Grandmaster expelled from team chess championship after phone found in toilet

One comment about the source (chess.com): it has a conflict of interest in this topic and has a clear bias in what it does and doesn't say. They omit that the cheater in question is a prominent member of their own chess platform, who has been scoring first-place in high-profile sitewide tournaments [0]. IMO the most interesting question here, which this source would prefer to elide over, is whether or not this over-the-board (meatspace) cheater has also been cheating for profit on the internet platforms—something that's technically much easier to do than in a professional, arbitrated tournament setting.

This is sort of an existential question for their business. Chess.com currently operates one of the two major online chess platforms. Their top public-image controversy, going back years, is whether or not their anti-computer cheating methods are effective and accurate. (This question has even made it into the Wall Street Journal [1]). Their system is a "security by obscurity" type, which both relies on cheaters not knowing how it works, and asks paying customers to trust the company's claims, without evidence, that their competitive platform is fair and fundamentally sound.

I think this revelation is going to (rightly) enflame that debate—though you won't read much about it on chess.com's own blog.

[0] https://www.chess.com/news/view/shevchenko-svane-win-titled-... ("GMs Kirill Shevchenko and Frederik Svane are your winners for the October 8 editions of Titled Tuesday")

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33085649 ("Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times (wsj.com)" (2022))

  For me I would say things started to get strange at move six. He played his move and left the playing hall for more than 10 minutes and this was repeated many times in the next moves. I thought he had some stomach problems! But at some point I decided to go out to see where he is and he was standing outside the toilet room and when he saw me he went back to the playing hall. And then at some point in the game he stopped going out till the game was finished.

Multiple extended length “bathroom” breaks and he thought nobody would be suspicious? He probably could have just consulted for one move and nobody would have caught wise.

This guy is 2656 and the world number 69. You might think, meh, so what who's heard of the world number 69 at, say, tennis. But if you are a serious chess player you understand that is an astronomically high level that is completely out of reach for 99.9% of people even if you love the game and devote many years of effort to it. (No doubt the same sentiment would occur to a serious tennis player in the tennis analogy).

I have two points really A) As a chess player and a programmer, I think many a programmer fancies themselves as being a rock star performer but if there was an equivalent of Elo ratings for programmers it would likely be a very sobering experience for almost everybody [I think I am a highly skilled programmer, but my chess rating is 1867].

And B) It is consequently a real personal tragedy for this guy that he has foolishly flushed his career and reputation at age 22. What a waste.

some basic level of formal culture in chess went missing. Chess is a battle in a war,fought with the mind,and conforming to the ancient rules of engagement and decorum. Certainly in the recent past,the outcome of a match between the representitives of adversarial nations was treated as proof of the intelectual and educational prowess of the winning side. What we are watching is the inevitable consiquence of comodifying everything,and the ho hummyness of the incident bieng disscused is the sound of the door closing.

I remember the Magnus/Niemann controversy from 2023 - that was quite a drama... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlsen%E2%80%93Niemann_contro...

This is almost comical. Why did he want to be caught so badly? Or did he stack all of his skill points in chess, to the detriment of common sense?