The Return of the Chess Cheat - The New Yorker

The New Yorker

By Simon Parkin

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Accounts vary as to how exactly a chess game between King Canute the Great and one of his most trusted Viking chieftains, Earl Ulf, went down, in 1026, but certainly cheating was involved, and for at least one party the match proved fatal. In their 1851 book “The Chess Player,” the German chess masters Bernhard Horwitz and Josef Kling tell a version of the story in which the king made a “false move” and lost one of his knights. Canute “would not have this,” they write, and insisted that he be allowed a redo, at which suggestion Ulf “waxed angry” and overturned the board. (The match took place at a banquet; he may have been emboldened by mead.) Things escalated. The king accused Ulf of cowardice, prompting the earl to remind Canute of the assistance he had rendered him at the Helge River, when, he gibed, “the Swedes beat you like a dog.” Ulf turned on his heel and retired for the night. It was to be his last: Canute had him killed in church the next day.

Chess cheating has, in the subsequent thousand years, grown less bloody but more sophisticated. Earlier this week, the twenty-five-year-old Georgian chess champion Gaioz Nigalidze [photo] was expelled and banned from the Dubai Open Chess Tournament. His opponent,

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the Armenian grandmaster Tigran L. Petrosian (no relation to the late Armenian grandmaster Tigran V. Petrosian), grew suspicious when Nigalidze began retreating to the bathroom following key moves, often for long stretches of time and always to the same stall. Adjudicators, at Petrosian’s request, carried out a search and found a toilet-paper-wrapped iPod Touch nestled behind the bowl. A chess app was open on the device and the virtual match board mirrored the real one outside.

This kind of cheating is possible, of course, because chess is an internal game; its players do not need bodily strength or speed, power or grace. As such, there is no way to distinguish a master from an impostor, provided that the impostor has access to a master plan. And, thanks to the rise of apps like the one that Nigalidze apparently used, master plans are in abundance. “My dog could win a major tournament using one of these devices,” the English grandmaster Nigel Short told the Washington Post on Tuesday. “Or my grandmother. Anybody could do this.”

The battle, in other words, isn’t so much between cheats and masters as between people and computers, and people are being trounced. Chess is a game that is beyond the scope of the human mind—unmastered and, probably, unmasterable. The first four moves alone open up some two hundred and eighty-eight billion possibilities. In the nineteen-eighties, Garry Kasparov faced off against ten computers simultaneously, beating them all (while blindfolded, no less). The match was intended to send the C.P.U.s packing, but in 1997 Kasparov lost to I.B.M.’s Deep Blue, the computer equivalent of an idiot savant, an intelligence with no transferable skills, incapable even of learning tic-tac-toe. (Kasparov accused the computer of cheating and demanded a rematch, which I.B.M. declined.)

Besides being superb statisticians, chess-playing computers have another advantage over their human competitors: they are immune to bullying, which has been a part of chess since the days of the Knights Templar. In the sixteenth century, the Spanish clergyman Ruy López advised ruthless players to sit their opponent “with the sun in his eyes.” The Russian grandmaster Alexander Alekhine, who won almost every tournament that he played in the nineteen-twenties, would allow his Siamese cats to perch on the board before major games, in hopes that his opponent harbored an allergy. Aron Nimzowitsch, a contemporary of Alekhine’s, would smoke a noxious cigar and fix his opponent with a dread stare. In one notorious 1977 match, Boris Spassky positioned himself in a curtained booth behind his opponent’s chair, emerging, when it came time to play his turns, in, variously, a sun visor, swimming goggles, and a ski mask. His rival, Viktor Korchnoi, lost four games in a row before he recovered.

No wonder, then, that flesh-and-blood players called on computers for help as soon as they were able. An episode of “Cheers” from 1990 was prophetic: in it, Ted Danson’s character, Sam Malone, who does not know how to play chess, wins a wager match by taking dictation from a computer program. Since then, there have been numerous cases of high-tech cheating in the professional game, of which Nigalidze’s toilet-bowl conspiracy is only the latest. In 2006, the Indian player Umakant Sharma was caught communicating with accomplices through a Bluetooth device hidden inside his cap. In 2008, the Dubai Chess and Culture Club banned an Iranian player who was receiving moves via text message.

These incidents are deplorable and unsporting, yes, but they bring a certain Viking chutzpah back to the game. Among the top twenty players in the world, more than half of all matches end in a draw. But, with computer-assisted chess supremacy always within (surreptitious) reach, there is hope for the wearied spectator: perhaps one of these masters, hunched in ascetic contemplation, is furiously plotting not his next move but his next bathroom break.