The Gamblers Behind One of the Weirdest Cheating Mysteries in Chess Have Been Unmasked

The modern era of cheating in chess began on a Thursday in July 1993, when a man with shoulder-length dreadlocks walked into the World Open tournament in Philadelphia and registered as John von Neumann. Both the hair and the name were phony.

The real Von Neumann was a prominent mathematician and computer scientist who died in 1957. The fake Von Neumann had a suspicious buzzing bulge in his pocket, fought a grandmaster to a draw, then fled before anyone could work out who he was.

A Boston Globe columnist called it “one of the strangest cheating episodes in chess history.” Chess.com recorded the “Von Neumann incident” as “the earliest known case of a potential computer cheater.”

This was decades before chess pros started getting expelled from tournaments for using smartphones, and a lifetime before the recent buzzing anal beads scandal. It was years ahead of Garry Kasparov’s defeat by IBM’s Deep Blue, in an era when humans still imagined themselves to be smarter than machines. The identity of the man with the dreadlocks has remained one of the game’s most enduring mysteries. Until now.

I stumbled across the culprits while researching Lucky Devils, my new book about gamblers using science and technology to win at blackjack, poker, roulette and, on this occasion, chess. The following excerpt is based on my interviews with the gamblers involved and the tournament’s organizers and participants, as well as contemporaneous reports. Wherever possible, details have been independently verified.

Rob Reitzen packed light for the flight from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. He had to. His suitcase was stuffed with computer equipment, switches, wires, and buzzers. Sitting next to him on the plane was his best friend John Wayne, known to everyone in their crew of professional gamblers as “the Duke,” after his Hollywood namesake.

It was June 1993, just before the start of the World Open chess tournament, hosted by the City of Brotherly Love. Reitzen and Wayne both fancied themselves as players. It was how they’d first met. The Duke had posted a flyer, inviting challenges against “John Wayne, chess champion and arm-wrestling champion.” Reitzen had responded and found himself sitting opposite a Black ex-soldier with a megawatt smile, beginning a relationship built on competitive pranks.

Their real calling, though, was gambling—specifically the high-tech kind. Reitzen, a dyslexic savant with a mop of curly hair permanently concealed under a baseball cap, earned a living with wearable gadgets. He’d used an adapted Zilog Z80 microprocessor, about the size of a pack of cards, to process the shifting possibilities in blackjack, then developed a similar device to do the same in California’s poker rooms. For a while, Reitzen and Wayne used a system with a tiny camera inside a player’s belt buckle. Outside, in a truck with a communications dish bolted to the side, teammates could pause its footage, zoom in, and see the blackjack dealer’s hidden card for a split second as it was placed face down on the felt. Was it cheating? Probably. But the profits spoke louder than any ethical doubts they might have had.

Since such machines were banned in casinos, they had to be concealed carefully. Reitzen and his players sent information to the computers using toe switches built into their shoes and received instructions back from a vibrating box hidden in the crotch.

On arrival in Philadelphia, the Duke wired himself up, putting on a pair of headphones to secure his wig. He wore one of their blackjack processors, modified to communicate with Reitzen, who would station himself, out of sight, in front of a bank of monitors in their hotel room running his homemade chess software. The two friends looked at each other, Reitzen grinning. This was it—their shot at chess immortality.

On the entry form, Wayne wrote the name John von Neumann. “As in … the father of game theory?” a skeptical official asked. Wayne nodded. The official raised an eyebrow, then put Wayne into the draw.

The event was held in the conference suite of a sprawling hotel complex. For the most part, the crowd was male, pale, and nearsighted. Its members squinted at the Duke. A square-jawed military veteran, he’d have stood out even without the fake dreadlocks. In the first round he got a bye. In the second round he drew a grandmaster, Helgi Ólafsson, a former child prodigy from Iceland.

For a computer programmer in the ’90s, chess was a simpler challenge than poker, Reitzen and Wayne’s bread and butter. Poker was full of uncertainties, requiring guesswork and bluffing. There were more variations in a game of multiplayer no-limit Texas Hold’em than atoms in the universe. Still, in 1993, game-playing machines were in their infancy. The world’s best player, Garry Kasparov, had crushed an early version of IBM’s Deep Blue four years prior. Afterward, Kasparov was dismissive about his electronic rival’s skill. “I was puzzled, because there was no opposition,” he said.

Reitzen, whose betting crew employed an MIT-trained programmer and a math professor, felt he had an advantage over the field. The World Open would be a serious test for his chess software. As for dressing his best friend up as a Rastafarian and using a fake name—that was for “shits and giggles,” Reitzen would say years later.

Wayne sat down at a long dining table, where dozens of chessboards were laid out in rows, each with a digital clock to one side. Players had no more than two hours to make their first 40 moves, with the total duration of each game limited to six hours. Wayne became increasingly aware of the timer as he carefully lifted and lowered his big toes to signal Ólafsson’s moves to Reitzen, then waited for the buzzer to assign his friend’s response as calculated by the computer. It was taking much longer than they had expected.

The minutes passed in awkward silence. Wayne passed the time by staring at the ceiling. But somehow it was working. The rattled Ólafsson made an error. Then, a few moves later, the machine lost radio signal. Wayne waited what seemed like an age for a vibration that never came. With little other choice, he played out the later stages himself. Finally Ólafsson offered a draw and held out his hand.

“Von Neumann” had pulled off a remarkable upset, competing on level terms with a world-class player. “I was sure I was playing a complete patzer,” Ólafsson told journalists afterward. “He had no idea about the game, and I even thought he was on drugs. He took way too much time to reply to obvious moves, and he was very strange.”

(Contacted by this writer years later, Ólafsson said: “I actually remember this game, but I really do not have anything to add … It hit me as a rather clumsy attempt at swindling, and I certainly hope that those involved have since found more meaningful ways to develop their talents.”)

Von Neumann marched on, to Reitzen’s undiluted joy. In the next two rounds, the coms link failed again. Wayne was delayed so long that he forfeited both games. In between matches, he amused himself by marching into a recreation area where attendees were playing speed chess. He slapped $500 onto the table. “No clock. Three minutes a move,“ he offered. There were no takers.

In the following days, the Duke won a couple more games, was timed out of others, and began to attract a crowd of curious spectators. Everyone wanted to see the mysterious Rastafarian with the somnolent playing style who had come from nowhere to draw against a grandmaster. He was on track to win a sizable chunk of the prize money for unrated entrants when a tournament organizer appeared at his table.

There had been some complaints about his play, the man explained. Did he have any identification? When it became clear that Wayne didn’t have any, the official said he needed to explain himself to the event director. “I can’t,” Wayne replied. There was a long pause. “My wife is having a baby.” He hurried out, escaping foll