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BGonline.org Forums
Another chess cheater busted!
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: Another chess cheater busted! (svilo)
Date: Thursday, 16 April 2015, at 12:40 a.m.
One might think that in the age of Google, people would do a little homework before posting insistently, multiple times, on a subject that they know they are uninformed about.
The short version is as follows. The evidence, which I will give a sample of below, makes it pretty clear that what Ivanov was doing was communicating with the program "Houdini" via a cell phone hidden in his shoe. In the final, crucial confrontation, Ivanov was asked to take off his shoes for inspection, but he refused, insisting that his feet smelled bad. He preferred to forfeit than to take off his shoes.
The evidence that Ivanov was cheating was overwhelming to anyone who plays chess, even though I suspect it wouldn't hold up in court. For example:
1. In one totally won position where Ivanov had many obvious and safe ways to clinch the victory, he opted instead for a wild variation in which he made a weird and seemingly ridiculous sacrifice, only to recover the material a couple of moves later via a clever forcing combination. The net result was fractionally better according to the computer's internal scoring system, but remember that in chess a win is a win. No one in his or her right mind would play such a crazy combination; why would you risk the whole game on a possible mental miscalculation of a wild and crazy line when there's absolutely no need for risk?
2. Ivanov would make moves at a constant rate. He would not think longer about difficult moves or shorter about obvious moves.
3. Ivanov's body language was strange. He would adopt a fixed posture, not even looking at different parts of the board as he "thought."
The correlation with Houdini's move choices was pretty striking in its own right, but to me is not even the most convincing piece of evidence.
The fact that Ivanov had a stable rating for a long time and then suddenly started performing maybe 600 to 800 Elo points higher is also pretty striking, but again since Ivanov "threw" some games to dilute his results, I don't think that his performance statistics alone would be totally convincing to a non-player.
The case against Ivanov was IMO unfortunately weakened somewhat by some people who exaggerated the correlation with Houdini's moves and who made absurd suggestions such as surgical implants in his ears. But the evidence is compelling without any need to overstate the case.
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