That hard to believe IBM cheated?

Lets break things down.

1996 Series

Kasparov loses the first match against Deep Blue but by game 6 he is easily dominating and beating Deep Blue to win the series 4-2 (3 outright wins, 2 draws).

1997 Series.

Opening game Kasparov beats the new and improved Deep Blue. Considering Kasparov lost the opening game to the previous Deep Blue, which was only 50% as powerful as the new model, its easy to say that alarm bells would have been ringing in the IBM camp.

Game two its looking like Kasparov is going to win. Now by this stage IBM had gone six games without a win and was looking down the barrel of going seven games without a win and 2-0 down in the current series. 2-0 in a 6 match series is very hard to come back from.

Put yourself in the shoes of the IBM engineers during game two. You have spent millions of dollars on developing this computer, careers are on the line. IBM has promoted this game heavily. Media attention is high. Things are looking bad.

The most logical thing to do would be for a human to cheat. People have cheated for far less reason.

Also lets not forget the era when this was being played. The internet by 1997 had burst into the mainstream and was usage was growing rapidly. Rapid growth needs servers to supply web pages, mail servers etc which means big $$ for IBM. During this era computer computer companies were growing rapidly.

Just think of the pressure the IBM deep blue staff would have been under NOT to cheat during game 2.