French Cheating?

This news has been the subject of a lot of buzz today, though at least so far there are vritually no details to speak of. The story is that the French chess federation has accused three of its own members of cheating at last year's Olympiad in Khanty-Mansiysk, though the only player allegedly involved is 19-year-old GM Sebastian Feller. (The other two individuals supposedly involved are GM Arnaud Hauchard and Cyril Marzolo.)

As of this moment I haven't seen anything detailing the nature of the alleged offense, so readers who know more (as opposed to readers eager to speculate) are invited to supply further information, if any exists. Meanwhile, I'll refer you to the main sources I've seen so far: here, here and here (the latter adds to the bare story, but does by offering hearsay and speculation).

Comments

[Thomas]

I won't claim that I really _know_ more, but I can add a few things:

- The primary source, in French, is obviously the French federation homepage. Next it was mentioned on Jan Gustafsson's blog - as he probably doesn't check the/that federation homepage regularly, I speculate that he heard it from one of Feller's Olympiad teammates playing in Wijk aan Zee (Vachier-Lagrave, Fressinet, Tkachiev). I refrained from mentioning it elsewhere as it's all rather vague, but a bit later it was picked up by others (Chessdom in addition to the links given by Dennis).

- The investigation started Dec. 22nd last year (not mentioned by Dennis but by his sources), one month later the evidence is apparently considered substantial enough to make things public?

- As I know French, I tried to find out more at the france-echecs.com forum: 71 comments as of Jan 22 5:50 Central European time (by now 189 comments, but I am too lazy to read all of them!). They are all puzzled, basically the only hard information is: Hauchard was the French team captain in Khanty-Mansiysk, IM Cyril Marzolo wasn't present in Siberia and is apparently accused of helping from a distance.

- Two rumors on earlier incidents (obviously I cannot verify them, maybe others can?): Feller was already banned for two years at the Playchess server for cheating. "Aro" in the comments on Gusti's site writes that "the accusations fit his own experiences" from the open section in Biel 2010: "A Frenchman who didn't play himself openly analysed the ongoing game [Hauchard-Pelletier] with a laptop in the analysis room, then rushing to the playing hall to tell Hauchard his 'discoveries'. We let the organizers know, and as far as I know the French [Hauchard and his helper?] are no longer welcome in Biel."

[monoceros4]

I'm not sure what's more depressing, the prospect that the cheating accusation is true or that it's false. What's worse, someone using a computer to cheat at top-level chess or someone using a computer to "prove" that any player who makes a strong move is cheating?