Hans Niemann was accused of cheating after he beat Norwegian grandmaster Magnus Carlsen last September.
If it’s the same video I saw, it was the ankle guy. And yeah, when it comes to historical cases of chess cheating (almost always at a lower skill level) they’ll either use some form of chess computer that they sneak away to use, or have an accomplice and a one way method of communication.
Another thing to keep in mind is that often times players at this level don’t need to cheat every move, they just need to be given the correct move at an important moment and they’ll be good enough to understand why they are being told to do that.
Ah, yeah~ I actually wasn’t really into chess, but I was intrigued about how it might actually work in practice. Like, perhaps a code taken from chess notation, and then optimized to keep messages to a minimum. Such messages are then composed of bursts of vibration, some longer and less intense, and some short but intense. This is where my mind went to bandwidth, lol! How fast can you alternate “dots” and “dashes” such that they would still remain distinct from one another, and not be perceived as just one long buzz session?
they’ll either use some form of chess computer that they sneak away to use, or have an accomplice and a one way method of communication.
It’s the first case that I thought about when I first heard of this. Kinda like braille, but for butts. And then rather than use your fingers, you clench your butt. That way, one can operate a chess computer while seated in a tournament. At the end of it, I was like “that’s some serious kegel action!”
An accomplice sending the necessary hints/information would be more plausible, I think. And now that I’m thinking about it, electrical impulses (through the skin, like in the small of the back, another sensitive area) might do the trick as well, perhaps going full braille action this time.)
But yeah, I just enjoyed overthinking about something like this. No offense meant to anyone. I’m just like “maybe it’s stupid enough to work?”
I find that the overthinking can be fun, but the most common cheating method is to simply relay the position on the board that contains the piece to move.
For example, let’s say that the best move would be to move a pawn on b4 (same column as White’s left most bishop, in the 4th row) a signal would be transmitted of two short “signals”, a long pause, and then four more short “signals”. Thinking in Morse, this would be “…/…”.
This tells the cheater that the correct move is made by the piece in the second column, fourth row, and thats usually all a top level player will need. They can stop calculating any move that isn’t from that piece, and there’s usually one move that is clearly better from that pieces immediate moves. The difficult part is now finding which follow-up moves are the best and how to punish your opponent for not playing them (which they would have been doing anyways, just with many more possible start points)
This method has been used in the past with a device that will send a non-painful but noticeable electric shock to a player (usually on their thigh), and because these individuals got caught there are now methods in place at top level tournaments to try and prevent external cheating devices from entering the playing hall (ex/ they pat you down to try and feel something rigid on your leg).
Thats where the butt plug theory comes in; it could theoretically pass through a standard metal detector, a security guard isn’t going to check your prostate for cheating devices, and it can still theoretically be used to communicate via 0s and 1s.
My analysis didn’t really go deep (pun unintended) into the details of how the information might be encoded, but taking a cue from what you’d said, position can be encoded into six bits: 000;000 would be a1 (white king’s rook starting position, right?) and h8 would be 111;111 b4 would then be 001;011. Perhaps we can save things into just three bits (there are just seven unique pieces in chess: pawn, rook, knight, white bishop, black bishop, queen, and king) if we just need to communicate which piece is to be moved. Maximally, the accomplice can communicate both the piece and the destination in nine bits, though following this discussion, it seems there’s not much need for it, and it’d introduce complexities that would hamper comprehension (like having to distinguish between the three cases so far: position of the piece to be moved, the piece to be moved, or the piece to be moved and the location of the destination).
As for how to send information (as opposed to receiving), there’s only one signal that would be needed, if the accomplice is watching a live feed of the match: “Help!” which would be a continuous anal clench, or something fanciful as clenching SOS to avoid any random anal clenching to be mistaken for a call for help.
Now, as for a cheating device inside a butt plug not triggering a metal detector, I don’t know for certain, but I’ve got no reason to disbelieve you. If there’s someone that manages to pull it off though (the entire thing, sneaking in a device up their butt and using it to cheat at live chess competitions), I’d love to hear about the details.
