A mistaken forward move in Xiangqi can lead to an irrecoverable situation, and that is exactly what happened to Wang Tianyi and fellow grandmaster Wang Yuefei, as the Chinese Xiangqi Association (CXA) has issued lifetime bans to both players for match-fixing and taking bribes.
According to a local news source, the CXA stripped both players of their grandmaster titles and forbade them from taking part in any events organized or sanctioned by the CXA or its affiliates.
Wang Tianyi has been the top-ranked player in Chinese Xiangqi – otherwise known as elephant chess, or more simply, Chinese chess – since 2014 and became the sport’s 16th national champion in 2012.
Wang Yuefei became a grandmaster in 2013, was runner-up in the 2010 national championships, and was Wang Tianyi’s teammate on the Hangzhou team from Zhejiang province, which won the Xiangqi league title in 2023.
Background
Although nothing came of it at the time, an apparent recording of a conversation between Wang Yuefei and a fellow grandmaster surfaced online in April 2023 where a discussion about match-fixing involving the now-banned players came up.
However, Wang Tianyi was arrested in August for alleged criminal violations.
Despite winning millions of yuan in legitimate prize money over his 11 years as the top-ranked Xiangqi player in the world, it was reported that the match-fixing Wang Tianyi was involved in may have only been for 800,000 yuan, which is just a bit more than 113,000 USD.
A bigger issue
China has been rocked by a string of gambling scandals in recent memory.
A two-year investigation by the Chinese Football Association (CFA) resulted in 38 soccer players and five club officials - including three former Chinese internationals Jin Jingdao, Guo Tianyu, and Gu Chao - being banned for life due to match-fixing and gambling.
In March, a former CFA chairman was sentenced to life in prison for accepting bribes.
Wang Tianyi and Wang Yuefei's bans aren't the only high-profile scandal in the Xiangqi world either.
Yan Chenglong, formerly known as “Xiangqi King,” had this title revoked by the CXA for admitting that he drank too much when celebrating a tournament victory, defecated in a bathtub, and failed to clean up. This sparked a rumor that Yan used electronic anal beads to transmit codes to himself from a chess computer during games in the competition he ended up winning. The CXA claimed these rumors were "impossible to prove."
