The Georgian chess master rumbled this week for using a hidden smartphone to plan his moves is far from alone – and as our access to an infinite online stock of information gets ever faster and more portable, the question is: are we on the brink of an epidemic?

It was in Abu Dhabi that Tigran Petrosian first became suspicious. During a match in the Al Ain Classic chess tournament last December, the Armenian world No 96 noticed that his opponent, the Georgian world No 400, Gaioz Nigalidze, kept going to the toilet. Under the pressure of competition, that might be understandable. It is also, as every chess player knows, how you cheat. In 1997 it needed Deep Blue, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, to narrowly defeat the world champion, but now everybody’s phone can do it easily. As a result, phones are banned from the playing space in all tournaments, and the ban is enforced with body scanners at the top ones. Only in the toilets do you get a bit of privacy.

Whatever he was doing in the toilet in Abu Dhabi, Nigalidze won that competition. But Petrosian says his opponent was at it again at the Dubai Open last Saturday. “Nigalidze would promptly reply to my moves and then literally run to the toilet,” he told chess-news.ru. “Twice, I made my moves promptly as well, so that he couldn’t leave, and he made mistakes on those occasions. Then I decided to keep an eye on him. I noticed that he would always visit the same toilet partition, which was strange, since two other partitions weren’t occupied.”

Georgian world No 400 chess player Gaioz Nigalidze, who is accused of using a smartphone to plan his winning moves at a tournament in Dubai. Photograph: Wikipedia

Petrosian informed the authorities, who searched Nigalidze but found nothing. Petrosian was adamant however, and eventually Nigalidze’s favourite cubicle was searched as well. “What they found,” Petrosian claims, “was the mobile phone with headphones; the device was hidden behind the pan and covered with toilet paper. We both were sitting at the board when the chief arbiter came up to Nigalidze and showed him the mobile phone, asking: ‘Is this yours?’ Nigalidze blushed, got confused and couldn’t say anything.”

Soon afterwards the Georgian was expelled from the competition. “Nigalidze denied he owned the device,” the organisers said in a statement, “but officials … found it was logged into a social networking site under Nigalidze’s account. They also found his game being analysed in one of the chess applications.” If his guilt is proved, Nigalidze will, of course, be banned. Perhaps worse, his name will be carved into the list of players, alongside Umakant Sharma, Steve Rosenberg and Christoph Natsidis, who lost their way in the shadow of Deep Blue.

Every cheat has a story, however, and no story can be understood without its details. For a grandmaster trying to hustle his way up through the middle-hundreds of the world rankings, too busy doing teaching work to study or rest properly, life is no picnic – especially when you have to watch your colleagues enjoying a picnic of their own. I only mention it in passing, but players with an ELO rating of 2,570 or higher get a direct invitation to the Dubai Open, a car from the airport and free accommodation, with meals, in a 4-star hotel. Nigalidze’s rating is 2,566. Petrosian’s is 2,660.

For this and a thousand other reasons, it has never been difficult to imagine why somebody might cheat at chess, or at anything. Indeed, when the rewards are good enough, the guilt slight enough, and especially when technology makes cheating easy, it is hard to imagine that somebody would not. And now technology is getting dangerously good. Before the rise of portable computing, cheating might often have been harder than doing the honest thing. Now it is often the other way around. Anything that tests your ability to memorise information, speak a foreign language, read a map, recognise music, take a photograph or simply know things is almost certainly going to be easier with the help of a machine. Perhaps one symptom of the smartphone era will be an epidemic of cheating.

Of course, that crisis hasn’t come out of nowhere. For a long time, the casinos were where cheaters went to try their ingenuity. After all, casino games are designed so that the house always makes more money than the players: if you cheat, well, you might say you are just balancing things out. In 1972, an engineer called Keith Taft virtually invented mobile computing on his own in order to beat the blackjack tables in Nevada. With various contraptions strapped to his chest and feet, he did OK for about a decade and a half, although he would have done much better if he’d actually invented mobile computing.

The iPhone and match sheet confiscated from Gaioz Nigalidze at the Dubai chess tournament

In 1984, an eccentric Ohioan called Michael Larson found a simpler way to make the most of new technology. On the new CBS TV gameshow Press Your Luck, he noticed that the crucial prize board, instead of being truly random, just recycled the same five patterns of flashing squares. Using a video recorder, Larson got each pattern on tape and studied them intensively. When he at last appeared on the show, he was brazen, and pummelled $110,237 in cash and prizes out of the board – at the time the largest sum ever won on a gameshow in one day. CBS could not discover any rule that Larson had broken, despite a lot of trying, and paid in full.

Hearing these stories today, you may think they scarcely qualify as cheating. Taft and Larson did not play in the spirit of their chosen games, but did, perhaps, in the spirit of the age. Today, wherever you look, a once-cherished human skill is being made a bit too easy by machines. Above all, this is a problem for education, where our skills are meant to be acquired and assessed. If a culture of e-cheating took hold in schools and universities – as a culture of doping has at times in cycling – the damage to society at large could be tremendous. One cautionary tale might be the UAE, where a survey of more than 1,000 students last month found that 78% of them admitted cheating.

The danger we’re talking about is not so much of people sneaking phones into exam halls – although a phone clearly would be useful, and there are a number of devices on the market that promise to make them more discreet. Rather, it is how extremely easy plagiarism has become at home. At a basic level this might just involve some cutting-and-pasting from Wikipedia, although it is hardly difficult to find something more obscure. If you have the means, there are even sites such as ukessays.com and essaybank.com, which provide pre-written work for a price. It’s hard to say exactly how widespread the problem is, but it is widespread enough to encourage many schools and universities to buy in software such as Turnitin, which promises to detect plagiarism. Still, nothing is perfect, of course. “Students are very goods at getting round anti-cheating technology,” says Michael Dunn, a senior lecturer at the University of Derby with an interest in academic cheating. “An arms race is underway.”

Dunn suggests a simple formula to explain why people cheat, and therefore how to limit it. “The likelihood of someone cheating,” he says, “will be governed at least in part by the availability of the means to do it, and the probability of being caught multiplied by the consequences if caught. In other words, I might still cheat if the likelihood of being caught is high but the consequences low. Even if the likelihood of being caught is low, I still might not cheat if the consequences are negative enough. So the most effective strategy, given that cheating is relatively easy, is to maintain high consequences.” Does this mean that chess, and perhaps all types of mental contest, are doomed unless they get extremely serious about punishment? I shouldn’t generalise but, well, it doesn’t look like it.

The Tuesday-night pub quiz at the Wick Inn, Hove, is small and relaxed. The prize here is either £23 or a bottle of prosecco, for which six large teams in secluded booths compete not very hotly. It is the ideal quiz, in short, in which to get away with cheating. The birth of smartphones was supposed to be the death of pub quizzes, since they effectively put all the answers into the contestants’ pockets – a temptation that few were expected to resist. But pub quizzes are thriving. In 2013, six years after the launch of the iPhone, a survey by trade mag the Publican found that 23,000 out of about 60,000 British pubs had at least one quiz every week.

At the Wick Inn, phones aren’t banned, and now and then during the contest I do see people using their phones, for something. But one team I speak to not only denies all wrongdoing, they sound quite shocked and confused by the idea. “I know it’s a cliche,” says Patrick, a 31-year-old support worker, “but you’d only be cheating yourself.” Then I ask whether any of them has seen cheating at a pub quiz before, and suddenly there is a lot of murmuring. “Definitely,” says Hannah, 26, an animator. “I have seen someone blatantly cheating.” How can she be sure? “Oh, people are on their phone. They do it sneakily underneath their coats, but you see them doing it.” So what did she do in response? “Oh, nothing. I’m too English to denounce people. Other than a disapproving look, there’s not much you can do. You can’t alert the officials. It’s only a pub quiz.”

After four years in the business, quizmaster Cameron Devlin agrees that cheating is endemic but small-scale. “When someone taps away on their phone and then everyone leans in, that’s when you know something’s going on,” he says. “But I would say it’s [happened in] maybe 5% of all the quizzes I’ve done, which is coming up to 250. So that’s very little cheating.” Sometimes a suspiciously high score will stand out, he says, but scrutiny has its limits. Put simply, “You can’t stop someone going to the toilet to look something up.”

You’ll cheat, in short, as long as you don’t have to stop believing you’re an honest person … Photograph: Illustration: Dwayne Bell for the Guardian

At serious pub quizzes, there is often a rule that you will be disqualified if you take your phone out of your pocket – and of course, at serious quizzes the teams are always looking out for that. Mostly though, the decency of quizzers, and the fact that it’s only their own fun they would be spoiling, seems to be protection enough. “I didn’t do it tonight,” Devlin says, “but if you feel like it’s going on, if you just say something about it, like, ‘Please respect your fellow patrons’, then people take that quite seriously.”

Interestingly, this is borne out by quite a broad body of research. Among other things, recent studies reveal that people cheat more in dim rooms than in bright ones. They also cheat more in messy rooms, and more when tired. People act more morally, on the other hand, when they feel they’re being watched, even when it’s only by a mirror or a picture of some eyes. Writing down what you can remember of the Ten Commandments makes everybody, even atheists, less likely to cheat. Being told your university has an honour code, even when it doesn’t, does the same. Ditto being asked if you’ve ever cheated in the past.

Altogether it paints a picture of people as almost always very moral, but never saintly. Most of us will cheat if we can find a justification for it, so we look out for any good justifications that may come up. You’ll cheat, in short, as long as you don’t have to stop believing you’re an honest person. Another study [pdf download] found that “Please Don’t Cheat” printed at the top of a test card has a positive effect on honesty, but the effect of “Don’t Be a Cheater” is significantly more. The bad news is that this makes cheating both self-perpetuating and contagious. By explaining away our guilt with spurious rationales, we give ourselves a rationale to cheat again. And when you look around and see everybody else cheating? Well, that’s a rationale for joining in. Ask a professional cyclist or an Emirati student. They know how it goes.

In one sense, this shows why you’d be right to worry about cheating in chess and quizzes; in another, why you would not. What we’ve learned from the effect of smartphones on both of them is that cheating will always happen, in any game, when it is possible, but also that cheating doesn’t matter. Online chess is in rude health, even though it could be teeming with mechanical assistance. (Some chess sites employ their own software-detecting software, but again, it cannot be perfect.) Besides, as the grandmaster Daniel King argues, the idea of the infallible chess genius was always nonsense, so nothing is really lost now that machines have taken it away.

“Amateurs often imagine that the top players are playing flawless chess,” King says. “They’re not, actually. What they’re really good at is outwitting their opponent … I really, really enjoy watching a top event because it’s a sporting struggle, and a very human struggle. I can see exactly what the players are going through as they’re playing.” Suffering, triumph, failure, the stuff of stories – computers can’t spoil any of this, no more than cars spoil running. If you want to find the real victims of Deep Blue and the iPhone, just Google them. They are Umakant Sharma, Steve Rosenberg, Christoph Natsidis, Gaioz Nigalidze and whoever’s next.

Cheating – the old-fashioned way

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Watertight technique … Humphrey Bogart cheated in a chess game played over the phone. Photograph: John Springer Collection/Corbis

The lift: The crowd at the 1904 Olympic marathon in St Louis were delighted to see a home favourite cross the finish line first. But as it turned out, Fred Lorz’s victory was not entirely legitimate: after nine miles, he had hitched a ride in his manager’s car. He romped the last few miles and had his picture taken with President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice, before suspicious spectators accused him. Lorz claimed it had been a bad joke – but he got a ban from competition all the same.

The double move: Chess’ intellectual complexity made it a hard game to cheat at before the advent of portable technology – but not impossible. When John Wayne was playing Robert Mitchum on his yacht in 1958, he used his large hands to slide a second piece forwards behind the one he was officially moving. Eventually Mitchum caught him. Humphrey Bogart had a more watertight technique: he won a game against a friend over the phone by asking for advice from a US champion who happened to be visiting his house.

The robot roulette ball: It sounds impossible, but in 1973 a group of enterprising French fraudsters, including a croupier, fitted a roulette ball with a remote-controlled device that allowed them to force the ball to land within a grouping of six numbers, with 90% accuracy. They made 5 million francs in a week before Monique Laurent, who had a controller hidden in her cigarette case, was spotted by security staff.

The corrupt emperor: The ancient Olympics were hardly less prone to corruption than the modern version. In 67AD, the Roman emperor Nero successfully bribed officials to delay the games for two years so it would take place during his tour of Greece – and then won a four-horse chariot race with a 10-horse team. He was also accused of drinking a potion of wild boar manure – the nandrolone of his time.