Chess men believe DP cons on the boards
Atreyo Mukhopadhyay
Kolkata, January 2, 2007
Along with success, the game in the country is courting controversies. Close on the heels of a 10-year ban slapped on Umakant Mishra for using unfair means of communication during games, a similar case has surfaced.
The player at the centre of this storm is Diwakar Prasad Singh whose meteoric rise has taken players by surprise. They think that the 30-year-old from Jharkhand is using some undetected device to communicate with someone during games to receive instructions. Top players have found something suspicious in his ascendancy, which had earned him a slot in the Indian team for the Chess Olympiad in Turin last year, and the Chess Player’ Association of India (CPAI) has lodged a complaint against Singh with the All India Chess Federation (AICF).
The AICF has constituted a three-man investigation team headed by RM Dongre, one of its vice-presidents. Dongre said a report is expected in two-three months. “It’s a very serious allegation and strict action will be taken if Singh is found guilty. We will speak to him and other players and also seek the help of computer specialists if needed,” Dongre added.
Singh, whose Elo rating jumped from mid-2200 in October 2004 to 2523 in the latest ranking list released on Monday, said his performance would do the talking. “It’s an attempt to malign me by those who are jealous of my progress. I am ready to undergo every test they want me to. This must end if I come clean.”
….The CPAI president, GM Dibyendu Barua, said there were reasons to be suspicious about Singh’s rise. “We have analysed about 20 of his games and in most cases his moves were exactly what the computer would suggest. The best of our players can do that in one or two moves out of 100. It was almost cent per cent in his case.”
Barua felt Singh was using some device to receive external inputs though he couldn’t say what it was.
Here is the full article. 
They’re going after everybody.
McCarthyism is making a comeback, this time in the chess world. They really need to develope some kind of system to identify and then handle cheaters, instead of going off hunches.
Yeah new stuff going on: FIDE working on a scan of all players before a tournament (also inspired by the Topelov/Kramnink match recently) plus some are talking about introducing doping tests to avoid players taking too many mental steroids, whatever they are.
Pax
HorizonExplorer
Singh, whose Elo rating jumped from mid-2200 in October 2004 to 2523 in the latest ranking list released on Monday
I tend to trust people and I tend to believe they are not cheating. I think this rise is certainly possible. That is over a 2 year period. I think Magnus Carlsen has risen more elo points then that over the same length of time.
If my memory is correct, I think Magnus was rising about 200 points per year. He will of course now have to slow down since there is no more room above him.
I would think one could test Singh’s chess ability by sitting him in a room and presenting him with some chess problems to solve and see how he does. the puzzles should not be too hard and he should not have to get them perfect. But since they would come from random positions he would not be able to set up a computer to work the problems.
Another way would be to sit him down at random positions against another player. but this is tough also.
You have to be careful because these methods could be used to abuse the honest player. Maybe FIDE needs to set up tests that players have to pass to advance.
yes that only implies about 75 points per year. A hard working player should be able to do that.
Just getting better in a short period of time isn’t proof of cheating.
Matching of moves with the computer isn’t really a useful observation – many strong players can predict the best line of play and in forcing lines, they completely mirror the computer. (or rather the computer agrees with their analysis)
Strength of play could be tested in some other practical way – speed play although that seems to be true mostly with the to players, or another method not yet mentionned – have him hand write annotations on several games in a test setting – the strong players would find improvements and we’ll see how strong he really is.
“…The CPAI president, GM Dibyendu Barua, said there were reasons to be suspicious about Singh’s rise. ‘We have analysed about 20 of his games and in most cases his moves were exactly what the computer would suggest. The best of our players can do that in one or two moves out of 100. It was almost cent per cent in his case.”
This is an ABSURD statement! MOST of a +2200 player’s moves will match a computer’s top selections.
Even a total novice would match a computer more than once or twice per 100 moves — that’s far less than one move per game!
I still hold out hope that it was a misquote or bad translation. If it is not, how could such an idiotic and inflammatory comment, even if it’s from the head of the CPAI, go unchallenged?
You can soon discover a cheater by analysing the game with your oppennt in post mortem. He will not have computer assistance to help fathom why he played a particular move. His rival would soon discover if he was cheatring or using computer assistance