The case of Gaioz Nigalidze, the 25-year-old Georgian chess champion being excoriated as a cheat for having allegedly hidden a mobile phone with a chess program in a lavatory while playing in the Dubai Open, is a peculiar one. On the surface, it is an open-and-shut case: His opponent, Tigran Petrosian (named after the former Soviet world chess champion), became suspicious about Nigalidze’s frequent trips to the toilet, expressed his concerns to the arbiter, the toilet was searched and the mobile unearthed, apparently rather crudely hidden under toilet paper.
Nigalidze was defaulted, is now being lambasted around the world — Nigel Short, the English grandmaster who challenged Garry Kasparov for the world title in 1993, is calling for him to be stripped of his grandmaster title — and is facing a 15-year ban from the sport.
Two things strike me as odd. First, according to his opponent, Nigalidze was going to the toilet after playing his moves. Normally, the surefire way to spot a cheat is that they go to the toilet on their move so they can choose the best one. Presumably, he was using his program to look at all possible responses and memorizing them. A very strong player, he would have no difficulty memorizing numerous variations.
Illustration: Kevin Sheu
However, more striking was that in round four of the Dubai event he lost horribly to the Swedish grandmaster Nils Grandelius, playing a terrible move fairly early in the game that a chess program would only play if it was set on moron level. It seems that Nigalidze is either a very incompetent cheat or a very sophisticated one. A strong player using a chess program could beat everyone, up to and including world champion Magnus Carlsen. However, perhaps that would be too obvious — Nigalidze might have been covering his tracks by only using a program intermittently. One hopes there will be a proper inquiry into the case, rather than a kangaroo court.
It is only worth winning if you do it fairly, yet players in every sport and at every level cheat. Sometimes this is trivial — the scrumhalves who never put the ball in straight at a scrum. Sometimes more serious — the divers in soccer desperate to win that last-minute penalty. Sometimes it is enough to get you banned — athletes who dope, golfers who move their putts nearer the hole. For some athletes, rules are made to be broken.
That attitude infects life too: Who can forget Charles Ingram (AKA the “Coughing Major,” though it was not he who did the coughing), convicted in 2003 of cheating his way to £1 million (US$1.49 million) on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Money can make fools and knaves of us all, whatever the idealists might think. Radix malorum really est cupiditas. Perhaps we should not blame Ingram; instead we should blame the program makers for offering such an unhealthy prize. I have a dim recollection that the most you could win on Double Your Money, one of the first widely watched game shows, was £64. That seems about right for one of these space-filling programs. Offer enough dosh and someone will try to get around the system.
Similarly, the big money in sport has cheapened it. I always love the story of the great American amateur golfer Bobby Jones who, in the 1925 US Open, called a penalty on himself when he accidentally touched the ball as he prepared to hit it out of the rough on the 11th hole. No one except him was aware of the infringement; there were no cameras then to record players’ every move. The penalty cost him the title, and afterwards spectators congratulated him on his honesty. “You might as well praise me for not robbing a bank,” he said. The idea of not being scrupulously honest had never crossed his mind.
Chess is increasingly dogged by accusations of cheating, and several prominent players have been exposed in the past few years. Because of its immense calculating power, a chess program can beat any player in the world — Carlsen would lose to a piece of software you can download for free off the internet. That is a nightmare for chess, and may even in the end pose an existential threat to the game. Not just because of cheating and the fact that grandmasters rely more and more on computer theory, but because the game has been demystified. Computers have not yet “solved” chess, but they are getting there.
A Russian grandmaster friend of mine is convinced that cheating in top-level open tournaments (as opposed to elite events with small invited fields) is rife. The temptation is enormous because the only people who make serious money from playing are the top 20 or so grandmasters in the world, who get invites to all the most prestigious tournaments. That leaves a host of impoverished grandmasters fighting for scraps, unless they are willing to subject themselves to the grind of teaching chess to amateurs. The more antisocial types — not uncommon in chess — dislike teaching, and try to eke out a living from playing. That is where the temptation to cheat comes in: If you do not win a prize, you might not eat that week, let alone pay the rent.
Raymond Keene, the English grandmaster and long-time Times chess columnist, tweeted on Sunday when the Dubai story broke: “What’s the point of cheating at chess? The thrill of the game is mental stimulation. It must be exhausting having to pretend all the time.” He is right of course. When you play chess, you are essentially playing against yourself and the board: Can you keep yourself together; can you find the right moves under time pressure; can you learn to become a better player?
I have spent the past three years writing a book about that very subject. So far, sad to say, I have made remarkably little progress in my attempt to become a chess expert. Maybe I will need to play the toilet gambit.
I am joking. Why on earth would an amateur cheat? Incredibly, it has been known. However, for professionals, I can understand the temptation a little more. You are expending huge amounts of mental energy in tournaments and earning nothing. Every spectator in the audience and at home has access to a chess engine that is giving a precise evaluation of the position and offering the best move. What if I have a quick peek...?
Once you go down that route, you are hooked. Computers are like a drug that was introduced into chess 30 years ago and have been poisoning it ever since. The only answer may be to play all tournaments in sealed glass boxes, with all electronic aids removed. When I played in the Chicago Open last year, staff were deployed outside the toilets with electronic wands to scan players for mobiles and iPads as they went in. As someone whose bladder responds adversely to the stress of a chess game (former world champion Vladimir Kramnik has the same problem), I was being scanned constantly. The arbiters must have been very suspicious.
“Chess is so inspiring that I do not believe a good player is capable of having an evil thought during the game,” said the first official world champion, Wilhelm Steinitz. Steinitz eventually went mad, so his idealism should perhaps be take with a hefty pinch of snuff. There have always been cheats and charlatans in the game. It is just that computers have made it worse.
In sport, the majority of professionals still manage to be gracious: Witness the wonderful attitude displayed by Jordan Spieth and Justin Rose as they battled for the Masters crown on Sunday. However, winners and huge natural talents, which these two are, can afford such graciousness. It is the strugglers and the streetfighters further down who are tempted to transgress.
Nigalidze is a grandmaster, but far from an elite grandmaster. He is ranked number 400 in the world. At that level, unless he was teaching the kid of some rich businessperson, he would struggle to earn a crust. How tempting it must have been to get a little artificial help.
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