Top French Chess Players Suspended For Cheating 295
Posted
by
timothy
from the neither-kosher-nor-cricket dept.
from the neither-kosher-nor-cricket dept.
cf18 writes "The French chess federation has suspended three top players for violating sporting ethics at a chess olympiad in Siberia last September. The allegation claims while the first member was playing, a second member would watch the game via internet, use software to find the best move, and send it to the third member via SMS. The third member would then sit himself at a particular table in the competition hall. Each table represented an agreed square on the chess board."
Re:Hand gestures (Score:3, Interesting)
You wouldn't need a whole lot of signals. It could very easily be as simple as "yes or no" signals. At this level of play you are far beyond "wondering which piece to move where." Problems are much more likely to present themselves in terms of "does this line lead to some tactical trouble that I don't see?" Chess has some pretty weird aspects that stem from its simplicity.
Is chess solved, or were these guys midlevel? (Score:4, Interesting)
Has the state of the art in fact advanced more significantly than I thought, or were these guys sufficiently low-level players that some quite ordinary software was deemed sufficiently likely to be better? I'd assume that you wouldn't take the risk of being caught cheating unless you were fairly confident that it would boost your odds of winnning, which would imply a belief that you were substantially worse than whatever software they had access to.
Top chess players are douchebags (Score:5, Interesting)
I enjoy a good game of chess myself, on occasion. However, at the top level, chess is populated almost entirely by gigantic douchebags. I'm not surprised cheating went on. Look at some of Bobby Fischer's early matches. And hey, Kasparov isn't above cheating, either. His opponent didn't say anything because she knew he'd use his reputation to destroy her and anything she said.
"An interesting example of taking back moves at the highest level of OTB chess occurred recently at the elite 1994 Linares super tournament. It's claimed that there is video tape showing that PCA World Champion Garry Kasparov, while playing Judit Polgar, moved a knight to a square which would have cost him the exchange. Apparently, even though he had released the piece, he picked it up again and moved it to another square and went on to win the game." Link to more [controltheweb.com].
Bobby Fischer, the greatest American player ever, idolized Hitler and hated Jewish people, and cheered 9/11 on his radio show. Sample quote: "This is a wonderful day. Fuck the United States. Cry, you crybabies! Whine, you bastards! Now your time is coming." Don't think he was alone in the chess world, either, he had a lot of friends: as Gudmundur G. ThÃrarinsson, the man who arranged the famous "Cold War" match against Spassky in Iceland, said at Fischer's funeral, "In the fullness of time, history will judge the United States harshly for its treatment of Robert James Fischer."
I leave with this piece about chess, written in the 1500s.
"Chess is certainly a pleasing and ingenious amusement, but it seems to have one defect, which is that it is possible to have too much knowledge of it, so that whoever would excel in the game must give a great deal of time to it, as I believe, and as much study as if he would learn some noble science or perform well anything of importance; and yet in the end, for all his pains, he only knows how to play a game. Thus, I think a very unusual thing happens in this, namely that mediocrity is more to be praised than excellence."
Re:Hand gestures (Score:2, Interesting)
Article is wrong. The modus operands was as follow:
Player plays
Moves are transmitted via the net for everyone to follow the games of the Olympiad
Guy in France enter move in chess engine
Guy in France send SMS to the captain of the french team
Captain of the French team *stands* behind a specific pair of players (ie: enters the room, look at game from player 3, then game of player 7, means Feller, the cheater, have to move to the square c7)
Cheat was discovered because the phone is owned by the vice-president of the federation who discovers the SMS later (I am simplifying a bit, but that is the spirit)