available to him. The USCF suspected that he had deliberately inflated the ratings of his opponents; Bloodgood denied this, attributing his inflated rating to a quirk in the rating system resulting from his regularly playing against a limited pool of much weaker players. There was widespread reporting of anomalous Burmese (Myanmar) rating movements in the late 1990s, with Milan Novkovic giving an analysis of manipulation in Schach magazine. False tournament reports The most notable international example of ratings manipulation involves Romanian Alexandru Crisan, who allegedly falsified tournament reports to gain a Grandmaster title and was ranked 33rd in the world on the April 2001 FIDE rating list. A committee overseeing the matter recommended his rating be erased and his Grandmaster title revoked. While the Romanian Chess Federation initially favored action against Crisan, eventually he became the RCF president and changed the policy, creating such a situation that FIDE intervened to broker a resolution regarding many problems in the RCF, including Crisan's rating. Crisan then was arrested and imprisoned on fraud charges relating to his management of the company Urex Rovinari and disappeared from chess, thus failing to fulfill the conditions of the resolution and so activating the above recommendations regarding title revocation. FIDE did not fully update its online information until August 2015, when all his titles were removed and his rating adjusted downwards to 2132. When writing about the Crisan case, Ian Rogers alleges that Andrei Makarov (at the time a FIDE vice-president and Russian chess federation president) had arranged an IM title for himself through nonexistent tournaments in 1994. Rumors of rigged tournaments are not unheard of in the chess world. For instance, in 2005, FIDE refused to ratify norms from the Alushta (Ukraine) tournaments, claiming that the games did not meet ethical expectations. A number of players involved protested over the matter. A different Ukrainian tournament in 2005 was found to be completely fake. Usually the strongest players are not involved in these, as they are more for careerist players to gain title norms or small rating gains, but Zurab Azmaiparashvili was alleged to have rigged the results of the Strumica tournament of 1995 to allow him to reach the chess elite. In 2003, Sveshnikov referred to these high-profile Crisan and Azmaiparashvili incidents as "open secrets", at a time when both purported culprits were heavily involved in FIDE politics. Simultaneous games A player with no knowledge of