Winning by Rook or by Crook
By Paul Hoffman
Sunday, November 18, 2007; Page B02
Chess, I'd always thought, is an ennobling cerebral contest between two determined
players armed only with their intellect and free of all drugs, except perhaps
caffeine. So you can understand my chagrin when Azerbaijani adults attending
the European Union children's championship last month accused the 8-year-old
Russian winner of receiving illicit help from a third party during the game.
Tournament organizers ultimately rejected the allegations and berated the adults
for smearing the child's good name.
But his was not the only indignity the royal game endured recently. The gentlemen's-club
respectability that chess once enjoyed was flushed away last autumn at the 2006
World Chess Championship when Bulgarian contender Veselin Topalov accused the
reigning champion, Vladimir Kramnik, of making a suspicious 50 trips to the
bathroom during a single game. The implication: that Kramnik was secretly consulting
chess-playing software on a Palm Pilot or talking on his cellphone to a confederate
armed with a chess computer. Officials hastily boarded up his private loo. "I
had to go to the bathroom urgently," Kramnik said later. "I asked
the arbiter to open my toilet. He just shrugged and offered me an empty coffee
cup."
The charges looked too much like an underhanded attempt by Topalov to rattle
the taciturn Kramnik, who was forced to explain his hydration and evacuation
habits to a prying press corps, and the International Chess Federation ultimately
decided that they were spurious. Nonetheless, organizers of future tournaments
are now debating whether they should herd grandmasters -- the black belts of
the chessboard -- through metal detectors and all but strip-search them before
a match. Already, playing halls have been bombarded with electromagnetic signals
to jam secret wireless communications.
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