[Competitive Chess] That Time a Female Chess Player was Accused of Hiding a Supercomputer in a Tube of Lipbalm

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

This is a really old piece of drama, but I only discovered it recently after getting into Anna Rudolf’s Twitch channel (note: I don’t think this breaks the rules because she wasn’t a Twitch streamer at the time, and she’s still primarily a chess analyst).

Warning: I don’t play a lot of chess, I’ve never followed chess competitively, and when this happened the only thing I really cared about in life was Webkinz. Even so, it’s pretty clear that this was screwed up.

Anna Rudolf is a Hungarian chess player. At the time this happened, in 2007, she was 20 years old. Since then she’s become an International Master, a Woman Grandmaster, and a member of the Hungarian Olympic Chess Team. She no longer plays competitively, but instead works as a commentator and analyst, and since the pandemic has been streaming through Twitch (her channel is here if you’re curious). If you were a Soothouse fan (RIP), you might recognise her from this video.

This took place at the Vandeouvre Open, whose current website calls them the “Biggest Chess Tournament in France”. At the tournament in 2007 there were 100 players, with the highest ranking being a chess grandmaster named Christian Bauer. Anna had a ranking of 2293 at the time, and was not yet ranked as a master.

Chess uses a ranking system where points are added or taken away based on games won while supervised. To achieve a higher ranking you need to have a point total within that range (for example, at the time Christian Bauer had a ranking of 2634, which made him a grandmaster since it is in the range of 2500-2700). So tournaments are an opportunity for chess players to move up and down the ranking, and have the opportunity to play those similarly ranked or higher ranked then they are.

Anna came into the tournament extremely strong. She was not expected to do particularly well, so there was a lot of surprise when she won her first four games in a row. Her second game, and the one that caused all the controversy, was against Christian Bauer. This caused a lot of talk about how she could have done so well, and some players began to suspect cheating.

It should be noted here that the normal way that people cheat in chess is through using a computer to calculate what the optimal next move will be. As supercomputers became more refined through time, and the Internet has made it easy to communicate their suggestions to chess players on site, concerns have arisen among high level players that any competitor could have a supercomputer.

Another important note is that Christian Bauer himself did not believe that Anna cheated. During the game and directly after the game it didn’t even occur to him. Afterwards he heard other players suggest it, and did briefly consider that it might be a “very unlikely” possibility. But then a friend of his used a supercomputer to prove that Anna’s moves did not line up with what a computer would have suggested, and that caused him to switch back to the “Anna did nothing wrong” side. He also said in later interviews that he made an error late in the game that Anna exploited perfectly, explaining how she won against someone with a much higher ranking. This is in line with what basically every other member of the chess community believes.

While several people gossiped about her cheating during the tournament, one competitor, a Latvian named Oleg Krivonosov, wanted to make actual allegations. He was dismissed by his fellow chess players because his claim had no evidence and no logical basis.

But he did not stop to listen to common sense. Krivonosov was hellbent on the idea of Anna cheating, so he rounded up fellow Latvians Oleg Lazarev and Ilmars Starostits to brainstorm with him. The next day, they went back to the competition and claimed that they knew exactly how she was cheating.

And what was their airtight hypothesis? Well, during her competitor’s moves Anna would get up and walk around, go to the bathroom, and apply her lip balm.

“Aha!” they must have crowed triumphantly, “Her lip balm is the supercomputer!”

Yeah, really.

To be fair, they did not literally think that she had disguised a 2007 supercomputer as a tube of lip balm. They thought that the tube was using the internet to receive signals from a nearby supercomputer, which she then used to make her next move. Which, considering the properties of both 2007 technology and of lip balm tubes, is basically just as preposterous.

Incredibly, they were not laughed out of the country. In fact, Anna went on to play two of them. The first, Lazarev, ended in a draw. Even with the accusation of cheating, Anna was doing pretty well.

The second Latvian she played, Starostits, went out of his way to make sure that she knew that he “knew” that she was cheating. He refused to shake hands, asked the arbiter to take away her bag (which the arbiter did, for some reason), and also got her banned from using her lip balm or from leaving the hall during the tournament.

A large part of chess playing is psychological. When you feel good and you’re doing good, you’re more likely to win or win again. Anna had been doing well all tournament, and presumably feeling on top of the world. This, alongside Bauer’s mistake, is the explanation most people give for her winning streak.

On the other hand, being publicly called a cheater, having your opponent refuse to shake hands, and then being treated like a criminal by the supposedly-objective arbiter, has about the opposite effect. Anna went on to lose that game, although it was a pretty even match to the end.

It also turns out that Starostits, aside from faulty logic and a strong sense of justice against twenty-year-olds who use lip balm, had a good motive to try and throw Anna off. If she had taken a draw in that game she could have finished in the top three. Starostits needed a win.

If that was his strategy, it worked. Starostits went on to take second. Thankfully, Anna also had somewhat of a happy ending in the rankings. She went on to take ninth place (she was expected to land around twenty-second), which allowed her to qualify for International Master and Woman Grandmaster.

In the aftermath, basically everyone sided with Anna. She left her last match crying, and many of her competitors went out of their way to comfort her. During the prize-giving ceremony, the president of the Vandeouvre club made a point to clear her name, telling everyone that she was just the victim of an amoral play. The crowd supposedly clapped for her for five minutes straight.

Krisonov, her original accuser, still could not let go of the belief that she was cheating. He promised to show up at the next tournament they both attended, Capelle-La-Grande, and accuse her again. If he did make these accusations they were dismissed out of hand, as no record of them shows up online.

The arbiters at Vandeouvre caught a fair amount of flack for their whole part in this. There was absolutely no evidence of her cheating at the time, and the arbiter either ignored internal protocols about how to deal with accusations of cheating (which are meant to prevent exactly what happened, a false accusation throwing a winning player off of their game), or the tournament simply didn’t have any.

False rumours swirled around online afterwards. Anna herself didn’t really comment on it, but her supporters found themselves having to clarify that most players she played were not ranked much higher than herself, and that her only incredibly high ranked competitor admitted to making a mistake that lost him the match.

For better or for worse, that weekend still influences her legacy. Anna continued playing for many more years, but that particular tournament is seen as one of the highlights of her competitive play. And the “scandal” is one of the first things to come up when you search for her online.

From what I could find, the incident is still occasionally brought up in general discussions of chess today, mostly in regards to two concepts: cheating with technology, and feminism.

Anna was a young, attractive woman in a field that is generally seen as male-dominated. Most of the rationale of her accusers was “he couldn’t lose to her”, and in an interview done by the Atlantic in 2019, she noted that a lot of the comments she received were very explicitly along the lines of “he couldn’t lose to a woman.”

The other chessplayer she was being interviewed with (Judit Polgar) noted that there were many times when male chessplayers did not believe her results because they did not believe that she could be that good, and that female chessplayers need to have a “strong character” to carry on. She called the experience a “teaching from life of how unfair [chess] can be”.

Even with the attempts in the last few years to promote women within male dominated fields, only two of the top one hundred chess players are women. In just 2015, one of the top English chess players, Nigel Short, claimed that men are just better at things like “chess” and “parking” than women, and later criticised his detractors as “shrill feminists”. Men tend to play chess more than women, and women tend to do worse playing competitively against men than they would playing against women.

As technology becomes smaller, the fear of chessplayers cheating becomes larger. In 2007, Christian Bauer said that he thought there was no worry of “cheating paranoia”. This actually seems to be mostly accurate.

In the thirteen years since, there have been a few large cheating scandals. None of them (from what I can see), however, have triggered any sort of witch hunt or disproportionate rule changes. While the situation with Anna stands out as what chess paranoia could lead to if unchecked, it does not seem to be any kind of herald of the future.

That’s pretty much the drama. If you’re a chess person and notice something I got wrong please let me know and I’ll edit it in.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here