In the hope of exploiting

Here's a special treat: one of the most spectacular of Ray's thefts, a double-decker of a plagiarism in which despite writing up a game in two different publications and annotating largely different moves in each, Ray managed to plagiarise every single word of every note in both. Two sets of notes under his own name - without a single original word being his.

The game was played between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, the fourth game of their 1986 world championship match. It appeared in Ray's Times column of 8 December 2011.

It also appeared in Special Ks, Ray's Spectator column for 5 January 2013.

It also appeared on pages 44-52 of the Everyman book Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess, Part III, which covers the 1986 and 1987 world championship matches and was published in 2009.

Every last word of Ray's Times and Spectator notes is plagiarised from this source.

The notes, in the original and the plagiarised copies, are set out below. I have not troubled much with commentary: readers can see for themselves that everything has been stolen.

1. White's move nine.

Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess:

(I have cut short the original note, which runs to several paragraphs.)

Spectator:

2. Black's move eleven.

Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess:

Spectator:

It's worth mentioning that since Kasparov gives an original source for his own commentary, Ray, who does not mention it, is plagiarising that work too. I did say this was a really special effort.

3. White's move fourteen.

Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess:

Spectator:

4. White's move fifteen.

Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess:

Times:

5. White's move seventeen.

Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess:

Times:

Spectator:

"It changes the direction of his activity" seems to me to use two different pronouns, but I suppose if you're plagiarising everything word-for-word you have to plagiarise everything word-for-word, errors and all.

6. White's move nineteen.

Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess:

Times:

7. White's move twenty.

Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess:

Spectator:

8. White's move twenty-three.

Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess:

Spectator:

9. Black's move twenty-five.

Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess:

Times:

Spectator:

Impressive is the way in which Ray writes two non-identical notes, both taking material from more than one part of the original note. Neither, naturally, containing so much as one original word.

10. White's move twenty-seven.

Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess:

Times:

11. Black's move twenty-seven.

Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess:

Times:

12. White's move twenty-nine.

Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess:

Times:

Spectator:

13. White's move thirty-five.

Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess:

Times:

Spectator:

14. White's move thirty-nine.

Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess:

Spectator:

Having activated himself to the minimum, Ray picks up two cheques for having performed no original work whatsoever.

There is, as it happens, one discrepancy: despite copying everything, Ray is unable to give the same game score in both plagiarised columns, having Black resigning after his fortieth move in the Times

but after White's forty-first in the Spectator.

Truly, "the parts that were good were not original, and the parts that were original were not good".

- - - - - - - -

But there's more! In December 2012, shortly before his Spectator piece appeared (but, one imagines, at roughly the same time as he was sending them his column) Ray wrote up the game for the now-defunct site Chessville, in a piece called London Pride that we can see courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

The notes are identical to those that appear in the Spectator, except that there is a note just before the end to explain that White sealed a move

which I mostly post so that we have another opportunity to look at Ray's magnificent crest.

There is no mention in Chessville that the notes are also being published in the Spectator, nor any mention in the Spectator that the notes have already been published at Chessville. Maybe Ray forgot in the pre-Xmas rush, just as he forgot to mention that four of the notes had previously been published in the Times, or that all of them had come from another source entirely.

Except that, at Chessville, he did say this.

Notes based on those by Kasparov, he writes, more than a little misleadingly ("based on" not being entirely adequate) but less misleadingly than pretending that notes which were entirely somebody else's were in fact entirely his own.

But in the Times and the Spectator, he chose to leave that out. I confess I'm less puzzled as to why he did that than why he mentioned it on Chessville.

Ray Keene, Plagiarist Of Mystery. Though the bigger mystery is why he's still in a job.

[Thanks to Angus French and Pablo Byrne]

[Ray Keene plagiarism index]

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