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A cheating scandal has rocked the world of grandmaster chess. It involves accomplices and text messaging. Anchor Lisa Mullins finds out the details from Henry Samuel, a reporter for The Daily Telegraph in Paris. Download MP3

• French Chess Federation Accuses Its Own Players of Cheating

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Lisa Mullins : A different kind of scandal is brewing in France.  The French Chess Federation has suspended three senior players for cheating.  The alleged cheating involved text messages. Henry Samuel has written about the scandal for The Daily Telegraph in Paris.  He says one of the accused, 20 year old Sebastian Feller had been the bright hope for French chess.

Henry Samuel: He was an international Grand Master at the age of 16.  He’s the fifth top player in France, and he’s the number five junior player in the world.  And he was taking part, last September in the Chess Olympiad in Russia; and he played a series of games and he actually ended up winning quite a few of them.  And he was been accused of, and found guilty by the French Federation of cheating in a scandal that involved him, his teen captain, who was present in Russia, and an assistant, another Grand Master who was back in France watching the game via internet.

Mullins : How did it work?

Samuel: So, if you can picture the scene, Sebastian Feller is sitting playing his game.  His colleague is following in real-time via internet the game in France.  He logs all the moves into a very powerful chess computer that gives the suggested best move.  Then, his colleague text messages the suggested move to the French team captain who’s in the room in Russia with Sebastian. Then this is the clever part, the team captain then walks up to a particular player in the room by a particular player and each table and player has been given a pre-selected number; each one represents basically a square on the chess board.  So, all Sebastian has to do is look up, see where his captain has moved to in the room, and he knows the best way he should move his piece.

Mullins : Now, didn’t anybody notice that one of Sebastian’s associates was moving around when it came time for Sebastian to move a chess piece?

Samuel : Well, that’s a good question, afraid I wasn’t present in the room, but all I can say is chess games, they’re quite a lot of time between each move, often, and so nobody seemed to pick up on it anyway during the competition.  And that’s actually one of the arguments of defense of Sebastian Feller and his associates.

Mullins : That nobody caught them then, they caught them later.  How did they figure this out?

Samuel : Well, that’s apparently where they weren’t quite so clever because according to the French Federation, its vice president stumbled across a text message sent to the Grand Master who was in France, who was watching the game and sending the suggested moves.  And that was because his mobile phone actually belonged to the Federation…it was a phone…And it was in the vice president’s name and so she just kind of looked at it for one second and saw it had a message.  And the message said, ‘Hurry up and send us some moves.’  So she was a bit confused.  She was obviously suspicious.  She was able to access the itemized phone bill of this man because it was in her name.  She saw that he had received 180 text messages in the space of the competition and of course, she thought there’s something very, very strange going on here.

Mullins : I wonder how many moves there are in the competition anyway and what percent actually came from the text messages from this guy in France.

Samuel : We do know because every move that Sebastian Feller made or at least many of the moves that he made were the first choice of this powerful chess computer called Firebird.

Mullins : Has this kind of thing ever happened before in the professional world of chess?

Samuel : There have been many accusations of cheating in chess.  In fact, there have been some suspensions on suspicion of cheating, but nothing quite as explicit and precise as this.  And certainly, never has a national federation denounced some of its own member for cheating as is the case here.

Mullins : Henry Samuel has been covering the story for The Daily Telegraph in Paris, the story of the cheating scandal in of all things, chess.  Henry, thank you.

Samuel: Thanks.

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