If you can’t win in the conventional manner why take to cheating unless this is the one and only way you think you can win?
Is this how your parents brought you up so as to disgrace the Family name during International Chess Festival of Imperia, where he was ranked 51,366 in the world.
Sort of a “heads-up” to the organizers when he defeated rivals that some say were better than him in the early stages of the event reaching the eighth and penultimate round of the Festival.
The match referee for the tournament held in Liguria, Northern Italy was Jean Coqueraut later told the La Stampa newspaper that “he began to suspect something was wrong early on in the competition.
“In chess, performances like that are impossible and personally I didn’t think he was a genius, I knew he had to be a cheat.”
He continued “I kept on looking at him and he was always sitting down, he never got up and that alone was very strange; we are taking about hours and hours of playing. But most suspicious of all, he always had his arms folded with his thumb under his armpit. He never took it out.”
The referee Jean Coqueraut mentioned that he was also “batting his eyelids in the most unnatural way and then I understood what he was doing -he was deciphering signals in Morse code.”
He was asked to empty his pockets, but nothing was found, but when he was asked to open his shirt, he simply refused to comply to the request.
Eventually the tournament organisers used the best guide and asked him to pass through a metal detector and an extremely sophisticated pendant was found under his shirt hanging around his neck.
After an inspection it was found that the pendant concealed a tiny video camera in addition to several wires attached to his body and a 4cm box under his armpit and to the shock of no one he (Ricciardi) said that they were his good luck charms.
The possibility is there that the camera transmitted the chess game in real time to an accomplice or sophisticated computer, which then suggested possible game moves for him all done through a series of signals received in the box under his arm.
The referee mentioned that he constantly drank from a glass of water and wiped his face with a handkerchief so as to conceal the pendant hanging around his neck.
An investigation has been launched and the Italian Chess Federation is deciding whether to press charges for sports fraud.
While this seldom happens in this sport, technology seems to be taking over the world and cheating tends to be the normal way in which to win any sport, not just chess.
Earlier this year Georgian Grandmaster Gaioz Nigalidze was expelled from the Dubai Open after being caught pretending to be using his phone.
Following a complaint Nigalidze was challenged and the tournament organisers found that he had stored a mobile phone in a cubicle, behind the pan and covered in toilet paper.
The device was found to be logged into his social networking account and had one of his games being analysed by a smartphone chess app.
Who say’s cheaters always win?
