FIDE ratings: Causa Rausis

Looking at the last FIDE rating list I noticed some 58 year old guy, who I never heard of, in the top 100 named Igors Rausis. Inspecting his profile you can see that he is unbeaten since over 100 games... but his opposition consists mainly of players that are rated 400 points below him. He is soon to break the 2700 barrier.. no one can stop him hahaha.

I think FIDE should do something about stuff like that.. the 400 rating difference boundary gives a minimum gain of 0.8 rating points per win which allows nonsense like this to happen and there will always be someone found to abuse this. IMO they should set it to like 600 or 650 (or whatever the correct number is) which gives a minimum gain of 0.1 points..

Emil Sutovsky, Director General of FIDE, just reported that Rausis has been busted for cheating. He was under suspicion and has been caught at a tournament in Strasbourg France. The French police are investigating.

The FIDE fair play team led by IM Kenneth Regan, has apparently done a statistical analysis of Rausis’ games and alerted the arbiters to check him.

Police?? I'm not sure there is any criminal law against cheating in chess???

Heh funny, before the article there was only one reply by some guy who tried to defend him. Mysteriously it disappeared.

I doubt Rausis will get arrested because of this, probably will just get a temporary ban if found guilty. More important that they will hopefully take steps to fix this 400 rating gap problem while they are at it.

There is money in winning chess tournaments. If Rausis got a terrible defense lawyer then he could be done for fraud.

Hmmm, this is why IMO chess is a sport.

This is exactly the danger that Maxim Dlugy warned about when they caught that Bulgarian player. The real problem will come when a 2550 player starts doing it, because s/he will be strong enough to understand when to pretend to think over critical decisions (which an engine comes up with a solution for in a matter of a few seconds). I did think it very odd that Rausis had started improving in this manner at such a late stage of his career. Sad that the reason seems to have been cheating.

Sutovsky has said that while the decision on the penalty is up to the ethics committee, he supports a strong punishment.

Yes, I noticed that too!

 Hey, it's France. Coming to a country near u soon.

There was a case in Germany in 1999, when an E1900 player cheated at the Böblingen Open and won something like 1600 DM. He was reported to the police for fraud, although the case was dismissed in the end because it was considered too difficult to prove. The evidence was just circumstantial, including having played the first engine line indicated by Fritz virtually all the time in most of his games, and announcing a mate in 8 against a GM.

Take his GM title away from him for starters, I hate people that cheat!

Or introduce a new title for such players, and change his title to a TM aka Toilet Master.