Soviet Cheating in FIDE Competition: 1952 Stockholm Interzonal

Checkers and draughts are not the same game.

99.9% of human beings are basically corrupt. Whether they are breaking into you home, lying, stampeding and manipulating their way through their careers, deceiving and abusing their partners, avoiding taxes, cheating their colleagues in sports, manipulating chess events etc. etc. The list is long.

As long as there is a financial, Geo-political, religious, personal or whatever incentive they WILL go for it. Only very few don't.

That is, unfortunately, the unavoidable nature of the beast.

Nobody here cares about those "sports". I also resent your anti-Russian slur. 

Just look at my post, try and read it properly and think through it. The Soviets did not cheat, and even Fischer didn't use that term in his wildest ravings (or at least very rarely).  

You are completely wrong in every way and you are failing to grasp an absolutely inherent part of competitive activity.  

The most popular forms are English draughts, also called American checkers, played on an 8×8 checkerboard; Russian draughts, also played on an 8×8; and international draughts, played on a 10×10 board. There are many other variants played on an 8×8, and Canadian checkers is played on a 12×12 board.

I never knew there were so many variants.

@Uhohspaghettio ... what slur? Russian judges?

Kotov's performance is one of the great performances of all time. Take a look at the games themselves. The 5 best players in the tournament finished in the top 5.

Kotov had a brilliant tournament - no doubt about that. Against non-Soviets he lost no game, and drew only against Ludek Pachman of Czechoslovakia and Herman Steiner of the US (in the last round).

This issue regarding Averbakh, Stahlberg, Szabo, and Gligorich had to do with the S-B tiebreaks, and effect of the Soviet collusion created. It was not lost on the FIDE members at the time, which is why the additional three players qualified for Zurich.

Furthermore, the Soviet tactics meant that they each played a 16-round tournament, whereas the non-Soviets played at 20-round tournament. Four addition rest days, in a tight schedule, is a huge advantage.

As an interesting comparison with Fischer in 1971, Kotov DID NOT qualify out of the Zonal, which was the 1951 USSR Championship. He actualy had a minus score in the Zonal.

However, as a past-USSR co-champion, and a member of the Sports Committee, he was jumped over three players who finished ahead of him: Flohr, Aronian, and Kopilov.

@JamieDelarosa: can you create a thread (in the "off topic" section,  I fear) about non-chess Fischer?

Details. 

Many of the shortest draws in the tournament involved either Unzicker or Stahlberg. The shortest draw was Stolz-Geller, a 9-mover. Steiner had a 12-move draw. 

Seems like the Soviets weren't the only ones taking quick draws.

In Jamie's universe, FIDE was the puppet of the USSR. And yet, as soon as the five Soviets had qualifed, FIDE ruled that the other three players tied with Averbakh would also be allowed to qualify. Jamie's conspiracy theories get weaker by the thread.

Taking a quick draw, OTB, is different than pre-arranging draws in advance.

In 1952, it was already apparent that the Soviets were experts in collusion. Recall that one reason given by Dr. RRueben Fine for passing up the 1948 World Championship tournament was that he did not want to waste three months "watching Russians throw games to each other."

To save face, over the years, and to avoid becomina complete farce, the FIDE started to limit the numbers of Soviet participants in the qualification competitions, instituted a minimum 30-move rule, abandoned the Candidates tounament in favor of knockout matches, etc. All this was done to limit the effect of collusion ... and no other chess federations outside of the Soviet Union were suspected of these sorts of tactics.

I have no doubt that less-than-honest play occurred when titles, tournament finishes, etc., were on the line. However, these individual instances to not measure up to systematic perversion of the system practiced by the Soviets.

The "tu quoque" logical fallacy you provided is not an excuse for Soviet cheating ... it is rather, an admission. Much like Barry Bonds claiming "everybody else were using steroids."

Jamiedelarosa, do you seriously mean to suggest that FIDE denied many USSR players a fair chance to play in tournaments because of this theoretical loophole in their own system? That's a very serious allegation, to actively discriminate against one nation. I have never heard of a sports organization actively prejudicing against a nation before except in an official way by taking punitive actions against the federation. Throughout history sport has always supposed to stand for inclusion of all nations, even in the worst of times. Players from USSR might even be able to take legal action against such a ploy. Do you have any backup for it?  

Again you cannot call any agreement to a draw cheating unless one player worsened his own position in the tournament and prospects by drawing. That would be cheating.... however it would be very hard to prove it. If any USSR player did this or threw a game for another USSR player then yes they cheated. Any sort of thing like this happen?  

I disagree... " have never heard of a sports organization actively prejudicing against a nation before except in an official way by taking punitive actions against the federation.Throughout history sport has always supposed to stand for inclusion of all nations, even in the worst of times."

It happens all the time...The Olympics limits the number of athletes a country can enter in a single event!!  Is that cheating??? 

There is a general rule that maximum three individual athletes may represent each nation per competition. National Olympic committees may enter a limited number of qualified competitors in each event, and the NOC decides which qualified competitors to select as representatives in each event if more have attained the benchmark than can be entered.

So applied to each country generally, which is very different. I guess it's so you don't have all of one country in a particular final. It sounds unfair to me, I'm reading that there have been calls for it to be dropped. It was not drawn up specifically for one nation based on one occurance.  

@Uhohspaghettio - It is history, my friend. The FIDE did, in fact, place quotas on the maximun numbers of players from any one country. The limiting rule, passed by the FIDE congress in 1959, affected Leonid Stein of the USSR at the 1962 Stockholm Interzonal, in which he tied for the sixth place qualifying spot, but was the fourth-ranked Soviet, behind Geller, Petrosian, and Korchnoi. It affected both Stein and Bronstein placed a clear fifth and sixth in the 1964 Amsterdam Interzonal, but behind Smyslov, Spassky, and Tal. Those two were replaced in the new candidates knockout matches by Ivkov of Yugoslavia, and Portisch of Hungary.

You are correct the limiting rule was not drawn up based on one occurance. It was drawn up because of a pattern of collusion by Soviets in international chess competitions, throughout the 1940s and 1950s.

Please note, The Soviets didn't consider working as a team to be cheating. They knew that even if all the other players got together as a collective, they still wouldn't be able to beat the Soviets.

???

 to cheat:

- act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage.

So, yeah. Cheating.