Toiletgate: When Vladimir Kramnik was on the other side of cheating allegations

In the third episode of Masters and Matches, Arne Moll and I discuss the infamous Toiletgate scandal, when Vladimir Kramnik was accused of cheating during his World Championship match with Veselin Topalov in Elista in 2006.

The episode (Spotify | Apple) is not only a complete overview of how the match unfolded, what accusations were made and how the players reacted at the time, but also features all the events that happened both before this match and afterward.

For starters, it was Topalov himself who was suspected by grandmasters of having cheated during the San Luis World Championship tournament in 2005. And then, half a year after the Elista match, suddenly Topalov and his manager Silvio Danailov were once again accused in Wijk aan Zee 2007 when seemingly suspicious videos appeared of Danailov spending a lot of time at Topalov's board, making strange gestures, walking back and forth and using his phone. In the end, no clear evidence was surfaced related to whether Kramnik or Topalov cheated during that period in time. 

Most remarkable are the similarities between the discussed period of 2005-2007 and more recent times, when we see Kramnik on the other side of the allegations, and using very similar methods and language as the Bulgarians were doing two decades ago. These parallels formed the inspiration for choosing this topic in the first place and ended up being even more striking than suspected.

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About the hosts:

Peter Doggers has played chess for over 30 years and written about it for almost 20. He regularly writes for Chess.com and New in Chess. He is the author of The Chess Revolution and also hosts The Chess News Podcast.

https://peterdoggers.com/

Arne Moll has played chess even longer than Peter and also loves to write about it. He contributed many thought-provoking articles to the website ChessVibes.com between 2007 and 2013 and recently published his first book as well, called The Center Game.

https://www.newinchess.com/the-center-game