Toiletgate: The 2006 World Championship Scandal
Partway through the 2006 World Chess Championship, the match meant to reunify a title split since 1993, Veselin Topalov's team accused reigning Classical World Champion Vladimir Kramnik of receiving computer assistance during his frequent trips to a private bathroom. What followed was a forfeited game, a near-collapse of the match, and a scandal that still gets litigated today.
The accusation
Topalov's manager Silvio Danailov formally complained that Kramnik was visiting his private bathroom far more often than Topalov, 50 times across the first four games by one count, and suggested he could be receiving engine assistance out of sight of the arbiters. There was no direct evidence of cheating, no device was ever found, but the accusation itself was enough to poison the rest of the match before a single additional game was played.
The forfeit that had no chess in it
In response, the Appeals Committee ordered Kramnik's private bathroom locked, and Kramnik refused to appear for Game 5 in protest, calling the ruling an insult. His clock was allowed to run for a full hour before the arbiter awarded Topalov the point by forfeit. There genuinely is no game to show you here, no move was played in Game 5, which is itself the most telling detail in the whole affair: a World Championship game decided entirely off the board.
How close the match came to collapsing
Kramnik nearly withdrew entirely, and for several tense days it was unclear whether the match, and the entire reunification project years in the making, would simply fall apart. FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov intervened directly, the Appeals Committee that had ordered the bathroom locked resigned and was replaced, and the score was fixed at 3-2 in Topalov's favour (the forfeit standing) so the match could continue.
What actually decided the title
With the forfeit dispute unresolved but the match restored, the players finished the classical portion level and the title was ultimately settled in a rapid tiebreak, a real, decisive game with real moves, which is the actual chess story of this reunification. We cover that deciding game in full in our companion piece on the 2006 reunification.
Why this still matters
Toiletgate is usually told as farce, and there is real farce in it, but the underlying tension was serious: the first computer-assistance scandal to threaten a World Championship match came not from hard evidence but from suspicion alone, a preview of exactly the dynamic that would resurface, louder and more consequential, in the Carlsen-Niemann affair sixteen years later.