Life Lessons from Chess Cheating Discourse
What can we learn about life from chess cheating and the discourse around it?
As I race to submit a draft of my next book, THINKING SIDEWAYS, I’ve been spending a lot of time contemplating the life lessons from a scourge in chess: cheating. My editor is very intent on me not just telling stories, but also embedding takeaways. Cheating is terrible, so it might not be the first thing we think of when considering all the lessons chess has to teach.
And at first I struggled: but now I have takeaways beyond the scope of the chapter, hence this post. And in other news the writing is finally going well!
Top Seven Life Lessons from the Chess Cheating Discourse:
1. The incredible spread of fake news: The Hans Niemann-Magnus Carlsen story blew up beyond imagination. And a big part of the early spike in news coverage was one tweet: by Elon Musk, soon after he bought Twitter, now X.
These tweets were based on fake news. Beyond the fact that there was no proof Hans cheated in over the board chess, the anal beads method was never a serious suggestion. It was a joke by a fan on the Chessbrahs stream. And yet, for months and even years after, friends from outside chess still ask me, “So wait, how did that guy cheat using anal beads?”
While the coverage had some funny moments, like Trevor Noah’s “Even if you Lose, you kinda win” quip, it was scary to see an unvetted story spread so quickly. It reminded me of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect-- on speed. That’s the fallacy where you read a story in your own field, and see tons of errors and misconceptions. You close the article/book/browser in frustration. And then you open up the same source to read about a topic you know nothing, and soak up its contents as gospel! While guilty of this fallacy many a time, I am at least more aware of it now.
As an optimist, I like to flip the Gell-Mann: When I see a story that is in my field in a mainstream venue, and nails it, I’m delighted and want to consume everything by that team/writer. For poker, the first thing that pops into mind is this Planet Money episode on investing in poker players. The quintessential chess example is the Queen’s Gambit Netflix series, with one caveat: Nona Gaprindashvili.
2. Cheating is Not Genius: Most of the reactions to Elon’s tweet were about anal beads. But its conclusion “that genius is in ur butt” is also suss. What if a player really did cheat using anal beads? Cheating is not genius. I know you’re gonna say, Jen stop being such a killjoy. Elon was obviously joking. Do you have something stuck up your butt?
Well, there’s a little truth in every butt joke.
Why is all this troubling? Many tech companies are replacing humans with AI, like this case with duolingo or this boss bragging about replacing 90% of staff with AI. Elon joking that it would be brilliant to cheat in chess using AI through your butt does make me think of a G-word, but it’s not genius. It’s Greed.
3. The Beast is ALWAYS Hungry:
The new chess world thrives on drama, but this does not benefit everyone. Sometimes it makes sense for drama to reign. But on a slow day, a troll on social media or a minor detail about a cheating accusation gets blown up to ridiculous proportions. The beast must be fed, regardless of whether there’s real food! Like when Andrea Botez asked Magnus Carlsen how the knight moves at the 2021 World Championship. That was kinda funny. I assumed it was a dare or inside joke. It went viral. This was during the World Championship, so I can’t even call it a slow news day. More like a slow news minute! The beast is perpetually hungry.
On a personal note, I broke a very grave sexual assault story on Twitter this year. I was grateful for social media in helping me to warn the community. My post drew in more women to tell their stories about the horrors of misogyny, abuse and sexual assault in chess. But I was also struck by how similar the dynamics of the response to me raising an alarm on sexual assault were to much more mundane things. Social media and its algorithms warp scale and priorities.
4. Continue to Cultivate a strong community + culture: We’re never gonna get away from rankings and metrics, nor would we want to. Meritocracy is a core value of chess and its culture. And yet, I think we can move the needle a bit.
If we expand the idea of chess success and focus not only on the top players and their moves, but also on the game’s impact, history and culture, I think we could slightly reduce the incidence of cheating, especially for teens + kids.
5. Comfort with uncertainty: In a Financial Times article, I wrote about how cheating scandals remind us that we don’t always get certainty1. That tension may have been why the Carlsen-Niemann saga has lingered in the news for so long.
The heart of this drama is uncertainty. But in chess, as in life, we don’t always get to be certain. There are things we’ll never know — and we should move beyond picking a side or tunnelling deeper towards confirmation bias. Because even chess players can turn a quest for truth into a fool’s errand.
6. Balancing gullibility and paranoia - The discourse around chess and cheating has shown me the crucial balance between being too naive—which can cause you to be a doormat—and too paranoid—which can make you anxious and unhappy. Chris Callahan, the Community Manager at lichess explains that fears of cheating begets more cheating: “Cheating paranoia is endemic in the chess world,” he told me. He frequently gets angry emails from players who claim tons of their opponents are cheating. Chris will check the games with his team, and find no signs of foul play. The player will email them back in panic, insisting that even more of their opponents are cheating—but those accounts also come up clean. The player sends a third, even angrier email, convinced that every game they lose is by a cheat. And finally the distraught player will cheat themselves, convinced it’s the only way to win. Before they go, they send Chris one final angry email: “Why did you ban me of all the cheaters on your site? I’m the only cheater you ever banned!”
In life too, we balance paranoia and gullibility. From protecting your online accounts (good idea to err on the side of paranoia on that one friends!) to the fear of getting cheated on in a relationship, finding the equilibrium isn’t always easy.
Ideally, institutions take on more paranoia, so that we can be more carefree. Put yourself in situations where you can err on the side of naiveté. Play with people and in venues that you trust. If you’re the type who veers toward paranoia, avoid time controls which are more conducive to cheating.
A final mental game tip for chess players on the paranoid side: think of your rating as your actual rating, with a tiny bonus for the people who cheat against you that never get caught. In a way, that is your real rating.
7. The dangers of surveillance culture:
A precursor to our era of constant chess drama was the 2006 World Chess Championship match aka “Toilet Gate.” Veselin Topalov’s team accused Vladimir Kramnik of going to the bathroom too often. The letter to the appeals committee was very detailed.
“The logical question arises: How many times during a game does a player need to go to the bathroom and with what regularity? The logical answer is: between 5 -10 times at the most, but not 50 as the statistics from the games played so far shows.
We would like to once again remind you that the bathroom is the only place without video or audio surveillance.”
The complaint triggered a dramatic appeal process, a forfeit from Kramnik in protest, and a lifetime of missed handshakes. While this one was ultimately resolved with Kramnik going on to win the match, the kerfuffle foreshadowed fears that would explode decades later.
Fair play in modern chess is tied in with surveillance, including common sense policies like banning electronics. But taken to an extreme, surveillance brings privacy violations. Just take the case of IM Igors Rausis2. Rausis was stripped off his GM title when he was caught using computer assistance at a 2019 tournament in France. A photo of him sitting on a toilet ended up being published all over the World from the London Times to the New York Post. It didn’t appear he was using the toilet but rather studying a chess position on his phone. I don’t think the photo itself was ever claimed, but in my view, it should not have been published.
Sadly, these are hardly the only prominent chess cheating accusations that involved restrooms. I’ve heard of other incidents in Open Events of players following suspected cheaters into bathrooms and even stalls.
Fears of a violent crime like assault, or a medical emergency, like choking is a valid reason to barge into a bathroom stall. But an opponent’s eerie knowledge of an esoteric line of the Sicilian does not qualify.
The danger of a heightened surveillance culture goes way beyond just chess. Videos pop up on social media, exposing or mocking people who don’t seem to give consent to be filmed or photographed. Sometimes those videos capture horrible behavior that is correctly punished. But often it’s a gross invasion of privacy.
We just got to keep asking ourselves:
What do we lose when we watch every move?
Uncertainty is a more complicated math question for the folks who develop and run the backend anti-cheating algorithms. There, the danger of false positives have to be seriously weighed, and there’s been a lot of spirited conversation on that point lately. The conversation on fair play heats up around 30:00.
Igors now goes by Isa Kasimi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isa_Kasimi
Good points, but note that the law (almost everywhere in the world) regarding photography is the same: if you are in public you have no expectation of privacy, and can be photographed by anyone at anytime without their consent. If you are in your home (or a hospital room, or a bathroom stall) then no. A chess tournament, unless it's held in your home, gives no protection from these photography laws (intended to protect freedom of the press). Without this right, no photojournalist could ever do their job due to lawsuits. So I question whether it's a "gross invasion of privacy", it depends on the circumstances.
A some point in the future, maybe 10 years, 50 years, 100... cheating will not be detectable. At that point all that's left is the love of the game amongst friends. So maybe that is what is most important.