#blitz chess

GM Wesley So (a top-10-in-the-world grandmaster who was playing for the St Louis Archbishops in this tournament, who won 2nd place) commented on the chess.com article announcing the Eagles’ win with this:

The “secret gin” was a reaction to Petrosian’s joking interview comment that he’d achieved his results in this tournament because he’d had a glass of gin to drink as he played.

The second part of the comment, though, is a deeper cut. On chess.com, often instead of publicly banning titled players who’ve been found to cheat, they’ll just contact those players and ban them privately.  Basically “your account won’t show that you’re banned, but never log in again if you want it to stay that way”. In other words, Wesley was implying that:

Andriasian and Sargsyan had been cheating in a previous event and were quietly told to leave town, and

Petrosian had possibly achieved this result by committing the same sin.

Part 2: Wait, cheating at chess?

Yes, it’s possible. To oversimplify... it’s like copying the answer to a hard test question off your genius deskmate, except the “deskmate” is your desktop computer. Chess programs have been better at chess than humans for decades now; in theory, all you need to do to beat a human is enter the game into Stockfish and see what it thinks is the best move.

In practice, it’s much harder than that. Try logging into a chess website and rocketing up the ranks by copying the computer’s homework, and you’ll be banned pretty quickly. It turns out that computer moves don’t look like human moves, and people playing computer moves don’t behave like people playing their own moves either; the big chess websites all have secret sauce to try to detect cheaters, or to investigate games where they think cheating has occurred.

Of course, in an officially organized, professional event, the most straightforward way is just for the players to be watched while playing, so that it’s clear whether or not they have Droidfish open on their phones - whether by a live tournament rep in the player’s house, or just by setting up enough cameras that the judges can see what’s going on. That’s the “proctoring” that Wesley mentions in his followup comment to the thread:

The PRO Chess League finals, despite being an online-native event, only requires the players to set up a single facecam - not the multi-camera setup that would be necessary to see what the contestants are actually doing. And the “single facecam” video from the event does show Petrosian repeatedly glancing down at... something... during the tensest moments of his games.

Part 3: Classics of Post

Early the next morning, Tigran Petrosian catches wind of the conversation going on in the article comments, and decides to reply to Wesley’s accusations. But the way he chooses to do it, well... take a look for yourself.

This pretty much instantly ascended to copypasta status in the chess fandom. The /r/chess subreddit had to install an automod to remove reposts of it. Meanwhile, /r/AnarchyChess installed a bot to automatically post it whenever any of the main characters or catchphrases of this story were mentioned.

Wesley accepts the offer for an IRL money match, with a final snide remark: “You are clearly the king of online chess, man. But I will dare fight you over-the-board.”