Cheating is not unknown in the chess world. In the highest-profile incident in recent years, Magnus Carlsen, then the world champion, lost to a player named Hans Niemann at a competition in St. Louis in 2022, and then withdrew from the tournament. — Photo by Jose Castillo on Unsplash
A top chess player was expelled from an event in Spain this week after being accused of cheating by using a phone during bathroom breaks between moves.
The player, Kirill Shevchenko, had been going to the bathroom for extended periods during games, and officials searching the stall he had used found a phone, which could have been used to get help from a computer program.
Shevchenko, 22, a Ukrainian grandmaster who represents Romania in competitions, was kicked out of the event, a team chess championship in Spain, on Monday after the phone was found.
The phone found in the bathroom had a handwritten note saying: “Don’t touch! This telephone has been left so the owner can answer it at night!” according to the tournament’s chief arbiter, Oscar Bruno de Prado Rodriguez, as reported in Chess.com.
The handwriting was similar to Shevchenko’s, and the ink resembled that in a pen he used, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported. The newspaper also reported that Shevchenko had made several moves very rapidly, seemingly without any reflection, immediately after returning from the bathroom.
A day earlier a cleaner had found another phone in the bathroom, which had been turned in to the authorities, according to El Mundo.
Shevchenko played to a draw in the first two rounds of the event, but after he was expelled, both games were changed to losses.
Shevchenko, who is currently ranked 69th in the world by the International Federation of Chess, could not be reached for comment.
The Romanian Chess Federation said in a statement that Shevchenko had denied the allegations and that unless it had more information, it would support him.
“Such serious allegations must necessarily be backed up by solid evidence, and so far only circumstantial evidence has been made public,” the statement said. “We await the details of the case and we will carefully study the accompanying evidence.”
FIDE, as the International Federation of Chess is known, said in an email on Wednesday that it had not received a report on the incident but was expecting it soon. It said that it would investigate the incident and noted that it had the right to impose sanctions on Shevchenko if he were found guilty.
In the modern age, chess computers, which are easily accessible through mobile electronic devices, play the game far better than any unaided human being. The watershed moment in computerised chess came in 1997 when the world champion, Garry Kasparov, was defeated by a computer called Deep Blue. And the computers of today are dramatically better still.
Grandmasters regularly use these computers to train and prepare for matches, but over-the-board play is supposed to be a test of human intellect only.
Cheating is not unknown in the chess world. In the highest-profile incident in recent years, Magnus Carlsen, then the world champion, lost to a player named Hans Niemann at a competition in St. Louis in 2022, and then withdrew from the tournament.
Carlsen’s abrupt withdrawal, plus a cryptic message that he posted on social media, sparked speculation that he believed Niemann had cheated. When the two players faced each other soon after, Carlsen resigned after one move, apparently in protest. Niemann was never sanctioned, although he admitted having cheated in online matches years before.
In the 2006 world championship, Veselin Topalov claimed that Vladimir Kramnik had cheated, citing frequent bathroom breaks. Officials responded by closing each man’s private bathroom and requiring them to use a common facility. Kramnik forfeited one game in protest, but eventually won a close match.
In the 1978 world championship, long before computers could come close to the best human play, Viktor Korchnoi suggested that Anatoly Karpov might be cheating through yogurt. Karpov was regularly delivered yogurt during matches; Korchnoi said he believed that the flavor of the yogurt or the time it was delivered might be a signal from Karpov’s camp to make a certain kind of move.
It was eventually ruled that yogurt could be delivered, but only at 7:15 precisely. – ©2024 The New York Times Company
