Cheat!

I'm not sure whether this violates my rule about not passing comment on news articles on the internet (because everybody does that in their blogs, and I like to be different), but I notice that Evil Eugene Varshavsky (as he's probably known in Philadelphia mind sports circles) has been stripped of his third place and $3000 prize in the US National Sudoku Championship, according to this article. The cool thing is that Eugene was also caught trying to cheat his way to victory in a major chess tournament, also in Philadelphia, a couple of years ago. Which makes me wonder how long it'll take him to expand his sphere of evil operations into memory competitions.

Okay, probably not until the WMC a) moves to Philadelphia and b) has prize money, but still, the US Championship in New York should probably watch out. It's been quite a while since we had a really interesting accusation of cheating in memory competitions and wow, it's ten years now since Yu Zhang's famous performance at the WMC (I wonder what he's doing now?). Of course, maybe everybody's been cheating all the time and they just haven't been caught yet. I suspect some competitors have been using secret techniques to help them memorise cards more easily - converting cards into mental images, visualising them along a journey, that kind of thing. It's disgraceful, and something should be done about it.