Following an incident of suspected cheating at The Irish International Open 2019 sponsored by the MHL Hotel collection, the tournament controller and ICU tournament director, Ivan Baburin FA, prepared a detailed account of what took place. Ivan also received fifteen witness statements which corroborated what he had seen. This report and these statements were presented to the ICU executive in May 2019 and was discussed at a subsequent ICU executive meeting. The conclusion of this discussion was that the ICU would adopt this report and sanction this player with a five year ban given the clear premeditation and obvious attempt to cheat in multiple games.

The ICU filed a report with FIDE informing them of the details they require in cases such as these, filed a report with the player's federation upon request from that federation and informed the player of the sanction and right to appeal within 28 days. The player did not appeal and so his suspension will run until May 2024.

We would like to state clearly that cheating should not and will not be tolerated and have adopted the following anti-cheating guidelines to tackle the issue. We are committed to fair-play principles, and we have put an emphasis on this with this new document in order to fight any kind of cheating, including computer-assisted cheating.

We will make all necessary efforts to successfully fight cheating, and have taken a stance which is currently more severe than international guidelines. We feel that we are simply getting ahead of the curve and that in time FIDE will move to punishments more in line with our own - FIDE has said that their guidelines are currently too lenient. We urge the entire chess community to respect these guidelines and understand that no one wins when someone cheats.