LONDON: In Ian Fleming’s 1955 novel Moonraker, James Bond is enlisted to punish Sir Hugo Drax, a sinister industrialist who cheats at bridge at the fictional Blades club in London.
Bond fixes the cards and crushes Drax with an impossible-looking grand slam: “Thirteen separate lashes whose scars no card player would ever lose.”“Haven’t had a cheating case since the fourteen-eighteen war,” muses the club’s chair.
If so, Blades either has a remarkable code of honour or terrible powers of observation, since international bridge has suffered many real-life cheating scandals, from an Italian team who used foot signals to two German players who coughed in code.Bridge is not the only game prone to cheating.
The online platform Chess.com this week disclosed in a report that the US grandmaster Hans Niemann had “likely cheated” in more than 100 online chess games.