CNN
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It was history that rocked chess and showed no signs of slowing down.
The cheating scandal that has engulfed the sport, involving five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen, is all everyone is talking about.
On Monday, Carlsen explicitly accused fellow grandmaster and rival Hans Niemann of cheating for the first time in a lengthy statement on Twitter.
The accusation comes weeks after the Norwegian withdrew from the Sinquefield Cup in St. Louis, Missouri on September 19 following his surprise loss to the American.
“When Niemann was a last minute invitee to the 2022 Sinquefield Cup I strongly considered pulling out before the event. I ultimately chose to play,” Carlsen wrote.
“I believe Niemann has cheated more – and more recently – than he has publicly admitted. His on-set progress has been unusual, and throughout our match in the Sinquefield Cup I had the felt like he wasn’t uptight or even fully focused on the game in critical positions, while outplaying me as a black in a way that I think only a handful of players can do.
“This game helped change my perspective.”
Niemann, for his part, admitted to cheating at the age of 12 and 16 and said he was banned from competing on Chess.com, but said in an interview with the St. Louis Chess Club that he had never cheated for too long. board games.
But for a game that seems so simple in its structure – one board, two players, 32 total pieces and, theoretically, a lot of creativity – the question many people ask is: “How does someone cheat? even in chess? ?”
Although an ancient sport, chess has been swept into the modern era in recent years.
Computers and the internet have made the competition more accessible and connected to players around the world, and artificial intelligence now gives players the tools to plot their moves before the match even begins.
It all really started in 1996 when grandmaster Garry Kasparov, widely recognized as one of the greatest players of all time, took on an IBM supercomputer called “Deep Blue” in a series of matches.
Although Kasparov won the first match, “Deep Blue” won two matches, becoming the first computer program to defeat a world champion in a classic game under tournament rules.
A year later, the two faced off in a rematch with “Deep Blue” defeating Kasparov, becoming the first computer program to defeat a World Champion in a full match.
Although Kasparov’s performance against “Deep Blue” has been reassessed over time, the importance of the results cannot be overstated. It was a totemic moment in the advancement of technology’s ability to play the “perfect” chess match and signaled the rise of artificial intelligence’s effect on chess.
Since then, thanks to improvements in computer hardware and software, chess engines have helped make the sport a game of the 21st century.
As defined by Chess.com, a chess engine is a program that “analyzes chess positions and returns what it calculates to be the best move options”.
Chess engines have become much more powerful than humans in recent years, many exceeding an Elo rating of 3,000 – the Elo rating system measures a chess player’s strength relative to their opponents. For context, Carlsen holds the record for the highest Elo rating ever by a human player when it hit 2,882 in 2014.
Stockfish is one of the most advanced chess engines with odds of over 3,500, meaning it has a 98% chance of beating Carlsen in a match – and a 2% chance of drawing the five-time champion of the world, which essentially makes a Carlsen. impossible victory.
Although chess engines have helped players hone their craft – practicing against the perfect moves to prepare for any eventuality – they have also made it easier for some players to cheat.
As a result, online chess sites, such as Chess.com, have developed anti-cheat technology to detect when players are using outside computer software during games to limit acts of foul play.
Even though anti-cheat technology has improved, Emil Sutovsky – chief executive of chess governing body FIDE – says chess needs to develop a “social contract” with players online to stop cheating.
“Now what has happened in the past is that the online cheating culture has been seen as much less of a crime than if you were trying to cheat on the chessboard,” Sutovsky – who says the cheating in online chess is a “huge problem” – told CNN Sport. “It was like you were playing a computer game, an online game, online chess, so it wasn’t also taken seriously.
“And many players suspected that other players were cheating, and then they were naturally more motivated to try themselves. This is something that does not happen in chess on the board. Now that culture or that legacy really needs to change and people should realize that whether it’s online cheating or generalized cheating, it’s cheating.
“Especially now that the situation has changed because there are serious prizes at stake, organizes tours like Magnus [Carlsen who] conducted its own tour, so all of this perception must naturally be replaced with the understanding that cheating online is a very serious sin and the punishment should also be very serious for it.
As FIDE struggles to curb online cheating, there has been a level of purity in excessive chess, with cheating proving much more difficult.
Andy Howie, arbitrator and member of FIDE’s Fair Play Anti-Cheat Commission, described some of the measures in place to prevent excessive cheating, such as metal detectors, signal scanners, non-linear scanners and l thermal imaging.
But security measures haven’t stopped people from trying to cheat, and the game’s history is full of scandals.
Accusations of cheating and foul play flew back and forth in the 1978 World Chess Championship Final, which a grandmaster who was there described as “the most disconcerting and dirtiest in the history of chess”.
At one point, young Soviet champion Anatoly Karpov claimed that Russian exile Viktor Korchnoi was trying to blind him with his mirrored sunglasses, reports El País.
Later, the waiters served Karpov a blueberry yogurt, and Korchnoi suggested that it could be used for his opponent’s analysts’ encrypted communications.
Karpov ultimately won the match, which is recreated in a 2021 Russian film called “The Champion of the World”.
More recently, FIDE stripped Georgian Gaioz Nigalidze of his grandmaster title and banned him from competitive chess for three years in 2015 for repeatedly going to the toilet in the middle of a match to check his phone in order to find the best shot to make.
Also in 2015, a referee caught Italian amateur Arcangelo Riccicardi using Morse code and a camera to cheat during a competition.
Ricciardi reportedly hid a video camera in a pendant around his neck, wires attached to his body, and a small box under his armpit.
“I kept watching him. He was always sitting, never getting up,” chief referee Jean Coqueraut told La Stampa. “Very strange, we are talking about hours and hours of play. Above all, he always had his arms crossed with his thumb under his armpit. He never took it out.
“And he blinked unnaturally, as if focused on the painting, but lost in another thought. Then I realized: he was deciphering signals in Morse code. Point line point line. That was it.”
Riccicardi denied cheating.
It is uncertain whether Niemann actually cheated on Carlsen – the American vehemently denies the charges.
In any case, theoretically, if someone were to input Carlsen’s moves into a chess engine like Stockfish, for example, they would be able to beat or draw Carlsen with almost 100% probability.
There has been no conclusive evidence either way, but the five-time world champion seems convinced there was foul play at the Sinquefield Cup.
It’s much harder to cheat when you’re sitting directly across from your opponent, with them looking you in the eye and an official over your shoulder, but that hasn’t stopped players from trying all the time. throughout history.
Howie says top players who rely on their chess careers are less likely to cheat with more to lose down the line.
“You have someone like Hikaru Nakamura or Magnus Carlsen or Levon Aronian or Ian Nepomniatchtchi. If they were to be caught cheating, it would be devastating to them, to careers,” he told CNN Sport. “It’s their career. They can’t afford to do that because it would be absolutely devastating for them.
“They would lose all credibility, all sponsorship. They simply have too much to lose. Now, that doesn’t mean we treat it like they’re never going to cheat, far from it. When we deal with their tournaments, we’re actually very, very strict, just to make sure there’s no… I never expect to find these cheaters.
“I would be really shocked if I found any of these guys cheating. But when you go down to the lower ranks, that’s when you’re most likely to find people cheating, your weaker players. People who see that, it doesn’t matter to them, they get banned for a few years. ‘So what? I’ll come and play in a few years. I’m not too worried about it. It doesn’t matter. doesn’t have the impact on them like it does on the best players. It’s not their livelihood.
And as the Carlsen-Niemann controversy continues to dominate the sport, who knows what truth events will bring.
