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. (Google it, but not at work.) 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.