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| en.chessbase.com |
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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| indianexpress.com |
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.
Leinier Domínguez y Lázaro Bruzón, los dos Grandes Maestros con mayor ELO en Cuba, accedieron a la fase de octavos de final de la Copa Mundial de Ajedrez, que se disputa en Khanty-Mansiysk, ciudad ubicada en el oeste de Liberia, en Rusia. 
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