The difficulty of players who aren't check mates

CATHERINE MASTERS finds out why chess has never been a gentleman's game.

Road rage is relatively new, but chess rage has been around as long as queens have been able to outmanoeuvre kings on the board.

To the non-chess groupie it might come as a surprise that chess, like the supposedly gentleman's sport of cricket, has its share of bad losers.

Yet chess is as competitive as any sport and the one thing on the mind of the often (but not always) brainy player is winning - with some employing just-not-cricket tactics to do so.

These range from the petty and annoying, such as finger tapping to distract the opponent, to outrageous, like tipping the board over.

In internet chess, where opponents play online and unsupervised, out-and-out cheating is becoming a real problem.

New Zealand chess players say most of them are good sports, but because of the temperamental nature of those who play the game, especially at higher levels, sometimes the unwritten rules of etiquette are broken.

It happened in Christchurch on New Year' Eve when New Zealand Chess Federation president Bob Smith accused his national championship opponent, federation vice-president Hilton Bennett, of cheating.

Not in those words exactly, but chess players reckon saying, "I've been playing Fritz" is the same thing.

Fritz is a clever computer program, and Mr Smith indicated his opponent might have taken advantage of an unscheduled coffee break to use it to analyse the positions as left during their game.

He was expelled from the championship but agreed to an appeal committee's desire for him to say sorry, and was let back in.

The Weekend Herald has been unable to contact Mr Smith, who is said to be lying low from the media, or Mr Hilton. But it did speak to Mr Smith's wife, Vivian Smith, and other chess fans.

Mrs Smith said her husband - a chess master - had been rattled by an interruption caused by a sudden band practice in the middle of his game with Mr Hilton.

Players were sent for a 20-minute coffee break, which is also unheard of, and when they returned Mr Smith, who had been winning, lost the game.

"He stormed off, saying I'm not going to sign the scoresheet, I've been playing Fritz ... That was all, basically," said Mrs Smith.

But she said her husband never believed his opponent was cheating and was letting off steam.

"It's just he takes all his games so seriously."

Martin Dreyer, a member of the federation, is writing a book about these sorts of incidents, examples of which he says have littered chess games in his 20 years as a player.

"A lot of chess players are in their own sort of world and they totally focus on playing chess and nothing else seems to matter."

Mr Dreyer said the rise of computer technology had affected the game. At the recent world championships, players were searched and had to go through metal detectors, and in New Zealand a few years ago someone was caught using a computer in a tournament.

Mr Dreyer said that although Mr Smith did wrong, "very poor organising" also contributed to the incident, because unscheduled breaks should not happen.

He said Mr Smith suffered as a result - he lost the game. If there had not been a break, he quite likely would not have.

Chess was not full of sore losers.

Players came from all walks of life, but the stronger players were often more volatile.

"There is a small correlation, I guess, between chess and intelligence," said Mr Dreyer.

Is it a gentleman's sport?

"I can't think of too many sports that are gentleman's sports ... I'd describe it as the making of a work of art from a piece of science."

But if New Zealand's chess reputation has been slightly tarnished, take a look at the behaviour of some of the big names in the crazy world of chess.

At the 1978 World Championships, challenger Victor Korchnoi wanted to use his own chair but champion Anatoly Karpov believed it might conceal devices which could help Korchnoi cheat.

The chair was pulled apart and x-rayed before being cleared. (Karpov later had a go at Korchnoi during a match for "swivelling".)

In the same championship Karpov was delivered yoghurt during a match, prompting Korchnoi's camp to protest that a coded message could have been contained in the dairy food.