How GM Thipsay outed a chess cheat

HOW PRAVIN THIPSAY OUTED A CHESS CHEAT AND GOT HIS MOJO BACK
By Vijay Tagore, Mumbai Mirror | May 2, 2015, 02.00 AM IST

On Friday Grandmaster Pravin Thipaey won his first tournament in four years under the most dramatic circumstances.

In the fifth round of the inaugural Dr Hegdewar Open Chess Tournament in Delhi, Thipay, 55, was up against an unheralded 19-year-old engineer from Haryana, Dhruv Kakar. The boy played with astonishing assurance and celerity. Moves that would take the Grandmaster 30 minutes, he was making in under five. Had India, wondered Thipsay whose wife Bhagyashree is also an international women’s master, finally found a new Viswanathan Anand.

But even as he was stunned by his opponent’s furious moves and handed a comprehensive defeat in 87 moves, there was something about his body language that caused Thipsay some disquiet. Unlike the usual Zenlike stoicism of most chess players (unless they are Kasparov of course), his young opponent was exceptionally fidgety and kept up a constant tattoo of his feet. Sure that there was something amiss, Thipsay complained to the authorities who then conducted a body search on Kakar and found him strapped with several mobile phones all over his body and an earphone in his ear so tiny that it had to be pulled out with a magnet.

Thipsay had not been wrong in wondering in the course of the game whether he was up against man or machine for indeed he was playing not just Kakar but also a computer which Kakar’s friend was operating back in Haryana.

“Some of his moves were out of the world,” said Thipsay speaking to us from Delhi. So this how Kakar’s modus operandi went: Once Thipsay would play his move, it would be relayed to Kakar’s friend sitting in front of a computer in Haryana through a series of foot taps which he could hear because of the mobile phone surreptitiously strapped just above Kakar’s ankle. “The friend would state a move aloud and Kakar would tap with his foot once if he was wrong and twice for affirmative,” says Thipsay who had been bothered through the game by the foot-stamping. The friend would then feed moves into the computer which would throw up the next move relayed to Kakar which he could hear because of the tiny earphone in his ear.

Full article here.