[9] In 2015, FIDE Ethics Commission, following a complaint put forward by Vasik Rajlich and chess engine developer and games publisher Chris Whittington regarding ethical breaches during internal disciplinary proceedings, ruled the ICGA guilty and sanctioned ICGA with a warning.

[10][11] ChessBase published a challenging two-part interview-article[12] about the process and verdict with ICGA spokesperson David Levy.

Vasik Rajlich was once asked in an interview by Alexander Schmidt, "Did you choose the name Rybka because your program always slipped out of your hands like a little fish?"

Jeroen Noomen (who used to work on Rebel) and Dagh Nielsen were the authors of its opening book – the latter is one of the world's top freestyle chess players.

[20] In January 2004, Rybka participated in the 6th Programmers Computer Chess Tournament (CCT6) event, placing 53rd out of 54 competers, losing 5 games, drawing 3, and beating the last-place finisher who had 0 points (Tohno).

[22] In April 2004, Rybka participated in the Swiss System Season 3 by Claude Dubois, scoring 6 wins, 6 losses and 6 draws in the Top 200 to finish 71st.

Rybka won the tournament with a score of 5½ points out of 7, ahead of other engines such as Gandalf, Zappa, Spike, Shredder and Fruit.

In the June 2006 PAL/CSS Freestyle main tournament, the Rybka team, playing under the handle Rajlich, tied for first place with Intagrand.

[citation needed] In October 2008, Rybka won the 16th World Computer Chess Championship, held in Beijing, China, scoring 8/9.

A month later Rybka won the 27th Open Dutch Computer Chess Championship, held in Leiden, scoring a perfect 9/9.

[29] In March 2009, Rybka won CCT11 with 7.5/9[30] and the 17th World Computer Chess Championship, held in Pamplona, Spain, with a score of 8/9.

[32] In March 2007, Rybka played an eight-game match against GM Roman Dzindzichashvili with pawn and move odds.

[42] In an interview with Frank Quisinsky, Vasik Rajlich revealed plans for a future GUI that would "properly display chess knowledge to the user" most likely in the form of graphical evaluation of the pieces on the board.

Early private Rybka engines have been accused of being a clone of Crafty, including copying specific bugs - such as comparing the result of the EvaluateMate function to a number, 99999, that it could not possibly return[48] - and unnecessary code ("there is no earthly reason for any program that claimed to have been started in 2003 to have such code, other than that it was mindlessly copied from Crafty without the slightest understanding of its purpose").

[50] Several players found Strelka to yield identical analysis to Rybka in a variety of different situations, even having the same bugs and weaknesses in some cases.

According to Victor Zakharov (Convekta company) in his review for Arena chess website: "I consider that Yuri Osipov (Ivanovich) is real name.

Vasik Rajlich has stated[59] that IPPOLIT is a decompiled version of Rybka, and that the people involved kept him informed of their progress via email.

Further allegations of violating the GPL have been brought forward by chess programmer Zach Wegner based on a new decompilation effort and a one-year study of the Rybka 1.0 executable.

[63] The Fruit author Fabien Letouzey has since appeared from a 5-year absence in January 2011 and published an open letter[55] asking for more information regarding Rybka and GPL violations.

The ICGA President David Levy has addressed the situation at ChessVibes and invoked a programmers forum to decide the merits.

[69] The ICGA sanction for Vasik Rajlich and Rybka was the disqualification from the World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) of 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010.

[73] Rajlich responded to the ICGA's allegations in a video interview with Nelson Hernandez, and answered questions about the controversy and his opinions on it.

Riis argued that critical portions of the ICGA panel report that appeared to show line-by-line code duplication between Rybka and Fruit were misleading or falsified, and objected to the panel's and Secretariat's composition, suggesting that it consisted almost exclusively of rival chess programmers who had a conflict of interest in seeing Rajlich banned from competition in order to interrupt his unbroken domination of competitive computer chess.

[77] In 2012, Vasik Rajlich filed a complaint[78] against the ICGA decisions, process and bias to the FIDE Ethics Commission, as co-signed by Soren Riis, Ed Schröder and Chris Whittington.

[79] Cock de Gorter, Chairman of Dutch Computer Chess Association (CSVN) wrote: I need not tell you that the ICGA made a terrible mess.

Their opposition did make an impression on us, because these people can rely upon a vast expertise in the field of chess programming, law and mathematical logic.

When finally dutchman Ed Schröder, former world computer chess champion, joined the aforementioned critics of ICGA, we no longer seemed to have a choice.