Commentary: Games that tolerate cheating gamble with their future

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. It published its investigation after Magnus Carlsen, world chess champion, accused Niemann of cheating when the latter beat him at an in-person tournament.

Dishonourable conduct is also common in sports. Two fishers competing at a contest in Ohio for a $29,000 prize were accused last week of cheating and surrounded by angry rivals.

“We’ve got weights in fish. Get out of here!” shouted the judge, proclaiming they had made their catch seem heavier by stuffing it with lead weights and fish fillets.

But technology has expanded the options for bending the rules. Not only has it made cheating easier in games from Fortnite to poker, but it has blurred the lines between rule-breaking and creative hacking. When computers can offer invaluable help to humans with anything from training for games to suggesting moves during them, it is dangerously seductive.

This makes rule-breaking