3 min readFeb 26, 2026 10:34 PM IST A day after world champion D Gukesh spoke about cheating in chess and opined that the issue was “being made bigger than it actually is”, Fabiano Caruana has also weighed in on the issue. The American grandmaster said that he had “never seen it happen in tournaments that he had played in”.
“Over-the-board cheating—it’s not really talked about too often, right? Because usually the focus is on the potential for online cheating, which must be a bigger problem, in terms of volume, because it’s just easier. So, I don’t know what the level of cheating is over the board versus online, but whatever it is, there must be more online because it’s easier. Just logically, there has to be more,” Caruana said on his C Squared Podcast.
While comparing online cheating with cheating in over-the-board events, Caruana pointed out how in online chess, instances of wrongdoing were “swept under the rug” with the perpetrators never outed openly but banned secretly.
“But the question is: how much is there over the board? There’s more money in over-the-board chess; there’s more at stake. The ratings are more important when you look at the FIDE ratings. When there’s a big over-the-board cheating scandal, players get banned. They get kicked out of chess. We rarely see a GM get caught cheating over the board—maybe once every few years—and then that person is basically banned from chess, sometimes coming back or sometimes not at all,” Caruana added.
“Meanwhile online cheating is just swept under the rug. I mean, they find the person, they quietly make sure that nobody finds out who they are. For years, that’s been the case. I don’t think it’s a good system, but maybe that’s how they’ve tried to avoid potential legal action. That’s also speculation on my part. I don’t know why they would do it; they would probably say they did it because they don’t want to damage careers, but obviously, if someone’s cheating, you kind of damage your own career that way.”
Caruana said that the most high-profile instances of cheating in chess in recent years had happened in over the board events while pointing at cases like the ones involving Sébastien Feller (who was caught cheating while playing for the French team at the 2010 Chess Olympiad) and Kirill Shevchenko (banned for cheating during the 2024 Spanish Team Championship).
“Does it happen over the board? I mean, probably in some measure, but I don’t know because I’ve personally never seen it happen in my own tournaments. I’ve heard of these stories—Feller and Shevchenko and so on—and also non-GMs, right? We’ve all heard these stories, but I’ve never seen it in a tournament that I’ve played in firsthand. I’ve never felt that a player was cheating against me over the board.”
Fabiano Caruana on cheating in chess: ‘Swept under rug in online events… never seen it in over-the-board events’ | Chess News
Written by Hemant Gowda
February 26, 2026
