Borislav Ivanov is BACK!

When I read the article of Dlugy I was totally baffled. Imagine: someone is of suspected of cheating and he walks in a very strange way. Didn't that raise any eyebrows? Why did nobody ask Ivanov to take out his shoes? Is he family of some powerful Ivanov or something?

Going by what Dlugy writes it seems as if tournament organisers have been doing their best to protect Ivanov, maybe that's connected to the level of previous searches, and why they promptly put him back in the tournament after the arbiter had disqualified him from it.

One of the more condemning parts of Dlugy's description (after Ivanov already had been disqualified for cheating by the Arbiter) is:

"I'm pretty convinced that the organisers want to prove that the guy is no fluke, and what is going to happen in this round, where he is playing some expert, he will be subject to a search, they will show that he has nothing on him. At this point, once he wins this game, which he could, possibly - I guess he is a 2200 player - and they would say look, the guy is clean. But this is only for a really dumb audience"

Maybe Ivanov just paid off the right people at some occasions.

Sis Phoenix understand that he responded to a post saying it's not a serious crime n the US by posting something that shows it is a serious ctime in Singapore?  Singapore is so over the top on law and order that I would be afraid to go there.

Stockfish 4, or Critter 1.6a, both extremely strong engines, are freely available for Android devices. Maybe not 3000+ performance on a dualcore Android smartphone, but still strong enough to beat 98% of the players.

Apart from the cheating in itself which has been obvious for a long time, it was more the method that was less obvious, Ivanov does seem to be a thoroughly unsympathetic person. Calling a previous World Junior Champion and US top three player like GM Dlugy an "unknown clown" is just ridiculous.

This is true, all a cheater needs is an Android device (there are quadcores available at the moment) with a free engine and an application to communicate using morse-like code. Ivanov could have written such an application himself, he is a programmer.

However Ivanov's game in Trompovsky was played by Houdini. Stockfish 4 chooses different moves in some places but everything starting from 18.b4 is Houdini 3's first choice. Also, FM Lilov's analysis of previous games (before the ban) shows the correlation with H3 at a level unavailable to any human player, including Carlsen or Fischer.

1) Metal detectors are made to pick up weapons not microelectronics.  You can make some really substantial microelectronics with much less metal than would be contained in one .45 bullet.  You are probably stuck with the metal in the computer chip (since manufacturing your own processor is out of the question) but aside from that you can make a chess playing machine with nearly no metal.

2) Building a x-86 shoe computer is not a challenging thing to do.

3) Didn't you see "I Spit on Your Grave 2"?  It's Bulgaria where much worse things happen.  That's classic film-making right there. 

There had been another person that had been caught with a vibrating phone. However, there had been no mention of anyone hearing any vibrations. He was caught because he kept putting his hands in his pocket which looked suspicious.

'Just checking my texts'.

'OK fine'.

Sure it is. He's stealing prize money.

It's all been done before to cheat at blackjack.  Casinos soon tumbled it and banned it as they were losing money.  The chess world is a bit less cut throat.

http://www.blackjackforumonline.com/content/taftint.html

The excuses for not removing shoes are laughable.  I would guess it is a bespoke small electronic device running houdini or something similar.  It wouldn't need an internet connection.

A relevant paragraph

Keith Taft: My first thought was that the hand would be difficult to conceal without them thinking you were doing something suspicious, whereas if you put it in the shoes, no one would be suspicious, and your hands would be free to play the cards.

I agree. It was mentioned that he had been searched in an earlier round (which Ivanov ended up losing.) Even then GM Dlugy had emphasized for a shoe search. Though the article doesn't mention it, i don't doubt a shoe search had been done at that time. 

There is nothing wrong with being sceptical in this story. The picture of a shoe with an Android phone in it in the mentioned chessbase article together with the remark: "We have done a little research and found that, unfortunately, there is a very low-tech way to cheat in chess (...)", does make me a bit weary about the journalistic quality of the article (and maybe the chessbase site in general).

I don't need hard evidence, but if you are going to make accusations, at least try to provide a plausible and verifiable explanation on the technique and methods you think are used. It is not enough to just say: "you can use your toes to send signals to the motion detector in the phone. Little wiggles will do it".

I'm not sure what you think is implausible about the method given in the article - maybe clarify? It seems pretty plausible to me. As for verifiable, they told Ivanov to remove his shoes, and he refused point blank to do so, even in the face of a forfeit - I'm not aware of any other realistic reasons as to why he would do so, unless he was afraid of what they would find.

Yeah, his socks really smell so hard. He wouldn't break his reputation with the ladies for a mere $5000.

Card sharks and pool hustlers can get their fingers broken.  Perhaps Ivanov should get his toes broken.

loool there we go - we have all this evidence "beyond reasonable doubt", but ivanov still never came close to admitting, so we'll see more of ivanov apologists for a while and, uh, whatever. :D

If only that would be an Armstrong-like-cheating. Just engines instead of drugs.  

Maybe Ivanov had a terrible foot disease and that is why he was always squirming with his feet and would not show his feet to the inspectors?