https://www.chess.com/news/view/life-time-ban-visually-impaired-player-for-cheating
What amazes me is how long they took to catch him. Also, the fellow’s technology was way behind the curve. Hand held Bluetooth device?? How about putting one into the ear canal?
His opponent beat Simen Agdestein 3 years ago 
They tend to catch the ones who cheat impatiently / stupidly / clumsily.
Depressing, of course, but hardly the whole story. If he was using that earpiece, then at least one other person had to be involved in relaying moves to him. No mention of that in the linked story.
Sadly, cheating will never go away. The higher the stakes, the more someone is willing to cheat. Just look at Russia and the winter olympics.
I’ll use chess for the rest of this post, but it can be applied to any competition.
It would be one thing if say, it was the world chess open and someone wanted to cheat to ace a particular class, say under 1600 or even say 1800 and under. If they managed to pull it off, as in they managed to hide the way they were getting chess engine help, it would be problematic to post analyze the games for engine help if the engine was, say, set a couple hundred points over class. (That is the cheater wants to win the under 1600, they might set the engine for 1800 or maybe 1850 at most. Maybe even use different engines in different rounds.)
But one has to wonder what would motivate a individual with little experience to cheat nearly from the first tournament they ever played. Are they motivated for money, the media attention, or just the thrill of the game of cheating.
The other thing that makes this visually impaired person unique is that it’s a disabled person doing it. I’m sure he’s not the first disabled person to cheat in a competition, but it has to be a rare person to do that. It’s far more common for a normal person to pretend to be disabled to get some sort of edge.
As a person with a disability, I occasionally will come across a random youtube video were an able bodied person will fake a disability to get on social security disability. In my opinion, a person that does that sets their personal bar of life so low, you’d need to dig a trench to get under it.
(Normally, people try to set goals so high, you need a ladder to get over it.)
Yes, indeed. No mention of that. A Russian perhaps… 
This pure speculation, but IIRC this fellow is terminally ill with cancer. Perhaps this goes back to his first tournament and he just wants to have “achieved” something of note before his death.
One has to wonder if he even has cancer, considering he out lived a two year suspension.
When I used to live in KY, there was a guy who lived in public housing the next street over. He was legally blind, so he tells everybody, but can only be described as a pan handler that drifts around town. One day he was looking for some handouts and at the time I was walking my dog with my mom. He gave us this sad story about having cancer and no cancer treatments and bleeding when he went to the bathroom. We didn’t buy his story. 5 years later he was still drifting around town looking for handouts. No mention of having been near dying from untreated cancer.
By the way, he didn’t actually qualify for disability or medcaid, so I’m not sure if he’s actually blind. Once he hooked his claws into free housing, the city was helpless to get evict him. All his income and basic needs, outside of his free apartment, come from pan handling around town.
Just for contrast: behind my mom’s house is a gentleman that is completely blind, and has been since his late 20’s. Not sure what he did for a living. He was retired by the time he moved into the neighborhood, but had no trouble affording a house and stuff. One day I was talking to my mom on the phone and she mentioned he’s now married to a very nice lady.
Just for clarity: the public housing starts on the block just east of our house, my mom’s backyard and blind neighbor is on the west side of the property.
Which opponent beat Agdestein? Just curious. If it was that 1700 player, that’s pretty impressive. As for the girl (who would have been 6 three years ago), I don’t doubt that he cheated against her, as he had that device attached to his palm. But based on the game itself, there is nothing terribly suspicious about it. Winning the pawn that way is tactics at a class C level.
This pure speculation, but IIRC this fellow is terminally ill with cancer. Perhaps this goes back to his first tournament and he just wants to have “achieved” something of note before his death.
[/quote]
Depressing and sad story.Hopefully this fellow finds some joy in his remaining time
Pardon me for not responding to the more interesting ethical points made in your post. Just wanted to ask questions about the mechanics of “safe cheating” suggested in this paragraph.
First, it’s hard as heck to win a class section in a big event. The last time I won over $1,000, tying for second in a class section, I had a performance that was 240 points over the ceiling. I lost to the deserved winner, a fourteen-year-old girl who had a performance 410(!) points above the ceiling. So the hypothetical “1850 engine” isn’t as likely to win such a class section as you’d think.
Although this young woman is now a strong master (and probably still underrated), she’s not yet a 2500 player. So peak performances are also a consequence of the Swiss System. (This statement breaks down a bit above master level, when odds of a drawn game increase exponentially.) Similarly, if you analyze the performance of a few thousand fund managers, you may find a dozen who have outperformed the market in seven consecutive years…some wisdom and some dumb luck.
And what does it mean to have an engine that performs at an 1850 level? It probably scores a bit under 50% against Class A players. Ratings measure performance, not play. Maybe search depth is limited; that’s not going to work well in a slow-time-control event. (There used to be a popular engine on ICC whose search depth was limited to 4 ply: it still maintained a 1700 blitz rating.) Or the engine deliberately avoids making “brilliant computer moves”? How do you program THAT? Or it deliberately blunders every so often? Uh oh. Or its positional evaluation function is suboptimal…
If I were a cheating class player, I think I’d be better off choosing my own “human” moves and somehow consulting the engine as a blundercheck. Would I have the strength of character 
to avoid a brilliant sacrifice (like the missed opportunity So had after …f7-f5 against Mamedyarov in today’s final round, spotted by Kasparov & engines)?
Players ARE cheating in our tournaments, occasionally in big money events. Fortunately, these cases are exceedingly rare. Most players in our events get the utter pointlessness of cheating.
I was just posturing a theoretical cheat to enhance my post for illustrative purposes.
To bad this guy didn’t actually learn decent chess. It actually quite interesting going up a decent chess ladder engine, for lack of a better term. I’d been using Chess King 2017 and it’s interesting how I’ve slowly climb up it’s strength from around 1350 to now about 1750. At 1750, it eventually has to make some mistake, but the mistakes often are more subtle to find. Sometimes the mistakes are still too obvious though. That’s the lodestone of trying to hobble a chess engine. They’re never really that good at pretending to be some random level other than their top strength.
In Peshka modules, my rating is still under 1600, so there is a difference in my estimated level against Chess King 2017 and a more scientific method using chess problems to estimate my strength.
But I’m having fun doing it, and that’s all that really matters.
How do you KNOW the cases are exceedingly rare? I would certainly hope they are rare, but here’s my beef: maybe they are not so much rare as well done.
Are we including playing/gaming the rating system by picking events and time controls to maximize ones results?
I think there are two separate issues here. One is cheating, ie, games that were not fair contests of skill, either because one player had access to outside assistance or because one player deliberately played poorly.
The second is gaming the ratings system by choosing the time controls, events or players one competes against.
Assuming these are fair contests of skill, it is probably easier to produce an artificially high rating by playing only much weaker opponents than to produce an artificially low rating by playing only much stronger opponents. (It’s so much easier, and probably faster, to deliberately lose or draw some games to lower one’s rating, ie, to sandbag, and sandbagging is very hard to prove.)
I think we’ve had some cases where players played mostly much weaker opponents to try to achieve some ratings level, like earning the national master title.
I’m not sure what can be done about that. I have suggested several times over the years that players should not be able to cross some boundary, like a 200 point class interval, without having played (or possibly defeated) any players at or above their current class, but that idea has never generated much positive response. In the long run, though, those rating points are hard to maintain.
I’m not sure that just choosing the time control is a good way to artificially inflate one’s rating, unless that also impacts the types of players one faces.
I think the switch to floating point ratings is a big deterrent. If my rating were somehow 2190 and I could play extra rated games against 100-200 players in ten tournaments to become a master, it would be tempting to try. Now that I’d have to do it a thousand times, the incentive is largely gone.
Alex Relyea
I think you’re overestimating the impact of the change to floating point.
To get a high rating, all one has to do is play a floored 2200 rated player who has not played in years, then beat a bunch of players who are under 1800 until you have an established rating. We had an instance of that happening in our area in our chess league. He probably was class A strength, but certainly not 2600+, which is what the USCF rating system allowed. Outlier or glitch in the system, it was certainly odd. When he finally played stronger opposition, his rating plummeted. IIRC, he finished his studies and went back to his home country with a very healthy USCF rating that was still higher than his actual strength.
The usual process for a newbie who is a sandbagger is to deliberately play poorly in a string of initial games to establish a very low rating. Then scoop up the cash in big class section tournaments in U1200, U1300, U1400, etc. tournaments. The smart thing in between those class tournaments is to lose in cheap events to keep the rating depressed. That is why I advise people to take care when deciding to play in a big class tournament. Expect both baby sharks, that is up and coming young players, and real sharks who are trying to supplement their income. Don’t expect to make money or have your rating after these events be a meaningful measure of your real strength. The rating system cannot do that when there are people manipulating their results.
The problem for sandbaggers is that their rating drifts higher and they are usually prize limited or barred from lower sections and have to play up until they reach their level of incompetence. Once a sandbagger’s prize money chances dry up, he usually quits playing. He may then turn to teaching proteges how to game the system. Is that cheating? There are too many ways to cheat in chess that they cannot be numbered. The dumb, the impatient, and the greedy usually get caught. The smart ones at least break even on their expenses. If you can break even on a hobby, that is usually enough for most people.
That never works. Sooner or later one of those “weaker” opponents (possibly an up-and-coming kid) will take 32 points away from you, wiping out months of tiny gains vs genuinely weaker opponents.
Yes, that’s the point.
It isn’t, because your opponents at that time control chose that time control because, like you, they play better at that time control.
Bill Smythe