The Latest Cheating Scandal

[andyburnett]

These Bulgarian 2100's are pretty strong! Top untitled player in the Masters was another youngish Bulgarian, rated 2126, playing at 2452 level for the tournament.

In the Challengers A played in the morning of the first week his stats were

Rating international 2126
Ratingperformance 2065


By the 2nd week, again the morning competition.

Rating international 2126
Ratingperformance 2536

Obviously warmed up by the 2nd week! By my reckoning he walked off with at least £3000.

Discuss

To be fair, it is possible. Some games you can just lob pieces, and a bad start gives you a bad mental frame. If he starts week 2 with a big win, confidence can grow. Personally speaking, I don't like the lynch mobs who try and seek out cheats based on people having good performances. The odds of these sorts of results are small, but then again, someone does win the lottery most weeks.

In the case of the now famous Mr Ivanov, I was pretty sure he was cheating, but not enough to condemn the man. The phrase "beyond reasonable doubt" springs to mind, and sometimes people can just streak huge runs in agreement with a machine. For example, I had a league game recently where my 1800 opponent played a near perfect game, and obviously there is nothing dodgy there, it just occasionally happens that people can play like that. The clincher for me though about Ivanov was when he claimed he had beaten Rybka and Houdini 10-0 each. That is ridiculous, and it is weird that a 2000+ can even say that and hope it would be believed. The easy way to disprove that is to give him a challenge game against Houdini, and I would be tempted to bet my life savings that he would get wiped out 10-0.

Good, an argument! Er, discussion I mean

I agree that occasionally a human can 'streak' both in terms of results and engine match-ups, but this is so improbable over the course of hundreds of moves (a whole tournament for example) that it can be considered 'beyond reasonable doubt' in my opinion.

One of the clinchers for me when someone is suspected of cheating is that it only seems to happen for 'weaker' players when there is great prestige (something like title norms) or lots of money involved!

If you look at the rating history of most of the people accused, it's fairly clear that they have played at a certain more-or less 'normal' level (relative ups and downs) for many years or tournaments and then suddenly improve by 300/400/500 points when something major is at stake.

Let's say I was playing at Gibralter, for example. If I wanted to cheat to win the maximum amount of money possible over the 2 weeks, and avoid immediate suspicion, how would I do this?

Well, I wouldn't produce a +400 point performance in the first week morning tournament and walk off with say £1500 - raising suspicions which could mean I might not even get to play the 2nd week event or finish the Masters event. I might be more inclined to put in an average performance in the first week, and only produce the real goods in the 2nd week, late on, and walk off with £3500!

I'm not saying this is what happened, but adding in the idea that only using 'Houdini-help' in critical positions (as Walter Buchanan I think mentioned) to keep the performance levels under that of Carlsen, etc - this is almost certainly the way I would achieve the maximum pay-off with the least suspicion (or suspicion least likely to affect things at the time).

It's not a 'witch-hunt', but seriously strange or unexpected results deserve to be discussed and analysed.

The clincher for me though about Ivanov was when he claimed he had beaten Rybka and Houdini 10-0 each.

This to me is the least relevant piece of information. Ivanov could be taking the p***, p***ed off because of the whole incident, or (I'm inclined towards this one myself) simply p***ed!

Anyway, cheating in chess won't be going away anytime soon, so discussing such matters is a necessary evil.

P.S. I have nothing against Bulgarians, I just found it a bit co-incidental coming so soon after the Ivanov incident that a 'more realistic unrealistic' result should pop up involving another Bulgarian.