Chess Grandmaster Accused of Hiding Phone in Toilet, Using It to Cheat During Championship Game

A Romanian chess grandmaster has been expelled from the 2024 Spanish Team Championship after a locked phone found in a bathroom stall was linked to him.

Kirill Shevchenko raised suspicion after taking extended bathroom breaks in the middle of the national chess championship. After searching the stall he had been using, officials found a locked phone that would've greatly aided Shevchenko if he had been using it to access a computer program, allowing him to cheat in the competition.

22-year-old Shevchenko, who is ranked 69th in the chess world rankings, was linked to the phone through a handwritten note left on the phone.

​​"Don't touch! This telephone has been left so the owner can answer it at night!" the note read, with the handwriting matching Shevchenko's.

The phone was then confiscated by officials, and the bathroom was locked. Janitorial staff revealed that a similar phone had been found in the same bathroom the previous day and was handed in to reception, reported chess.com.

Though Shevchenko denied all of the allegations, other contestants had also noticed his suspicious behavior and reported it to competition authorities. Grandmaster Jose Carlos Ibarra Jerez approached officials with information from one of his teammates, Amin, who had noticed Shevchenko's repeated and elongated absences during the first round of the competition.

"For me I would say things started to get strange at move six. He played his move and left the playing hall for more than 10 minutes and this was repeated many times in the next moves. I thought he had some stomach problems!" Amin told chess.com.

"But at some point I decided to go out to see where he is and he was standing outside the toilet room and when he saw me he went back to the playing hall. And then at some point in the game he stopped going out till the game was finished," he continued.

The Romanian chess federation released a statement supporting Shevchenko, citing a lack of evidence.

"Such serious allegations must necessarily be backed up by solid evidence, and so far only circumstantial evidence has been made public," the statement said. "We await the details of the case and we will carefully study the accompanying evidence."

As a result of his expulsion, the results Shevchenko earned in the first two rounds of competition, a draw against Grandmaster Bassem Amin in round one and win over Grandmaster Francisco Vallejo in round two, have been turned into defeats by competition authorities.