This is now becoming the famous daily scenes at the Baku Grand Prix. A number of well publicized cheating scandals have led some organizers to take steps to prevent any potentional problems.
– Do you think there is a cheating problem among the elite players?
– Should all tournaments conduct searches / security check to prevent cheating?
– What should be the penalty for a top player caught cheating?
– What is your opinion?
And by the way, can you name the players going through the security check?
Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
The tall fellow is A. Grischuk and the other fellow is Wang Yue.
I don’t like these security checks the least bit. Though somebody must be gaining something from it for sure.
I don’t like the way it looks and I hope it doesn’t have a great effect on the action on the boards at Baku.
1. No. 2. Yes (unfortunately) 3. You tell me. 4. Flyers in six.
Bonus question: Grischuk and Wang Yue.
Surely the shorter player is Micky Adams.
@Susan
Can you make a post with all sound file for each of the player’s names. If fact if you did that for the top 20 mea and top 20 women that would be very helpful.
This would be a nice post to do for each torment. Some of these names are hard to remember and hard to pronounce.
>>>- Do you think there is a cheating problem among the elite players?
In the top 50 no. To much to loose, money and invites. Below top 50 it is very possible that some one is stupid and tries it.
– Should all tournaments conduct searches / security check to prevent cheating?
Yes! This will stop the idiots that accused honest Abe Kramnik (he gave a Chucky a draw when he made a loosing mouse slip at Amber) and poor Anna Rudolf that was destroyed by carnal accusers and unsportsmanlike losers. So she had a good run — disgusting conduct from the others. The accusers should have all be put out of the tournament.
If some one accuses another person of cheating to there face they should be put out of the tournament. All accusations false, true, to the face, behind the back, public, or in private should be dealt with a tournament disqualification. All accusations need to be submitted with proof to the head arbitrator of the tournament and left in the arbitrators hands and nothing more said.
>>>- What should be the penalty for a top player caught cheating?
One year ban for all tournaments, a 200 point penalty, and put on a cheat list where all their games that are submitted for rating must be compared to the top 10 chess engines for the following year (they would need to pay to have this done).
This will not stop stupid people from cheating but it will make an example of them.
It was Gelfand who blundered against Kramnik in Amber, not Ivanchuk.
I don’t think the top professional players will cheat as once they do they will totally loose their credit.
I really don’t like this way of security checks. It somewhat insults the players.
to be a GM and to cheat in a chess tournament, you must be in a desperate situation. you are putting your (semi)professional reputation on the line. on one hand i feel that it’s better to prove cheating rather than to prove the intention to cheat. i don’t think it’s a problem in elite tournaments but we’ve seen a few examples over recent years in open tournaments with big prize money. in my opinion no-one has ever gotten away with cheating – except the Turk! 😉 and the ultimate penalty is not bans or fines but that feeling of pathetic worthlessness that catches up with you one day. play chess because you love to. the moment that stops then do something else (and accept my condolences).
TD: We found pocket fritz, Is this yours?
GM: um..thats not mine.
I know of no case of cheating in other than a Swiss format, unless the Tadeusz Gniota Memorial in Poland last July was a round-robin. Nor do I have any reason to suspect any, nothing beyond certain allegations everybody has heard. Hence I do not think we have a general problem at elite levels.
Signal detection systems are preferable to personal searches, and would apply also to members of the audience(!), but they may be expensive and in violation of privacy regulations. This is apart from jamming being illegal in the US. Well, a computer science professor here at a symposium in Atlanta just talked semi-seriously about hiding receivers in the equipment—!—hence my Carlsen Knight caption. Anyway, I concur that the searches are better than doing nothing, and help confidence a little…
…but maybe they get people like the next-in-line person here thinking, “Do they do this in poker?”