“The moral seems to be that, despite isolated successes, current anti-cheating measures are inadequate and the integrety of the game is in serious danger.” - GM Ian Rogers
xpertchesslessons.wordpress.com … g-scandal/
All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from easy. - Scott Alexander
Must say I agree with Spraggett. I do like the idea of stoning cheaters to death with heavily weighted chess pieces.
Wouldn’t work. The cheater would simply remove the weights before the stoning.
Bill Smythe
An appropriate chess term would be that “throwing enough pieces into the attack would eventually be crushing”.
Not if the miscreant’s hands are bound or they’re buried in sand up to the neck…
Seriously, though. Why would someone pay the big entry fees to a CCA tournament, for instance, knowing that they’ll be playing a computer for prize money in their class? How rampant is cheating? Do we know? I heard of a FM banned from a small local club for using a phone to cheat. If 2300s will cheat for a $50 prize, what else goes on?
During a game I find myself needing to go to the bathroom, but because the game is in a crucial spot, if I leave will my opponent think I’m cheating? Will the TDs have to start issuing Depends to all players and just make leaving the hall forbidden?
The push is to ban all electronic devices. The problem is they keep getting smaller and smaller. Some of these cases are devices hidden in the toilet area as the playing area gets more difficult to sneak such devices in.
When I was taking my state licensing examination, proctors prowled the hall. Anyone who went to the restroom was followed in by a proctor. There was zero tolerance. Anyone who said anything in the exam area was ejected.
Are cell phone jammers out of the question?
Is this where we are headed?
Cell phone jammers are generally illegal in the USA. A major problem with them is that you can’t control where they jam, so people who aren’t part of your group get affected, and they won’t be happy about that.
You could try to set up a Faraday cage in the playing hall, but that isn’t easy and won’t help if someone goes to the bathroom to use their cell phone.
Cell phone detectors might be an option.
Cell phone hamming devices are illegal anywhere in the US so we are not headed there.
How about draconian penalties? First penalty for being caught, a one year suspension. Second offense five years. Third, life.
Or, by contractual agreement:
First offense removal of non-dominant hand thumb. Second offense, removal of dominant hand thumb. …
It might be good for cooking hot dogs during the round, though.
I agree with GM Spraggett that only a small percentage of cheats are caught. All the cases we’ve discussed in this forum have involved players drawing suspicion by improving way too fast, or by taking excessive restroom breaks or other odd behavior. There is no reason to assume that more patient, more careful players are not slipping under the detection wire. “But cheaters are never patient” say the doubters. And we know this how?
I’ve had about 8 opponents bounced on chess.com for unethical behavior, all in 5-0 blitz with nothing more than rating points at stake. With a server site, the chess.com folks can use their CAPS system as an initial screen and it evidently operates in real time. Unfortunately, today, this seems impractical in a OTB open event.
We live in a society where cell phones and other electronic devices have become ubiquitous. Their convenience has become an addiction. Every new generation of the phone technology has made it easier to do everything, including cheating in school and in chess. In recent tournaments I have seen the following options used. First, all phone must be put away in bags or not be brought to the tournament site. Players cannot access their phones until after the game and outside the playing hall. A second option involves players turning off their phones and placing them on the table so that they can be seen by the TDs and the other players. The phones must remain on the table if the player must go to the loo. Measures have been taken to shoo spectators out of the hall if they have an electronic device that they are using, even if their activity is innocuous. Almost all spectators have been compliant. Third, all talking in the hall could be banned to stop the low tech cheating that goes on. We may have to ban spectators or waste staff time monitoring the areas outside the hall to limit contact between players and others.
We may have to adopt elementary school methods for players who leave the tournament hall. They must sign out and sign back in, showing ID so that names and times can be registered. I have had players tell me that they were leaving the room for an extended period of time. My inclination was to ask if they had a hall pass, but instead asked to see their phone. I put the phone in my pocket. As for players working with confederates, this is more difficult to police as there will never be enough staff or electronic countermeasures to stop dedicated teams who are cheating. The best you can do is place extreme penalties on cheaters like lifetime bans for tournament play, lifting their memberships, and posting lists of cheaters who have been suspended. Even this may not be enough, as the lure of big prize money is a risk they are willing to take.
Having washrooms dedicated to the tournament hall (such as in the Convention Centers for the National HS tournaments in Kansas City and Schaumburg) eliminated good reasons to leave the playing hall. A 50% time deduction was a penalty imposed at both, pretty much only needed in the early rounds that are big mismatches anyway. The National Elementary has had staff dedicated to managing access to washrooms so that they are for players only.
The HB Global had a strict no-talking rule that the players hated. It’s a balancing act between locking things down enough to stop cheating and making conditions so onerous that people don’t want to participate.
Thought experiment - if spectators were banned and players had a dedicated “air-lock” to go through where they individually changed into tournament-provided jumpsuits (leaving behind all of their non-chess/non-medical possessions) to enter a tournament room with its own dedicated washrooms, then how much cheating would still go on. If you add microphones in the collars of the jumpsuits and video cameras throughout the tournament hall then how much less would go on. If you divide the room into one-board cubicles and only allow one person at a time to leave cubicles (thus eliminating contact between active players that are not each others’ opponents), then would that be enough to stop all cheating? And if players were limited to looking at only their own game and their opponent, and were unable to even catch sight of their friends in the tournament hall, then how many would opt out of attending?
Some of the suggestions you’ve made have been attempted at international bridge tournaments, where even a slight pause while saying “three spades” might convey information.
There was a famous mentalist whose assistant was able to convey information him by speaking with tonal variations so subtle they weren’t discernible to the audience.
I went to “The Illusionists” show when it came to Lincoln last winter, I still haven’t figured out how their mentalist act worked.
Facial expressions, hand and arm movements, coughing, and breathing patterns can convey information in a very subtle way if only to alert the player that the position on the board is critical requiring more time. Before I asked him to leave the playing hall at one tournament, I watched one chess dad be almost a semaphore of hand movements and arched eyebrows. That is low tech and may or may not be confusing for a child. When scanning a crowd of players it is useful for a TD to see who is looking with some frequency at an adult or other player during a game. Players who frequently go to the bathroom are always suspect. If a player locks eyes with me across a room, I always wonder what he/she is doing that he needs to see if the TD is watching his behavior.
The worst incident I have heard of was an adult sitting out in the hallway with his daughter’s position on his tablet. How that position got there was a mystery unto itself. When the girl went to the loo, her father was alleged to have told her to “play what you have just seen” while they were huddling over the device. Other parents turned them in. This was just for a trophy and a few rating points in an under-section. Some people cheat because they can, not just for money, trophies, or rating points. There is an amoral approach to competition which irks other players who play honestly. If caught, the offenders shrug it off as a cost of doing business, much like what we see in the real world. The cynical baseball adage, “If you aren’t cheating you are not trying,” is offensive to real players of every sport and game who bust their brains and bodies trying to prepare for competition.
Sometimes all that type of takes is to have a neutral high-rated player pause to stare at the board for a while because the high-rated player noticed something interesting. As a TD I’ve learned to keep all expression off my face when I’m passing by games and I also do so when I am just a player, but at a non-rated club ladder night one player told me after the game that my simply stopping to look expressionlessly at a position between two C players was enough to alert the player to analyze the position to see why I was looking at it (another reason for TDs to not get engrossed in games unless they are among the last games in the round and would be expected to have a TD watching them). I’ve heard of times at the US Open or other big events where multiple masters will pause by a game between C/D/E players and then leave if the player whose turn it was didn’t see the crushing move.
As a coach, I cannot watch my players’ games. Inevitably, they look up or turn around if I am behind them to see from my expression what I think of their positions. I have told them when they do this, it raises the specter of my cheating to help them, so I stay a far distance away or not even enter the playing room at all. I have seen coaches use all manner of gestures, both subtle and overt, to prompt their players. To eliminate that, it is wise for scholastic organizers to keep all adults except TDs out of the room and shoo players who are finished with their games out of the playing area. In big money events, TDs have to be alert to all manner of unusual behavior, technology, and tricks. It is just as exhausting as playing. Even if there is only one instance of cheating in an event, it poisons the general chess atmosphere for everyone else who now suspect that even more cheating has been missed.
Just to give an example or two of how easy it is to cheat, all I have to do is quietly hum “Kill da Wabbit” as I pass by to indicate that there is a sacrifice in the position. I do this as a prompt/hint when we are analyzing a position on a board in the dining room of their homes when they are stumped. Humming a few bars from “Night on the Mountain” or “Finding Nemo” can impart signals of what to do as well. It does not take much to create mnemonic devices to jog memory or alert the player to danger. Dots by moves or notes of encouragement at the top of a scoresheet are passe. Earbuds with music that reflect studied opening lines is much better as a memory aid. Eyeblinks are useful for giving specific information. Messages can come in many forms. As a former school teacher, I have found the ingenuity of children to cheat on tests to be almost limitless. They are really offended when caught out because their methods were so intricate and foolproof that they cannot believe that the teacher was capable of paying attention.