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Top French Chess Players Suspended For Cheating
cf18 writes "The French chess federation has suspended three top players for violating sporting ethics at a chess olympiad in Siberia last September. The allegation claims while the first member was playing, a second member would watch the game via internet, use software to find the best move, and send it to the third member via SMS. The third member would then sit himself at a particular table in the competition hall. Each table represented an agreed square on the chess board."
Would have been much easier and less obvious than changing seats for every move.
My first thought, how would steroids help in chess? Guess chess isn't like other sports.
You've obviously never played MMORPG. :)
People will PAY EXTRA to cheat depriving themselves of any glory in accomplishment... for the empty bragging rights that come with having something you didn't earn, and which has no inherent real world value.
But they still do it in droves.
My understanding was that Chess, while significantly less intractable than some games, was still something that you needed a fairly serious computer to play well fast enough to be tournament legal.
Has the state of the art in fact advanced more significantly than I thought, or were these guys sufficiently low-level players that some quite ordinary software was deemed sufficiently likely to be better? I'd assume that you wouldn't take the risk of being caught cheating unless you were fairly confident that it would boost your odds of winnning, which would imply a belief that you were substantially worse than whatever software they had access to.
While I despise such cheating in general, I still have to say that this is a nice stunt. I like the coding through seating step.
According to TFA, this cheat is discovered by their own federation, and disclosed so at least these cheaters can be considered as violator of their own ethics and the rest of the French chess players on that level won't have a bad reputation or leave a doubt in future events.
It's wise, and also fortunate, that they solved this problem in house.
A Grand Master is among us. *bows*
which is totally what she said
It mention the chess program used is called "Firebird". From google there are many reference for it in various chess forums as an open source chess engine but I can't find an official page in English.
Of course, parkour is just a fancy form of running away.
Keep my fine sport(!) chess, safe from those people.
Typical sports envy. Chess is not a sport. It's a board game.
You don't play competitive, do you?
Competitive, professional "sport" is not about sport at all. It's about money.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's not whether you are taking it serious or not, it's that the word "sport", in common usage, applies to physical activity.
When chess fans use it, they are just trying to latch on to the popularity and good connotations of the term. Some English-speaking players have taken to calling these intellectual games "mind sports", which is just stupid.
There's not a need for a new word because "game" accurately describes what it is. There are other qualifiers like "tournament chess", "professional chess", "competitive chess", etc. that serve the same purpose without the bogus appeal to sports.
I enjoy a good game of chess myself, on occasion. However, at the top level, chess is populated almost entirely by gigantic douchebags. I'm not surprised cheating went on. Look at some of Bobby Fischer's early matches. And hey, Kasparov isn't above cheating, either. His opponent didn't say anything because she knew he'd use his reputation to destroy her and anything she said.
"An interesting example of taking back moves at the highest level of OTB chess occurred recently at the elite 1994 Linares super tournament. It's claimed that there is video tape showing that PCA World Champion Garry Kasparov, while playing Judit Polgar, moved a knight to a square which would have cost him the exchange. Apparently, even though he had released the piece, he picked it up again and moved it to another square and went on to win the game." Link to more.
Bobby Fischer, the greatest American player ever, idolized Hitler and hated Jewish people, and cheered 9/11 on his radio show. Sample quote: "This is a wonderful day. Fuck the United States. Cry, you crybabies! Whine, you bastards! Now your time is coming." Don't think he was alone in the chess world, either, he had a lot of friends: as Gudmundur G. ThÃrarinsson, the man who arranged the famous "Cold War" match against Spassky in Iceland, said at Fischer's funeral, "In the fullness of time, history will judge the United States harshly for its treatment of Robert James Fischer."
I leave with this piece about chess, written in the 1500s.
"Chess is certainly a pleasing and ingenious amusement, but it seems to have one defect, which is that it is possible to have too much knowledge of it, so that whoever would excel in the game must give a great deal of time to it, as I believe, and as much study as if he would learn some noble science or perform well anything of importance; and yet in the end, for all his pains, he only knows how to play a game. Thus, I think a very unusual thing happens in this, namely that mediocrity is more to be praised than excellence."
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Will this do?