At the Chicago Open 2024, a player was exposed for using a phone to gain an advantage in chess games played over the board. In contrast to other cases of offline cheating, the player used his phone in his lap, directly in front of the chessboard, rather than using a device outside the playing hall. Before being discovered, he had amassed more than 1,000 rating points in the previous year.
The cheater, who used FIDE National Arbiter Dane Zagar in round four of the u2100 section, was discovered using a phone in round six. Watch Zagar’s account of playing and participating in the hunt for a cheater on the No Pawn Intended podcast below. The highlight is covered in this article.
Soon after the first moves were made, Zagar became suspicious. “The bizarre thing was he spent only about 15 minutes on the entire game,” Zagar said of the cheater, who remained anonymous. “He was, besides looking down every once in a while, playing extremely fast and played one move in particular where he just hung a pawn, it looked like, just to gain a square.”
He had previously played against a player who had been proven to cheat. That game “really rang alarm bells” for him. In the game below, which Zagar annotated, his opponent played an almost flawless game on the light squares.
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