Bad move: Grandmaster caught cheating at chess in a lavatory
Disgraced Georgian champion Gaioz Nigalidze is expelled from the Dubai Open
after his opponent Tigran Petrosian, became suspicious
A disgraced
chess Grandmaster
faces a 15-year ban from the game after being caught pretending to be
desperate for the loo so he could use a mobile phone to cheat.
Georgian champion Gaioz Nigalidze was expelled from the Dubai Open on
Saturday after his opponent Tigran Petrosian, became suspicious about
the amount of times he nipped to the lavatory.
A complaint followed and Nigalidze was challenged. Tournament
organisers then found Nigalidze had stored a mobile phone in a cubicle,
behind the pan and covered in toilet paper.
The device was found to be logged into Nigalidze's social networking
account and had one of his games being analysed by a smartphone chess
app.
After Saturday's match, Armenian Grandmaster Petrosian
said: "Nigalidze would promptly reply to my moves and then literally run
to the toilet.
"I noticed that he would always visit the same
toilet partition, which was strange, since two other partitions weren't
occupied.
"I informed the chief arbiter about my growing suspicions and asked him to keep an eye on Gaioz.
"After my opponent left the very toilet partition yet another time, the arbiters entered it.
The popular 'stockfish' chess engine, available on Android phones as Droidfish
"What they found was the mobile phone with headphones; the device was hidden behind the pan and covered with toilet paper."
The tournament's organisers announced their decision to expel Nigalidze on Sunday morning on their Facebook page.
It said: "A cheating incident was found during round 6
by Georgian GM Gaioz Nigalidze ... bravo to Chief Arbiter Mahdi Abdul
Rahim for taking the complaint seriously and raising it to the
Tournament Director.
"An electronic device was found in the toilet ... Full story with pictures to be published soon.”
British former world title contender Nigel Short said Nigalidze "should
be stripped of his GM title and banned immediately" and called for
FIDE, the game's governing body, to tighten up rules.
The incident follows a warning from British GM Daniel Gormally last month.
He refused to name any names but
told the Telegraph he was suspicious about "improvement" some players have shown.
Allegations of cheating are rare at the top level of chess.
However, in July 2013 Bulgarian player Borislav Ivanov was suspended from playing for four months by his national federation.
It had been found most of his moves matched those of the leading computer chess analysis programs.
Two years earlier the French chess federation suspended three players,
including the national team captain, after it was alleged they used
mobile text messages, a remote chess computer and coded signals to beat
the opposition at the 2010 Chess Olympiad.
