An Update on the Bundesliga Cheating Story
The accused, GM Falko Bindrich, has responded to the accusations that he cheated during last weekend's opening matches in the Bundesliga. Readers can (and, obviously, will) make up their own minds about this; I'll offer just three comments.
First, a player's privacy concerns are a legitimate factor, and if cell phones aren't banned from the premises there has to be some sort of accommodation. (All the more so for club players in ordinary weekend Swisses, whose livelihood doesn't come from chess and must attend to the cares of everyday life.)
Second, contrary to Bindrich's protestations about possible jeopardy to his business and personal life, perhaps all the arbiter needs to do is check the chess apps. (I suppose someone could have texted him moves, if the games were transmitted live over the internet, but one would assume Bindrich would have deleted them immediately.)
Third, while Bindrich downplays the quality of his play against Tregubov, the annotators for the Chess Evolution Weekly Newsletter (either Arkadij Naiditsch, Csaba Balogh and/or Kamil Miton - all quite strong GMs; the former over 2700) look at that game from move 41 on and find White's play extremely impressive.
Reader Comments (2)
"perhaps all the arbiter needs to do is check the chess apps"
Well, this wouldn't be enough to make him demonstrably innocent - not just because of possible deleted text messages (yes the games were transmitted live) but he could also have opening notes somewhere on his smartphone. They might be hidden in a folder, and saved with a filename to make them look like a private or business but non-chessic document. They could even be part of an otherwise unrelated document (p. 54 in a report with 227 pages). Therefore, taking a smartphone to the restroom isn't just suspicious but forbidden and would have been enough to forfeit him.
But it might take hours for the arbiter to check everything on Bindrich's phone, so he certainly would have taken just a quick look. If the arbiter then found a smoking gun, Bindrich would be in trouble. If not, he still had to give his smartphone to the team captain for the rest of the game. Bindrich's opponent was willing to continue the game under such conditions - the game was still in the opening phase, the position was balanced, so even if Bindrich already cheated it didn't (yet) affect the result of the game.
[DM: I was assuming in-game help rather than opening notes, especially given the discussion of the Tregubov game. But maybe in the second game the opening was at issue.]
I'm not persuaded by Bindrich's protestations. Phone use is forbidden during the game. Indeed, if it rings it's a forfeit - so why have it on your person at all? I think the Bundesliga regulations are quite clear and "Nobody informed me" is not a defence.