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Subject: Re: Cheat of the Year!

Author: David Blackman

Date: 19:04:55 01/25/99

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On January 25, 1999 at 08:34:38, Jürgen Hartmann wrote:

>The German Newsmagazine "Der Spiegel" today reports a funny story: Mr.
>Allwermann, an Elo 1925 amateur of age 55 has won a nine-round 2h/40 swiss
>tournament and achieved a performance of 2630.
>
>Jürgen

Something like this happened in the USA a few years back. The culprit called
himself "von Neumann" on the tournament entry. He was caught when either his
computer or communications broke down. Rather than trying to finish the game on
his own, he just waited for the computer to come back and eventually lost on
time. I don't think his exact method was found out.

I guess a 1925 player would not have the same problem since he could play on
fairly convincingly by himself, and maybe even win a won game against a IM.

BTW i hope the people making allegations here have checked out the games very
carefully first. These days a lot of people retire from work at about age 55.
Imagine someone with IM talent or better having time to study chess properly for
the first time in their life. They might surprise a few titled players at
tournaments. In fact this has happened here in Australia, and it is fairly
certain that the player concerned is not cheating in any way.

Playing a few computer-like strange moves is not necessarily suspicious these
days, especially if the moves are early in the game. Someone plays practice
games against Fritz, Fritz plays something weak looking at move 12, but the
player can't refute it, so they decide to use it for themselves in tournaments.

To detect cheating you would have to check out all the game scores carefully,
preferably with the time information available. The people who run the internet
chess servers are supposed to be very experienced at this.



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