The 64 - Why Do We Cheat?
The old adage goes, "If you ain't cheatin', you ain't trying." It seems as though the year of 2022 was the year of cheating accusations, as multiple reports of grifting and swindling continued to roll in one after the other. Poker saw a cheating scandal unfold live on stream in early October after a peculiar call on the turn left many wondering about the sincerity of the more than a quarter of a million dollar pot.
(strong language in this video; viewer discretion is advised - Skip to about 7:30 into video to see everyone's reaction)
Shortly after that, another cheating scandal went viral when two fishermen pled not guilty after they were accused of packing lead weights into the fish that they caught during an Ohio fishing tournament, adding weight to the final tally and tilting the scales to win a thirty thousand dollar grand prize in their favor.
(once again, viewer discretion is advised)
Even the world's oldest and largest competitive Irish dancing organization has launched an investigation after being hit by allegations of competitive fixing.
Then finally, the case most prudent for this website, World Champion Magnus Carlsen withdrawing from the Sinquefield Cup after implicitly (and then not so implicitly) accusing Hans Niemen of cheating at chess. Unless you've been living under a rock since September, there's no doubt that you are familiar with this incident and have fully formed your own opinion on the matter. It was picked up by every major news outlet and even premiered in the cold open of The Late Show one night.
So, with the calendar year of 2022 coming to a close, and with much of the Magnus-Hans discourse finally coming to a halt (for the meantime at least), I thought it would be prudent to discuss the topic that seemed to epitomize this twelve-month period as a whole. The subject of cheating of course. This blog will not be an op-ed of the world champion's claims however. There's plenty of material/opinions on the internet you can go to that will either confirm or deny whichever slant you support. This article isn't addressing that controversy but instead seeks to answer a different question. In a recent chess.com video celebrating the website's 100 millionth subscriber, CEO Erik Allebest, when discussing the first time he figured out someone was cheating on chess.com posed the query "how are we going to deal with this?" With the underlying subtext basically being, how does one cheat? I'm more interested in a different interrogation, the same question my three year old niece asks me on a regular basis, not how, "but why?" Why Do Athletes Cheat?
Each sport has its way of gaining a competitive advantage, even if it stretches the letter of the law. Wether it's applying too much pine tar to your baseball bat...
manipulating the curvature of your blade for a snappier wrist shot...
or deflating a football so a wide receiver is not so prone to drop it...
But chess is a different animal. Other than moving the pieces around when your opponent isn't looking and hoping that they don't notice, there's really just the one practical way to cheat in chess and that is to gain outside assistance, and really in the most contemporary point of view, help from a computer engine. Say what you want about everybody that was just previously mentioned but they still have to go out there and perform. I could lather my Louisville Slugger in a bucket of pine tar but I'm still not coming anywhere close to touching a Jacob Degrom changeup. However, there is nothing as definitive and secure as already knowing the answers to the test and chess is the one sport where this system of cheating makes the participant essentially omnipotent.
Basically, cheating in chess is purely a psychological decision premeditated by the cheater. It doesn't rely on physical capabilities like taking performance enhancing drugs. Psychological research has provided insight into the sheer competitive nature of sports and the ethical complications of cheating and there seems to be two major factors which offer the most perspective into why athletes are willing to cheat.
1. "WINNING ISN'T EVERYTHING; IT'S THE ONLY THING"
There's an emphasis on WINNING, no matter the cost. According to the Handbook of Sports Psychology, "Competitive sport often places individuals in conflicting situations that emphasize winning over sportsmanship and fair play." In a nutshell, an entire culture and their values are put on display. We can see these positive values, like sportsmanship, on display in sports that don't rely on head to head competition. Something like snowboarding or even gymnastics often lend themselves to an overall camaraderie as if they are part of the same household searching for answers on the gameshow Family Feud.
Heck, the entire premise of competitive integrity was portrayed by the Olympics, and when it launched way back in 1896, how their motto, "Citius, Altius, Fortius" - "Faster, Higher, Stronger" for my non Latin speaking friends, was emblematic of these ideals. Athletes are supposed to push their limits, and by doing so, inspire other athletes to do the same. The criterion that there are no losers but rather just competitors challenging themselves to do more than they originally thought possible. To the skeptic, it's not an advocation for participation trophies but rather it's using your teammates or even your adversaries and opponents as your 'accountability partner', to borrow a term from James Clear's Atomic Habits.
In many cases though, cheating is systemic and perpetrated by the parents, coaches and trainers who misemploy athletes (and putting the athlete's career and reputation in peril.) The material and psychological rewards are so much greater than the repercussions of dealing with any ethical or moral fallout. It's just human nature to find ways to justify unethical behavior to benefit ourselves, just as long as the "results" continue to pan out in their favor and remain positive. Cheating then becomes more about, not so much the act of cheating itself, but rather doing it without being caught. It's not cheating if you can get away with it.
2. "I HAVE NEVER SEEN A GREATER MONSTER OR MIRACLE THAN MYSELF..."
It turns out that the answer to my thesis is ultimately a case of Occam's Razor. It isn't complex at all. The bottom line is straightforward: people like to win - cheating pays off. Everyone cheats and everyone knows about it but the final bullet point emphasizes what winning does to one's EGO. Research from the Attitudes and Social Cognition Lab, which studies ways in which attitudes and beliefs affect the way we think about our social world, finds that cheaters do not feel remorse after engaging in unethical behavior. In fact, their experiments only found that these exploits only triggered positive affects! It is known as a 'cheater's high'. The ego-oriented athlete is focused on being better than everyone else and therefore suffer from:
- Lower displays of sportsmanship.
- Acts of cheating.
- An overall endorsement of cheating.
Their moral compass has gone askew. They would rather be crooked than common. Everything seems to revolve more around taking the short view and cheaters aren't concerned with long-term consequences because if they were, they'd be deterred by the potential humiliation of being caught. Instead, the short-term benefits blind one's long-term sight.
There's always a pressure to perform, especially in today's world where there's a need to post and boast about your accomplishments.
Broadcasting our success makes the psychological benefits of winning all that much greater. That constant pressure to compare ourselves makes people all that more likely to cheat. For chess players, that is our rating. We are rating obsessed when in reality, your rating isn't all that significant in the grand scheme of things, especially if your actual play and overall chess knowledge isn't indicative of the rating you hold. As Sam Copeland so eloquently put in regards to online chess in his blog about 'How To Cheat At Chess'...
Any idiot can cheat in online chess. What they get out of it, I don't know."
All in all, cheating can be a slippery slope. In a BBC interview with Lance Armstrong, when he was asked was it worth it, Armstrong responded by saying he would "probably do it again". The risk of being caught and being labeled a cheater is worth the money and the glory that being the best brings. But what about later? One must transcend the moment and ask what the long-term consequences are. Still, cheating is an inevitability, especially in online chess. However, with millions of games being played daily, it is still a rather minuscule problem as far as the percentage of games goes. Obviously it happens and I don't mean to underplay the severity of it, particularly at the highest level where there is a lot of money at stake.
But throughout my career of competing in all kinds of sports, I subscribe to the theory, because my experiences have shown this to be the most true, that you have to learn to lose before you can win. Although these long-term goals don't abide to the ethos of the ego-centered athletes who are willing to cheat to fulfill their nearsighted attainments. Unfortunately, for every athlete who is caught, we can only guess how many more there are who continue to get away with it.
WORKS CITED
Aurora University. “The Psychology of Cheating in Sports: Aurora University Online.” AU Online, 16 Aug. 2019, https://online.aurora.edu/psychology-of-cheating-in-sports/.
Copeland, Sam. “How to Cheat at Chess.” Chess.com, 31 Aug. 2019, https://www.chess.com/blog/SamCopeland/how-to-cheat-at-chess.
Dure, Beau. “Winning Isn't Everything; It's the Only Thing. Right?” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/sep/24/winning-everything-sports.
Zabala, Diego. “Cheating in Sports: the Risks behind a Winning Culture.” Law Ahead, https://lawahead.ie.edu/cheating-in-sports-the-risks-behind-a-winning-culture/.
