During the Week 7 match between Dallas and Arizona, in the Board One game between GM Julio Sadorra and GM Rogelio Barcenilla there was a severe rules violation committed by the eventual winner, GM Barcenilla.

GM Barcenilla was detected as having “task-switched” out of ICC 24/37 moves in his game, and at the end of the game a chess engine (Houdini) was found to be running on his computer. In response to this, due to the extreme violations of Rules F9 and F10 in our rules page, the USCL TD, Chris Bird, ruled the game as a forfeit, reversing the game result and thereby changing the overall match result.

The USCL has no compelling reason to believe that any cheating or foul play occurred as both the President and Vice President examined the game in question and did not feel that cheating was likely to have occurred. However, this was clearly a huge breach of the aforementioned rules and these types of actions, whether due to cheating or not, can cause teams and fans to believe that the league is not being played honestly and thus must be dealt with very seriously.

Due to the extreme nature of this decision and the obvious effect on the standings, the Arizona team appealed the decision to the USCL advisory board, which is composed of one representative from each USCL team.

After receiving the facts of the case, the vote was twelve to one with one team abstaining (the two teams involved in this automatically abstaining) in favor of upholding the decision of the TD. Therefore the Week 7 result of the Dallas vs Arizona match is now a 2.5-1.5 win for Dallas.