You don’t generally think of the old fishing hole as a place to cheat, and it’s unusual to see any cheater get indicted, but it happened recently when authorities charged two fishermen in the Lake Erie Walleye Trail tournament. With more than $28,000 in prize money at stake, an investigation revealed lead weights and fish fillets stuffed into the stomachs of fish caught by the two, meant to increase the weight of their catches.
“I take all crime very seriously, and I believe what these two individuals attempted to do was not only dishonorable but also criminal,” Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael C. O’Malley said in a news release.
This was one of several high-profile cheating incidents this month. Cheating was alleged in a poker game — nothing new there, considering how poker and cheating have always gone together. But this occurred in a popular California YouTube poker game. One top player accused another of cheating when she called an all-in bet in a game holding cards that anyone else would have folded. Did she know her opponent’s hand? Details are still sketchy, and although she denied the charges, she returned $135,000 in chips to settle the matter. Suspicions remain high.
A claim of cheating also arose in the rarefied world of high-level chess when a low-ranked young grandmaster beat the No. 1 player in the world in a live-board match, an almost unimaginable occurrence. The top player had little doubt cheating was involved, even though it was not obvious how it was accomplished. What made it more suspicious was that the young player had admitted to past cheating in online tournaments and had been banned for a time in 2020.
None of this is new. As long as there has been competition, there has been cheating. Consider the “innocent” 1950s. Amid Elvis, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Sputnik ran a deep undercurrent of cheating.