I Have Read About People Cheating At Chess,

but I had to have a double take when I read about one tournament,

photograph Adobe Stock, where a competitor smeared mercury over the board and chess pieces of a rival before the game! Amina Abakarova, a 40-year-old chess player from the Russian Republic of Dagestan, stands accused of trying to poison another female player during a chess tournament in Makhachkala. Surveillance footage from the Dagestan Classical Chess Championship shows the 40-year-old woman spreading the substance later identified as mercury, and it worked! Umayganat Osmanova had begun to experience symptoms like nausea and dizziness just 30 minutes later, 30-year-old Umayganat Osmanova ended up requiring medical assistance and is still recovering from the poisoning attempt. She told Russian reporters that she began feeling bad only a few minutes after taking a seat at the chess table, and believes she would have died if she hadn’t noticed something strange on her chess pieces and on the chess board, “I still feel bad. In the first few minutes, I felt a lack of air and a taste of iron in my mouth. I had to spend about five hours on this board. I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t seen it earlier,”

Osmanova told Russia Today, organizers checked the surveillance camera footage and saw Amina Abakarova tampering with her rival’s chess board. When confronted with the evidence, the 40-year-old woman confessed to trying to poison Umayganat Osmanova with mercury from an old thermometer as a way to “knock her out of the tournament,” admitting that she felt “personal hostility” toward Osmanova. However, she denied wanting to harm her rival, claiming that she only wanted to scare her, Russian media reports that Abakarova now faces a lifetime disqualification, dismissal from work, and criminal prosecution, and there was me thinking chess was such a calm, fair, game to play!