Carl Ja­cobs

A brief­case and a pen ap­par­ent­ly held the se­cret of Sergey Kli­men­tiev's re­mark­able suc­cess. The 42-year-old chess play­er, rat­ed 1678, be­came the fo­cus of at­ten­tion at the re­cent Mikhail Botvin­nik Memo­r­i­al tour­na­ment in St Pe­ters­burg when he be­gan chop­ping down a num­ber of FIDE Mas­ter lev­el play­ers in­clud­ing IM Alexsej Lanin. In­evitably, both tour­na­ment or­gan­is­ers and play­ers them­selves grew sus­pi­cious of Kli­men­tiev's ex­cep­tion­al per­for­mance. Af­ter all, this was not the case of some su­per-tal­ent­ed young­ster en­ter­ing im­pres­sive­ly up­on the in­ter­na­tion­al chess scene.

What, then, could ac­count for this vet­er­an jour­ney­man play­ing way above his rat­ed com­pe­tence? What made the sit­u­a­tion even more mys­te­ri­ous was that Kli­men­tiev could not show or re­call the moves he had played af­ter each of his win­ning games. Ac­cord­ing to both or­gan­is­ers and play­ers, Kli­men­tiev did not even know the names of the open­ings he played! Sus­pi­cious tour­na­ment ar­biters be­gan their in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­to the Russ­ian chess play­er's per­for­mance by run­ning his first game-he played Black-through the Blun­der Çheck func­tion of the Fritz 12 en­gine. The test in­di­cat­ed that Fritz, the lead­ing chess com­put­er pro­gramme, de­vi­at­ed from the text moves made by Black on­ly six times in the 66-move game.

Now, say tour­na­ment au­thor­i­ties, this does not in it­self "rep­re­sent ir­refutable proof that an en­gine was used." The fact is that some­times very strong play­ers will play an en­tire game "where most of the moves meet with the full ap­proval of chess en­gines." But Kli­men­tiev was cer­tain­ly not in that elite com­pa­ny. Af­ter six rounds of play, even the Russ­ian news site Why Chess no­ticed "some­thing fishy at the Botvin­nik Open". At that point, the ar­biters re­fused to al­low him to bring along his brief­case to the ta­ble or to use the pen he had used so far in the con­test. In ad­di­tion, he had to play on stage where spec­ta­tor ac­cess was re­strict­ed. The re­sult: Kli­men­tiev lost all three of his re­main­ing games, show­ing a sud­den and marked de­pre­ci­a­tion in skill. It seems odd to Dou­ble Rooks that, in the cir­cum­stances, the ar­biters did not see the need to ex­am­ine his brief­case or his pen for some elec­tron­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion de­vice. The fact is this kind of cheat­ing is be­com­ing more so­phis­ti­cat­ed and more fre­quent es­pe­cial­ly in high-prize open tour­na­ments.

Or­gan­is­ers by now should be far more alert. In fact, it seems a fail­ure of tour­na­ment su­per­vi­sors not to be­come sus­pi­cious of Kli­men­tiev's in­ex­plic­a­ble suc­cess in at least two pre­vi­ous in­ter­na­tion­al con­tests. In White Knights 2011, with a rat­ing of 1698, he scored six out of nine for a tenth place fin­ish, even though sev­en out of his nine op­po­nents were rat­ed more than 400 points above him. In Pet­ro­grad Side 2011, he end­ed up ty­ing for first place with a 7/9 score, even though eight of nine op­po­nents had rat­ings more than 400 points above him. Erik Kauko­nen of Chica­go, USA, who point­ed out these two "anom­alies" to Çhess­base, not­ed that in just two tour­na­ments Kli­men­tiev in­creased his ILO stand­ing by 171 points and scored a re­mark­able 13/18 against 15 op­po­nents who were rat­ed more than 400 points above him.

It seems un­for­tu­nate to Dou­ble Rooks that this tour­na­ment, part of the In­ter­na­tion­al Chess Fes­ti­val cel­e­brat­ing the 100th an­niver­sary of ex- world cham­pi­on Mikhail Botvin­nik, should be marred by this un­savoury in­ci­dent. The event may well be re­mem­bered as much for Kli­men­tiev's "feat" as for the per­for­mance of the ac­tu­al win­ners, GM Khis­mat­ullin De­nis, GM Alek­san­drov Alek­sei and GM Ponkra­tov Pavel, all on sev­en points. An old­er gen­er­a­tion of chess play­ers will be pleased with this memo­r­i­al fes­ti­val for Botvin­nik who dom­i­nat­ed the post war years, hold­ing the world cham­pi­onship from 1948 to 1963 with the ex­cep­tion of two one-year in­ter­ludes when he lost and re­gained the ti­tle against Smyslov and Tal.

Con­sid­ered great enough to rank with Ca­pa­blan­ca and &Ar­ing;lekhine, Botvin­nik was an in­com­pa­ra­ble vir­tu­oso in con­trolled po­si­tion­al play and his games still pro­vide great de­light and in­struc­tion for play­ers of all ages. An elec­tri­cal en­gi­neer by pro­fes­sion, he was al­so a mov­ing fig­ure in the Russ­ian School of Chess and ac­tive in the ear­ly de­vel­op­ment of com­put­er chess pro­gramme.