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Melissa: Last weekend, at a sports fishing tournament in Cleveland, Ohio, known as the Lake Erie Walleye Trail, sports fishermen competed for almost $30,000 in prize money for whoever caught the biggest fish by weight.
Speaker 2: I got to tell you, you got to beat 16-something pounds. 3391, 3391, your new leaders locking it in Team of the Year Champions, round of applause. You got Chase Cominsky, Jake Runyan.
Melissa: But as the winner's fish were being weighed, the tournament directors noticed something fishy.
Speaker 2: We got weights in fish.
Speaker 3: There we go.
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Melissa: Tournament officials cut open the fish to discover the winners' fish stuffed with lead balls and fish filets from other fish. The winning duo, well, they'd previously won more than $300,000 in earlier competitions in Ohio, but they were disqualified for this incident. Law enforcement is now investigating.
In the meantime, the scandal has left the fishing world reeling. Last month, world champion Norwegian Grand Master Magnus Carlsen withdrew from a chess tournament after losing to 19-year-old American grandmaster, Hans Niemann. Two weeks later, during a highly anticipated rematch in an online tournament, this happened.
Speaker 4: Sorry, Alejandra, I just have to interrupt you because the game started, and Magnus has logged off. What has happened?
Speaker 5: Magnus has resigned.
Speaker 4: Magnus has resigned the game against Hans Niemann.
Speaker 5: Yes.
Speaker 4: Wow.
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Melissa: After resigning, Carlsen accused Niemann of cheating and said he was no longer willing to play against him. Here's Niemann in an interview released by the tournament organizers after Carlsen's first withdrawal.
Niemann: I have never cheated in an over-the-board game. Other when I was 12 years old, I have never ever, ever, ever, and I would never do that. That is the worst thing I could ever do, cheat in a tournament with prize money.
Melissa: This week, the online chess platform, chess.com, released a 72-page report, which detailed findings alleging that Niemann likely cheated in over 100 online matches as recently as 2020. The International Chess Federation, the sport's governing body, also recently announced that it will conduct its own investigation.
The poker world is also royally flushed with a controversy of its own. In a super high-stakes poker game, two pros, Garrett Adelstein and Robbi Jade Lew, went heads up on a hand worth over a quarter million dollars.
Speaker 6: Does she have jack four? What?
Speaker 7: Whoa, look at Garrett's face. That is super, super strange. You can see his reaction.
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Robbi JAde Lew: You look like you want to kill me, Garrett.
Melissa: Robbie Jade Lew's unconventional winning hero call, that's a poker move when a player with a weak hand calls a large bluff and wins the pot. Well, it has the poker world wondering if there was foul play involved or if it's just sexism.
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Joining me now to talk about all this is David Mack, senior reporter for BuzzFeed News. David, thanks so much for being with us.
David: Thank you, Melissa. Cheating is the hottest trend of 2022.
Melissa: [laughs] That's wild. That is part of what you write here. Is it a hot new trend, or are we getting better at just seeing the cheating when it's happening?
David: Well, this is what I've been trying to think about. Obviously, there's been this fate of headlines, which you've just touched on, on all these slightly obscure side sports that we've seen a bunch of cheating scandals.
I also think perhaps we're just as a society, right now in this cultural moment, post-pandemic, very attuned to the concept of rules and rule-breaking. We like the idea of consequences. We like the idea of cheaters being exposed. I think where it says something about our appetite as media consumers, that we really are eating these stories up.
Melissa: You call these obscure sports, and I think they are. They certainly are not getting the eyeballs of the NFLs getting on a Sunday afternoon, but boy, some of them are pretty well paid. Isn't there a built-in incentive here when you've got a big cash prize and not a lot of oversight?
David: I think that's right. I don't want to offend any fans of any of these sports, but there is a lot of money on the line, even in the fishing scandal as well. I think we're talking total winnings for the year, a couple of hundred thousand dollars some of these guys are making.
These sports do have their own rules, and they're taking these very seriously as well. I shouldn't downplay that. They are-- All three sports that we've talked about launching investigations of their own. We're seeing law firms being brought in to try to work out what's happened. We're even seeing polygraph testing, which is apparently quite a routine in fishing, as one of the catchall methods to try to prevent cheating, is that winners do routinely have to take lie detector tests.
Melissa: Okay. I totally get how that cheating was happening in the fishing. You make the fish heavier by putting these other things, and that's freaking fascinating. How does one cheat in chess or poker?
David: Listen, you are asking someone who barely understands the rules of each. I think there's something beautifully simple about the fishing scandal. I think in the poker and the chess tournament right now, the key scandal seems to be that no one seems to know exactly what's happened. There's a lot of shadowy intrigue, there's a lot of accusations flying around.
A lot of the allegations are being made simply because it seems so unlikely. You've mentioned the chess.com investigation and the fact that they have basically run computer tests to show that many of his plays were just astounding and couldn't be repeated. This poker hand as well is so audacious that it's bizarre that she won. It shocked everybody in the room. It shocked the announcers, it shocked her opponent.
It also didn't help that afterwards, Robbi Jade Lew said she was confronted by her opponent, Garrett Adelstein, and she said he bullied her, he accused her, but then she also responded by giving the money back. He's arguing that it doesn't look good that as soon as she was confronted on it, she folded, to use the poker metaphor.
Melissa: In the case of Hans Niemann, this idea of how fast, of how good he is, does seem to be related to age, that he's just 19 years old. In the case of poker, it's not only that it's this astounding and audacious win, but an astounding and audacious win by a woman. How should we disentangle this notion of age, experience, gender from this notion that these might be moments of cheating?
David: You look at Magnus Carlsen, who's the world's best player, and this is the man who was beaten. He is a chess icon. He's also a bit of a cultural icon as well. He's been in fashion campaigns. He's a young guy himself. I think chess, in particular, is very open to the idea of young prodigies.
I think what's to surprise people, particularly in this win, was the idea of him being an upstart. That Magnus Carlsen is this established player at this point. He's regarded as probably the best in history. The idea that he was beaten by someone, yes young, but also who doesn't have the same track record behind him raised some red flags, so to speak. He also had obviously allegations in his past, in his youth, Niemann did, about his past cheating online, which he has admitted to two instances, but, of course, this investigation has found potentially as many as 100.
Poker, that's a different thing. We associate that fairly or not with men for the most part. The idea that this is a woman coming in, not only a woman, she's a model actually. She's got a huge social media following. I think there's probably, you're right, accusations of sexism that come into this and the idea that she seems to be, perhaps if a man had made the same audacious bet, we would be looking at that as just a very bold and cocky thing to do.
Melissa: Can you help us to frame this relative to the big major sport cheating scandals, things like the Russian Olympic team doping scandal, maybe even the whole steroid era in baseball? Is this a similar kind of moment, or is this something unique and maybe even pandemic-driven?
David: I think certainly, again, the doping scandals are kind of like the fish scandal. We can understand the simplicity of that. I think these, obviously, we're not talking about doping. It would be hard to imagine a doping scandal in chess. I think what we can imagine here is still the idea of these sports being affected by people, with unknown ways, shadowy ways perhaps of trying to manipulate the system and to game the system.
I think that speaks to something innate in us that's been really pounded into us as a society for the last few years. The idea is in the pandemic, we've all been living by these strict social rules that have guided what you can, and you can't do. For a long time, especially early on in the pandemic, people were really hounded if they broke those rules, and there were social media accounts set up to exposing pandemic cheaters and pandemic rule breakers. I think there's something in us that has been really emphasized the last few years of wanting to expose cheaters.
Also, I think our fascination with these cheating scandals probably speak to a very dark side within us, something I certainly probably have as well. Maybe you do too. Where deep down, as much as I hate those people who cheated when we were at home isolating, and then there were people out at underground parties. As much as I hate these people, I'm kind of jealous of them too. [chuckles]
There's something very freeing in not caring about others. Sounds awful to say out loud, but these people obviously don't care. They want to just go out and have fun. There's something very dark in myself, perhaps, that my therapist and I need to reckon with.
Melissa: [chuckles] Well, I'm a college professor, so I am not down for cheaters, but at least if you're going to cheat, be a good cheater. Don't just stuff lead balls in the fish. I'm going to figure that one out. David Mack is senior reporter for Buzzfeed News. David, thanks so much for taking the time with us today on The Takeaway.
David: Thank you. I would never cheat, Melissa. You have my guarantee as a former college student.
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