With headlines in the chess news like “grandmaster puts phone in toilet” one cannot help but wonder how far some players are willing to go, and why the make an effort to go to that extent. Often times in chess tournaments, like the Grand Swiss, or the Grand Chess Tour there can be a lot of money on the line, for example in the Grand Chess Tour the first-place winner would receive about 1/3 of a million dollars. Or the prize money for the world championship matches had 2-3 million dollars on the line as well as the world champion title. With large amounts of money in the prize pools players definitely want to be sure that their opponents are not using a chess engine to tell you the right moves. This is why chess tournament competitors often have to go through border level security before ever even getting through the tournament door.
Cheating in the modern era has become far easier ever since the existence of smartphones. Any free chess engine app one can download on their phone is capable of beating even the current world champion Magnus Carlsen himself. So, one of the most common ways players cheat in tournaments is by going to the washroom during chess games and looking up the best moves on their phones during a chess game. To counteract this in tournaments players go through metal detectors to make sure they do not have access to their smartphones during a game.
However, even with metal detectors some players are able to bypass this. One Czech grandmaster hid his phone inside a plastic bag in a toilet bowl, and during chess games he would go to the washroom to check the best lines in his position. Another case is when a blind player who had to have the moves said to him, and he took advantage of hearing aids by having a team of players listening through the hearing aids. The moves were being sent by SMS messages and then the best moves were sent back to the player and he listened to them in his hearing aids.
Online chess has taken the greatest hits from cheating in the modern era because of how much easier it is to cheat due to the fact that players are not face to face. When players on chess.com, lichess, or chess24 are asked why they do not play long games like rapid or classical time controls, one of the most common answers is the number of players cheating during their chess games. Chess streaming grandmasters like Simon Williams or Eric Hansen often come across cheating during online chess games which complicates things when the chess grandmasters are trying to provide educational insight into the game. Even I have come across cheating in some online chess games, and it is the main reason I never play online games.
Today’s cheat detection systems have to continuously update in order to keep up with the new ways to cheat in tournaments. Often times the main problem is that the only way to improve on the cheat detection is to analysis cases, but even then, it is difficult to predict cheating cases. As IM Danny Rensch said “it is difficult to predict a murder case, so we often time police can only investigate the murder after is has happened.”
This leaves to question, how far are you willing to go to win?