A universal history of infamy in chess

With the advent of Soviet hegemony in chess, instances of cheating and collusion became easier both to implement and to disguise, given the proliferation of Soviet Grandmasters in official tournaments.

The 1962 Candidates Tournament to decide the challenger for the world championship provided one of the most flagrant examples of such Soviet collusion. The top three, all Soviets, drew all their 12 games against each other in perfunctory fashion, without a semblance of fighting spirit. Bobby Fischer, who came fourth, was outraged. Certainly the Soviet Grandmasters broke no rules, but they indubitably infringed the spirit of the game. Of course, while the Soviets were sharing points, Fischer could have surged ahead by winning, which he signally failed to do.

When it came to Fischer’s chance for a crack at the world title, against Spassky at Reykjavik 1972, Fischer in his turn broke no rules, but his unrelenting campaign of gamesmanship (constant demands to change conditions, combined with threats to withdraw) patently helped to shatter Spassky’s morale.

The 1962 Candidates controversy is amply covered in a new book from the Elk and Ruby stable, specialists in Soviet and Russian chess. Entitled Korchnoi year by year: volume 1 1945-1968) and written by the hyper diligent research duo of Hans Renette and Tibor Karolyi, this gives Korchnoi’s highs and lows from the period when he was beginning to home in on his goal of becoming world champion. The anecdotes are revealing (including some sensational new allegations from David Bronstein concerning throwing of games) and the annotations are exhaustive. My only complaint is the absence of tournament tables, revealing the full extent of Korchnoi’s domination of so many top level competitions. Perhaps some examples will feature in volume two.

In 1935 that great writer, Jorge Luis Borges, inventor of magic realism, serial ignoree for the Nobel Prize for literature, and himself a strong chess player, published his Historia Universal de la Infamia. This collection includes that most striking of short, filigree masterpieces Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv, set in that region and period of Islamic expansion which witnessed an explosion of chess interest throughout the Muslim imperium. In 1978 I visited Borges in his apartment on Maipu St in Buenos Aires. We discussed his works, especially the Infamia. It seemed only fitting, at a time when the global chess community is being torn apart by allegations of cheating at the highest level, to pay homage in my title to Borges’ sweeping analysis of iniquity through the ages.

Recent turbulence began when the then World Champion Magnus Carlsen sensationally walked out of the richly endowed Sinquefield tournament in St Louis, after losing to 19-year-old Hans Niemann, whom the champion suspected of illicit subterfuge in achieving his unexpected victory. Then, a week or so later, when faced by Niemann once again, Carlsen, in the Bank Julius Baer tournament, made his feelings obvious for all to see, by resigning the game after playing just one move. An unmistakable insult to his opponent, a slap in the face for the other competitors and an undisguised reproach to the organisers and sponsors of the competition.

The standard published treatise about sharp practice in the most cerebral of games is How to Cheat at Chess by the multi-talented British International Chess Master and television personality, William Hartston. This disquisition on the dark side of chess was, to a significant extent, inspired by events from the 1978 world championship at Baguio City in The Philippines, between the Golden Boy of the Soviet Chess establishment, Anatoly Karpov, and the by now Soviet defector, the self-same  Viktor Korchnoi, widely known as The Leningrad Lip.

For this match at the Everest of chess expertise, I officiated as Head of Delegation for Korchnoi, where my Soviet opposite number was the former Stalinist military prosecutor, Colonel Viktor Davidovich Baturinsky. It raised the bar to unprecedented levels in ploys to throw the opponent off balance. Such measures included Karpov’s refusal to shake hands and the  Soviet enlistment of the sinister alleged parapsychologist, Dr Vladimir Zukhar, countered by Korchnoi’s personal retaliation, his recruitment of the banned Ananda Marga sect of chanting, orange robed gurus. Astonishingly, all of them were on bail for the attempted murder of an Indian diplomat, and all were equally intent on levitating for a Korchnoi victory and consequent coronation as world chess champion.

In fact, so seminal was the level of gamesmanship evidenced by these bizarre behaviours that an Academy award winning film (Best Foreign Language Film, 1984) ‘La Diagonale de fou’ (released in English as ‘Dangerous Moves’) was produced to widespread critical acclaim, with the twist that the defector was the young challenger and his elderly opponent, the incumbent champion.

A precedent for the Olympic medal in creating off board diversions to irritate and demoralise the opponent had already been set in Korchnoi’s previous qualifying bout against Boris Spassky, which had earned Korchnoi the right to challenge Karpov in the 1978 championship. I also functioned as Korchnoi’s Head of Delegation in this contest, where my counterpart was the hardline Communist Grandmaster Igor Bondarevsky.

Having already notched an impressive lead, Korchnoi became disturbed by Spassky’s sudden decision to hide off stage in a private room while thinking about his moves. Although not illegal, this manoeuvre was at least highly unusual and of course Korchnoi drew the only logical conclusion for a paranoid, ultra suspicious Soviet defector. Spassky, still representing the USSR, must surely have been provided by the KGB with a conveniently small and portable thermonuclear reactor, which, concealed in the bowels of the theatre, was dealing mind bending death rays against the defector. Spassky, so this paranoid narrative ran, was doubtless dashing off stage after each move, as quickly as possible, in order to avoid being roasted by the rays.

Fortunately, wiser councils prevailed and I succeeded in convincing Korchnoi that concealing a pocket size generator of death rays was impossible. Once this important message had sunk in, Korchnoi romped home to victory.

When Hartston wrote How to Cheat at Chess, he can scarcely have believed the lengths to which cheating potential might extend in subsequent years. After Garry Kasparov lost his match to the IBM computer Deep Blue in 1997, he later claimed that IBM had cheated by introducing human consultation. Nowadays, the glove is on the other hand, and human players fear the intervention of hidden computer analysis in human games, so far have the thinking machines advanced in their speed, power and general prowess.

Such concerns reveal how senseless it is for the chess authorities to legislate against, and intrusively test for, ingestion of drugs and stimulants (even, ridiculously, coffee) in chess competitions. The genuine danger stems from the drug free mentation of the silicon beasts.

There were more things to come than dreamt of in Hartston’s philosophy, given the advent of the wildly popular Netflix TV series Queen’s Gambit, the Covid pandemic and the huge advances to be made in the development of chess computer nanotechnology.

The first of these drove up the number of global chess followers to stratospheric altitudes, the second created a vast army of chess players competing from the safety of their own homes, while the third made use of small devices and transmitters, an invaluable weapon in the hands of any potential cheat. At the same time prizes began to grow dramatically, while a largely self replicating elite core tended to monopolise this financial cornucopia. Under these circumstances, where great rewards awaited those grandmasters who could enter the charmed circle, the temptation to gain promotion by resorting to illicit computer analysis, became, for some overly ambitious souls, quite irresistible. Conversely, an unexpected defeat against a weaker opponent, as with Niemann’s win against Carlsen with the black pieces in St Louis, could conveniently be ascribed to cheating by the opponent.

All this is a far cry from the origins of board games, many thousands of years ago, where, for example, gaming configurations were etched into the rocks outside the lost city of Ur. Historically, race games and games of chance predate games of strategy and ratiocination. Intellectually, aleatory games represented the primitive belief that fate, chance and prevailing local deities decided the lives of humankind. Chess, along with its oriental relatives, Shatranj, Shogi, Xiang Qi and Wei Chi, or Go, posited the opposite world view, that human beings are in charge of their own fate, that we choose our moves, not fate, chance or the gods.

The first intimation of cheating at chess came with the 16th century Spanish chess writer, Ruy Lopez (c. 1530-1580), who advocated placing the board with the sun in your opponent’s eyes. He also advocated play after your opponent had eaten and drunk freely – not exactly cheating, but certainly sharp practice.

Later, towards the close of the 18th century, the great Frenchman, André Danican Philidor, conducted three games simultaneously blindfold. In earlier times this might have been considered as witchcraft (cheating) while the Encyclopaedist, Diderot, even warned Philidor that such exertions might cause his brain to explode. However, this feat, remarkable for that time, involved talent, not subterfuge.

We move on to 1853, when two championship level players, Harrwitz and Löwenthal, were engaged in a bitter fight to the death in London. Harrwitz himself did not cheat, but some of his overzealous supporters hired an organ grinder to cacophonise outside the venue, while others smoked copiously in the players’ presence. The supporters’ rationale was that the hyper sensitive Löwenthal (who did indeed lose the match narrowly after having established an early and commanding lead) would suffer more from noise and smoke than the more resilient Harrwitz.

In our modern computer age, the Latvian grandmaster Igors Rausis was caught on camera analysing his game in progress on his mobile phone. There could be no defence and the punishment was a lifetime ban.

In the 2006 world championship Vesselin Topalov levelled the same accusation against defending champion Vladimir Kramnik. The evidence was non-existent and the claims were rejected. In fact, the decisive refutation was that some of Kramnik’s moves were so bad, that he should have lost on the spot. However, Topalov’s responses were even worse and it was he who contrived to lose. Had Kramnik been guided by a computer, he would certainly have avoided the blunders. As it was, Topalov went on to dine out on his accusations of “Toiletgate” and even published a book on the topic.

To conclude the original topic: the war which has broken out between Carlsen and Niemann is complicated by the fact that Niemann has twice admitted to cheating (by use of computers) in online games. He now claims to be a reformed character but the stigma remains and has given Carlsen the ammunition to imply that Niemann also cheated in their over the board, face to face game.

Such experts as former world champion Garry Kasparov, Chief Arbiter David Sedgwick and computer expert Professor Ken Regan, have all asserted that Niemann has a clean bill of health, though Carlsen evidently continues to doubt while others, including US Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, have poured oil on the flames. Carlsen has even, apparently, mobilised the resources of his vast chess based business empire to exclude Niemann from certain online playing outline outlets, such as Chess.com.

There remains one other intriguing possibility. Niemann may not have resorted to silicon assistance during his famous victory against Carlsen, but there might be a leaker in Carlsen’s own back up team of seconds and analysts. One prepared to betray his master’s secrets for “all corrupting gold” as Shakespeare put it in Richard III. Industrial espionage of that sort does not constitute cheating on the part of Niemann, rather opportunistic self interest. On Carlsen’s side it implies a poor choice of assistant, again, no actual cheating involved.

The probable outcome is that FIDÉ, the world chess governing body, has promised (aroma of long grass gently wafting in …)  to set up a commission to evaluate the actions on all sides. This may take some time and may well turn out to be toothless, especially where a celebrated former world champion is concerned.

Britain’s most distinguished Grandmaster, Nigel Short, has declared the death of online chess tournaments, where the players can operate from home. The stigma of suspicion of computer use now hangs over everyone.

The games this week include Korchnoi’s win with the Pirc Defence against Fischer from the 1962 Candidates tournament, and then his heavyweight win of manoeuvre against Petrosian in 1965. Both games are copiously annotated in the “Elk and Ruby” Korchnoi book reviewed this week above.

Finally, a game of my own against Indonesian Grandmaster  Ardiansyah, where I learnt valuable strategic lessons from the latter Korchnoi example.

Raymond Keene’s latest book “Fifty Shades of Ray: Chess in the year of the Coronavirus”, containing some of his best pieces from TheArticle, is now available from  Blackwell’s . His 206th book, Chess in the Year of the King, with a foreword by The Article contributor Patrick Heren, and written in collaboration with former Reuters chess correspondent, Adam Black, is in preparation. It will be published later this year.  

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