What's worse: cheating or false accusations?
Last year's story about a Dutch chess player who was studying his position with PocketFritz during an official game, quickly became known all over the world. Cheating should be banned as much as possible - everone agrees on that. But what to do when an innocent girl is falsely accused of cheating? Isn't that equally bad? It happened last week at the Vandoeuvre Open.The Hungarian chess player Anna Rudolf (2273) started the open tournament in Nancy, France, with 4 out of 4, beating GM Christian Bauer and IM Cyril Marzolo along the way. Great, of course, until you start to notice that some participants don't believe that you're playing the tournament of your life. Rudolf was openly accused of cheating. Participant Marie Boyarchenko wrote:"Right after the third round the Latvian chess player Oleg Krivonosov directly accused Anna Rudolf of using Fritz. He did not provide any logical explanation of his words, nor he brought any proof of his claims. However, the next day he came back with support - Oleg Lazarev and Ilmars Starostits - and all of them accused Anna Rudolf of using... Rybka. The three players claimed that Anna was going too much to the bathroom and that her bag had a secret internet connection. To be more precise, they said that "the secret internet connection was transmitting the best moves with the help of Anna's lip balm."Inevitable memories of the Topalov-Kramnik match rise. The parallel with Danailov & Topalov's accusations at the address of Kramnik is of course the lack of evidence, and in this case it's better to keep quiet.At first, Rudolf managed to deal with this nonsense quite well, as we look at her results:[TABLE=96]But before the last round, it was almost impossible for her to play a decent game because of her opponent's behaviour. Boyarchenko continues:
"As Anna Rudolf had to play against the Latvian Starostits, he asked the arbiter to control her bag and to confiscate it. Plus she was no more allowed to use her lips balm, nor to go out of the playing hall without the permission of the arbiter. It is clear that Anna was morally destroyed, especially when Starostits refused to shake hands with her. And still she prooved during the whole game that she played solid and beautiful chess, even when she lost."Chessdom did some excellent journalism this week around this story. In an interview Rudolf said:
Yes, ridiculous indeed. I usually went away from the board when it wasn't my turn to move: I like to go out to the fresh air and also to wash my face. Moreover, I played most of my games on the stage, broadcasted, so I didn't have to sit at the board to see my position. And yes, the lip balm was always with me. Kids, beware, Rybka is in it!Rudolf will surely survive all this, because she scored both a WGM and a IM norm at the tournament, but the story probably doesn't end here. The Latvian players already announced they will continue to accuse Anna Rudolf at the coming open tournament in Cappelle la Grande. So Anna already cheated before the tournament has started...Links:[/lang_nl]
Peter Doggers joined a chess club a month before turning 15 and still plays for it. He used to be an active tournament player and holds two IM norms. Peter has a Master of Arts degree in Dutch Language & Literature. He briefly worked at New in Chess, then as a Dutch teacher and then in a project for improving safety and security in Amsterdam schools. Between 2007 and 2013 Peter was running ChessVibes, a major source for chess news and videos acquired by Chess.com in October 2013. As our Director News & Events, Peter writes many of our news reports. In the summer of 2022, The Guardian’s Leonard Barden described him as “widely regarded as the world’s best chess journalist.”
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