4

Professional Chess Players Go To Incredible Lengths To Cheat

Of all the board games, chess is the only one taken seriously as a "sport." The world championships for Battleship, or Connect Four, don't get nearly as much international news coverage. Given its level of prestige, it probably shouldn't be surprising that people go to great lengths to cheat at it. In 2015, Georgian Grandmaster Gaioz Nigalidze made frequent visits to the restrooms right before crucial moves. A search of the toilet revealed a smartphone and a headset, hidden behind the pan, and covered with toilet paper. Nigalidze denied that it belonged to him, but the tournament arbiters thought it was awfully suspicious that the phone was logged in to a chess-playing robot under his name, so they disqualified him.

In a 2015 tournament, 19-year-old Dhruv Kakkar beat several much higher-rated chess masters by using a contraption that would make Q proud. After one opponent became suspicious, Kakkar was frisked, revealing an elaborate setup involving two phones -- one taped to each ankle -- a speaker hidden in his ear, and spare batteries stuffed in his underwear.

chessbase.com

3

Two Lawyers Tried To Game The Legal System By Filming Porn And Suing Whoever Downloaded It

Porn is something almost everyone uses, but nobody pays for. So media producers will occasionally try to recoup their income by going after porn pirates in court. Between 2011 and 2014, a couple of lawyers decided to skip the middle man and just produce a bunch of porn themselves, put it on the internet, and sue anyone who downloaded it.

In the beginning, the scam run by attorneys John L. Steele and Paul R. Hansmeier involved buying up a lot of copyrights to porn movies, and putting those movies on file-sharing websites. They would then wait for someone to download the movies like a couple of litigious Wile E. Coyotes. Once that happened, they would subpoena service providers to give them the details of the downloaders, and threaten them for settlements.

Eventually, the easy money scheme grew: Steele and Hansmeier actually started shooting their own porn movies, with no intention to sell them, just to give them clickbait titles, put them on Pirate Bay, and wait for that sweet litigation money to roll in.

Fortunately, when we set up our legal system, we foresaw these kinds of shenanigans and decided to make rules against them, inventing words like "entrapment" and "extortion." Though piracy is still illegal, it's also illegal to bait people into doing it for your own profit. Being lawyers, Steele and Hansmeier were aware of this, which is why they hid their activities behind a bunch of pseudonyms and shell companies. In the end, they made around $6 million from the scam, but Steele, the mastermind, was eventually caught after falling like so many do: by incriminating himself on Twitter.

gaia/Twitter

2

Parents In India Scale School Walls To Help Their Kids Cheat At Tests

In the state of Bihar, India, cheating on school tests has become the world's most elaborate game of "the floor is lava."

Hindustan Times

Every year, exams in Bihar become a life-or-death affair, when parents literally scale the sides of school buildings in order to pass notes through the windows. Although this kind of thing is all technically against the law, local police just think of it as payday, since the bribes are so rampant. It's rare that anyone is actually charged for this behavior, and any attempts at cracking down on the situation have resulted in minor riots.

The Bihar Education Minister best characterized the whole situation: "What can the government do to stop cheating, if parents and relatives are not ready to cooperate? Should the government give orders to shoot them?"

We hope that's just a rhetorical question.

1

A Bar Built A Maze To Get Around A Poorly Written Zoning Law

In April of 2017, India passed a law stating that no business could serve alcohol within 500 meters of a highway. As you would imagine, an awful lot of bars, pubs, and liquor stores instantly went out of business. One bar, however, survived on a loophole -- the law specifies walking distance, not direct distance.

The owners of Aishwarya Bar shipped in a ton of wooden panels and built themselves an elaborate entryway that is, in effect, a half-mile-long maze. Since you now need to walk further than 500 meters from the road to enter the premises, the bar is still operating within the specified regulations.

Sasi Chandrika/The Guardian

According to the authorities, who no doubt quadruple-checked the legislation to make super-sure you could slip around a law with zany shenanigans, the whole situation is legal, though they do intend to fine the bar owners for "altering the entrance." Otherwise known as the "whatever, fuck you" compromise.

Aishwarya Bar will be allowed to continue to operate where it stands, although there's a natural catch -- after weaving your way in there and drinking half your weight in alcohol, you have to find your way back out again. Good luck!

For more ridiculous moments of breaking the rules, check out and The 5 Biggest Cheaters in Game Show History.

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