The gamblers behind one of the strangest unsolved cheating mysteries in chess have been revealed

Modern era The story of chess cheating began on a Thursday in July 1993, when a man with shoulder-length braids entered the World Open in Philadelphia and registered as John von Neumann. Both the hair and the name were false.

The real von Neumann was a prominent mathematician and computer scientist who died in 1957. The fake von Neumann had a suspicious buzzing bulge in his pocket, fought a grandmaster to a draw, and then escaped before anyone could figure out his identity.

A Boston Globe columnist called it “one of the strangest cheating episodes in the history of chess.” Chess.com recorded the “Von Neumann Incident” as “the first known case of a potential computer cheater.”

This was decades before chess masters were expelled from tournaments Using smart phonesand the penultimate age The loud anal beads scandal. (Google it, but not in action). It happened years before Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue, in an era when humans still imagined themselves more intelligent than machines. The identity of the man with dreadlocks has remained one of the game’s most enduring mysteries. yet.

I stumbled across the culprits while searching Lucky devilsmy new book about gamblers who use science and technology to win at blackjack, poker, roulette, and, on this occasion, chess. The following excerpt is based on interviews I conducted with concerned gamblers, tournament organizers and participants, as well as contemporary reporting. Where possible, details have been independently verified.

Rob Ritzen is packed Light for the flight from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. It had to. His bag was full of computers, keys, wires and alarms. Sitting next to him on the plane was his best friend John Wayne, known to the entire professional gambling crew as “The Duke,” after his Hollywood namesake.

It was June 1993, just before the start of the World Open Chess Championship, hosted by the City of Brotherly Love. Both Ritzen and Wayne fancied themselves as players. This was how they first met. The Duke posted a leaflet calling for challenges against “John Wayne, chess champion and arm-wrestling champion.” Ritzen complied and found himself sitting across from a black ex-soldier with a megawatt smile, beginning a relationship built on competitive banter.

However, their real mission was gambling, specifically the high-tech kind. Reitzen, a dyslexic scientist with a mop of curly hair permanently hidden under a baseball cap, makes his living through wearable gadgets. He used a modified Zilog Z80 microprocessor, about the size of a pack of cards, to process turn odds in blackjack, and then developed a similar device to do the same thing in poker rooms in California. For a while, Ritzen and Wayne used a system with a small camera inside a player’s belt buckle. Outside, in a truck with a side-mounted communications dish, team members can pause its footage, zoom in, and see the blackjack dealer’s hidden card for a split second as it is placed face-down on the felt. Was he cheating? probably. But profits spoke louder than any ethical doubts they might have.

Since such machines are prohibited in casinos, they had to be carefully hidden. Reitzen and his players sent information to computers using toe switches built into their shoes and received instructions from a vibration box hidden in their crotch.

Upon arriving in Philadelphia, the Duke wired himself and put on a pair of headphones to secure his wig. He was wearing one of their blackjack wizards, modified to communicate with Reitzen, who was standing out of sight in front of a group of observers in their hotel room running his homemade chess program. The two friends looked at each other, and Ritzen smiled. This was their goal towards chess immortality.

On the entry form, Wayne wrote the name John von Neumann. “As in…the father of game theory?” asked a skeptical official. Wayne nodded. The official raised an eyebrow, then put Wayne into the lottery.