Commonly cited instances of cheating include: collusion with spectators or other players, use of chess engines during play, rating manipulation, and violations of the touch-move rule.
)[3] For example, while deliberately sneaking a captured piece back onto the board may be construed as an illegal move that is sanctioned by a time bonus to the opponent and a reinstatement of the last legal position, the rule forbidding actions that bring chess into disrepute may also be invoked to hand down a more severe sanction such as the loss of the game.
According to one legend, a dispute over cheating at chess led King Cnut of the North Sea Empire to murder a Danish nobleman.
[11] One of the most anthologized chess stories is Slippery Elm (1929) by Percival Wilde, which involves a ruse to allow a weak player to beat a much stronger one, using messages passed on slippery-elm throat lozenges.
[12] Television shows have engaged the plot of cheating in chess, including episodes of Mission: Impossible and Cheers.
The most famous alleged instance was at the 1962 Candidates Tournament for the 1963 World Chess Championship, where the three top-finishing Soviet players finished with draws in all their matches against each other.
[19][20][21] In 2011, IM Greg Shahade wrote that "prearrangement of results is extremely commonplace, even at the highest levels of chess.
"[23] Concerning an incident involving 2006 US Championship qualification, Shahade blamed the Swiss system for creating perverse incentives.
[26][27] In one famous instance, Garry Kasparov changed his move against Judit Polgár in 1994 after momentarily letting go of a piece.
The tournament officials had video records proving that his hand left the piece, but refused to release the evidence.
[30] The 2003 European Championship saw a "takeback game" between Zurab Azmaiparashvili and Vladimir Malakhov, who eventually finished first and second respectively in the event.
According to the book Smart Chip by Genna Sosonko: Both grandmasters were fighting for the lead, and the encounter had huge sporting significance.
In an ending that was favourable to him, Azmai[parashvili] picked up the bishop, intending to make a move with it instead of first exchanging rooks.
The rules of chess have had differing penalties for making an illegal move over time, varying from outright loss of the game on the spot to backing the game up and adding additional time to the other player's clock, but they only apply when the illegal move is noticed.
A rare example where a high level player was accused of this was at the 2017 World Blitz Chess Championship in Riyadh.
At the 2017 Canadian Championship in Montreal, GM Bator Sambuev was playing IM Nikolay Noritsyn in a blitz match.
Modern chess websites will analyze games after the fact to give a probabilistic determination on whether a player received surreptitious help as part of an effort to detect and discourage such behaviors.
[39] Due to the great multiplication of technological cheating incidents, the following examples concentrate only on those that are either at a high level, or are of historical significance.
There was widespread reporting of anomalous Burmese (Myanmar) rating movements in the late 1990s, with Milan Novkovic giving an analysis of manipulation in Schach magazine.
[100] Crișan then was arrested and imprisoned on fraud charges relating to his management of the company Urex Rovinari[101] and disappeared from chess,[102] thus failing to fulfill the conditions of the resolution and so activating the above recommendations regarding title revocation.
[103] When writing about the Crișan case, Ian Rogers alleges that Andrei Makarov (at the time a FIDE vice-president and Russian chess federation president) had arranged an IM title for himself through nonexistent tournaments in 1994.
For instance, in 2005, FIDE refused to ratify norms from the Alushta (Ukraine) tournaments, claiming that the games did not meet ethical expectations.
[104][107][108][109] In 2003, Sveshnikov referred to these high-profile Crișan and Azmaiparashvili incidents as "open secrets", at a time when both purported culprits were heavily involved in FIDE politics.
Stage magician Derren Brown used the trick against eight leading British chess players in his television show.
[112] In most simultaneous exhibitions, the player giving the exhibition always plays the same color (by convention white) in all matches, rendering this trick ineffective; even with a mixed group, attempting to use this in an in-person circle is rather obvious due to more delayed moves than usual, as the player must always look at a given board, not make a move immediately, mirror the move seen on the opposite board, wait for the reply, then send the reply back to the original board.