Man
Professional
- Messages
- 3,077
- Reaction score
- 614
- Points
- 113
Since the start of the COVID-19 lockdown, chess competitions have moved en masse online, leading to a surge in cheating and subsequent disqualifications, according to a report in the Guardian.
As the newspaper writes, due to the fact that most games between chess players of different levels are now held remotely, cheating in this sport has grown to a scale comparable to doping scandals in cycling and athletics. One chess expert even said that the pandemic has caused a serious crisis in this sport.
The problem is that chess players now play en masse at home on their computers, which allows them to use computers and chess programs to determine the best moves. The first time a program beat a human player was in 1997, when Garry Kasparov lost a match to IBM's Deep Blue, and a computer has been playing chess better than any human since 2005, when the last match between grandmaster Ruslan Ponomariov and the German chess program "Fritz" was played on November 21, and a human won. The newspaper cites an example of a tournament in which five of the six best players were caught using "computer doping," resulting in their disqualification. In another example, parents of ten-year-old chess players vehemently rejected the fact that their children were playing at the level of the world's best grandmasters.
The first cases of cheaters in online chess competitions were caught back in April, when the German Amateur Championship was held on the Playchess website. The game between the two best chess players, who ended up at the top of the table, raised suspicions among the referee committee, which ordered an investigation. As a result, both were disqualified.
The world's largest online match site Chess.com also reports an increase in cases of cheating in chess. According to the site's representatives, it has gained 12 million new users this year, which is almost twice as many as in 2019, when 6.5 million new players registered on the portal. At the same time, the level of fraud has increased sharply - if last year 5-6 thousand users were banned monthly for cheating, then in August 2020 this number was almost 17 thousand.
The most notable disqualification occurred during the PRO Chess League tournament in September, in the final of which the team of the best American grandmasters St Louis Arch Bishops lost to the outsider Armenia Eagles. The Americans were defeated thanks to the victory of the Armenian chess player Tigran Petrosian, who was 260th in the Elo rating at the time, over the world's second grandmaster Fabiano Caruana. Petrosian explained his unexpected victory by the fact that he drank gin during the game, but observers noticed that the Armenian athlete suspiciously often looked away during the game.
In early October, following the investigation, Chess.com decided to permanently block Petrosyan and disqualify the Armenia Eagles. In response, Petrosyan launched into an angry tirade , calling his other American opponent a “loser.” The chess player compared himself to “one cyclist” who “achieved success at any cost” — apparently, this was a reference to multiple champion of various international cycling competitions Lance Armstrong, who admitted to doping after finishing his career, thus provoking the loudest scandal in the history of cycling.
Tigran Petrosyan
Similar incidents have occurred in junior competitions with much lower stakes, The Guardian reports. Former British chess champion Sarah Longson, who now runs the Chess Challenge, a British schools championship sponsored by the property company Delancey, said at least 100 of the 2,000 competitors this year had used computer technology. According to Longson, the abuses were blatant, with mediocre teenagers playing at the level of Magnus Carlsen, and only three of them admitted to cheating.
On one day of the qualifying games, when it was discovered that the top three players had cheated, the judging panel spent until 3 a.m. deciding what to do, and then decided to cancel the results of the day's games, Longson said. The biggest problem was with private school students, whose parents only swear at her when she is accused of cheating. According to the chess player, this is how parents and children try to win at any cost.
Kenneth Regan, an associate professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and a member of the joint FIDE-ACP anti-cheating commission, said the pandemic has required as much work from him in one day as he did in the previous year. His model for detecting cheating in chess is now actively used by FIDE. In addition, the organization’s director general Emil Sutovsky, who called it his weekly job, and president Arkady Dvorkovich, who said that “computer doping” has become a “real plague,” have also spoken out about the problem.
To solve the problem of cheating in chess, tournament and match organizers force players to record themselves on one or even several cameras, the image from which is broadcast to Zoom or WhatsApp, and also to provide judges and organizers with remote access to their PCs. In special cases, chess players may even be prohibited from leaving their playing places even to go to the toilet. Sutovsky clarified that the system can be improved by making the supervision of players even stricter - for this, eye tracking programs can be used, which could warn of possible cheating if a player looks away with suspicious frequency.
Chess.com's head of anti-cheat operations, Gerard Le Mareschal, has said he has been forced to hire additional staff to tackle the problem. He says the rise in cheating and the corresponding rise in discussions about it has created a new, unhealthy climate of suspicion and recrimination in the chess community: "Paranoia has become a culture," he was quoted as saying by the Guardian.
Similar problems have plagued other intellectual sports as competitions have moved en masse to remote play, with players and organisations reporting cheating in poker, bridge and backgammon. However, for chess, such incidents are the most damaging to its reputation, the Guardian notes.
Source
