I hope you revise your policy of keeping all known instances of cheating amongst titled players on chess.com private. Further, as part of this report also reveal who the other professional players who confessed to cheating are.
I attribute part of the reason why this scandal has reached as far as it has is that Niemann was able to retain his reputation and enter professional OTB tournaments up until the Sinquefield Cup.
Nobody knew about any of this until it was alluded to vaguely, and then implicitly after Magnus was defeated OTB
The report was great, and answers a lot of questions everyone had. I'm especially glad to see you applied your tools to OTB games.
The only disappointing thing was the focus on how fast Hans' rating soared after he hit 2500, and how much it rose between ages 11 and 19.25. These thresholds were very cherry-picked to make Hans look bad, which you didn't need to do. For example, Hans's rating lingered at 2450 for two years and then popped. If you charted ratings rise starting at 2450, Hans would be on the other side of the chart!
If the rate of increase is highly unusual, then the rate itself is the relevant datum, and the interval over which it occurred is not being cherry-picked, even though it may appear to be. In other activities, more than one cheater has been caught out by presenting data that contains a brief period which was physically impossible, and the fact that the averaged data had no such problem did not, of course, make the concern go away.
To be clear, as there is no equivalent to a physical impossibility here, I am not claiming that the rate of rating increase is conclusive; I am saying it seems to be a legitimate concern regardless of how reasonable the broader averages are.
I'd be curious to know about the cheating rate on chess.com. I'd expect at lot of people to cheat occasionally, e.g. kids with too much time on their hand, people trying to "fix" their ranking, or getting a bit of help when they play against their friend and so on...
And also... who cares? there are no stake, just playing against random people, who cares if they cheat as long as you have fun playing. It's less fun for the cheater, but doesn't impact non-cheater.
Since chess.com ranks similar players against each other, and I'm not planning on tournament play at all, I actually wouldn't care in the slightest if I played someone who was consistently cheating. That would mean I'm playing a hybrid human/computer instead of a pure human, but I'd still be playing someone with a consistent ranking and it would still in some sense be a fair fight.
I would be upset if someone was inconsistently cheating, and so I'm playing someone nominally at 1400 but for this game they're actually playing 2100.
Of course for true tournament play, the rules are the rules, whatever they may be, and they must be followed for it to have any meaning.
This is actually what lichess does - if it flags you as a cheater, you are silently paired against other cheaters.
They have almost the entirety of the lichess system source code publicly available, but from what I can gather they have a private set of weights on inputs - I assume to prevent cheaters from fully reverse-engineering the system.
I think it is an interesting question. Aside from consent, playing against an anonymous cheater is indistinguishable from playing against a better player. Presumably people are elo matched so it should not matter
It is definitely not indistinguishable, both because "someone with this rating shouldn't be winning like this" and because engine moves look very different than human moves, especially at lower ratings.
At top levels it gets closer -- often human play is compared to engine play and people will discuss which moves were 'engine-like' vs 'human', and a significant achievement would be to play the engine moves on every turn. Although it should be said that engine moves are not always necessarily the best moves positionally, nor the moves with the highest win % versus a human (because you can 'trick' a human, whereas the engine can't trick itself so it will never prefer a move like that)... but they are always the best moves tactically.
In middling ratings, if I was allowed to look at the engine (in a Lichess replay for instance) I'd guess I can tell a player using the engine with 99+% accuracy. People _always_ lose on tactics (or misplayed opening lines, misplayed endgames, etc). Engines never do. At high ratings I assume this goes down, especially if the players are playing 'boring' draw-ish lines, in which the best moves are fairly obvious most of the time.
Thanks for breaking down how this would actually work in practice. As an amateur player, I don't think I personally would be able to tell the difference between playing a much better player and a good bot, or a bad player and a bad bot.
Cause they shared Dlugy's private emails last week? Cause they leaked this report to the WSJ before putting it on their site? Cause Rensch worded the non-denial denial specifically like that?
Like I had mentioned previously, why would they reveal their entire hand?
It makes sense to show the relevant part of their upcoming case and who knows what kind of agreement they had with Dlugy and with lawyers before deciding to reveal that snippet.
Like in poker. Just because they showed one card, doesn't mean they are now obligated to show their hand.
Yes if there are legal avenues this takes it will involve Dlugy and the Chess Max Academy. The problem is unless there is a caught in the act smoking gun it's all lot of statistics and inuendio that's very hard for anyone to prove in either direction. I'd feel more comfortable if Chess.com ran the exact same report they are releasing now on 50 other top players to see how close to a hundred anomalies they get. Still its a fascinating story with deep implications far beyond the world of chess.
> “Outside his online play, Hans is the fastest rising top player in Classical [over-the-board] chess in modern history,” the report says, while comparing his progress to the game’s brightest rising stars. “Looking purely at rating, Hans should be classified as a member of this group of top young players. While we don’t doubt that Hans is a talented player, we note that his results are statistically extraordinary.”
I basically made the argument that, in any sport, when a player does statistically much, much better than their previous performance would predict, that in and of itself should be considered evidence of cheating - perhaps not conclusive evidence, but definitely evidence warranting further investigation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32990022
> All this talk of "Carlsen accused him of cheating with no evidence" reminds me of the blowback against some athletes in the 70s and 80s who accused rivals of taking PEDs "with no evidence".
> Sometimes the evidence of someone doing monstrously better than can be expected by their history is sufficient IMO. I mean, look at this article about swimmer Shirley Babashoff [1], dubbed "Surly Shirley" at the time by the media, for suggesting the East German women were on PEDs in the 70s. Nowadays we look back on those images of the East German women, looking more manly than any dude I've ever seen, and wonder how we considered with a straight face that they weren't on a boatload of drugs. Similarly, it completely baffles me how any sane person can think that Flo Jo wasn't on PEDs in the runup to the 1988 Olympics - her 100m dash record still stands today.
> I'm not saying Carlsen went about it in the right way, because now Niemann is basically in an indefensible position, but I'm also not willing to quickly dismiss it because Carlsen has "no evidence".
Yeah you pointed out something special here. It’s like those unsung Russian sub captains who didn’t start the nuclear apocalypse because they had an intuitive understanding between faulty and genuine threats. You can’t explain why you know something you just know it.
Besides, Magnus genuinely has never seemed like the guy to get petty and up and throw a fit, he’s lost plenty of times without doing such.
> You can’t explain why you know something you just know it.
The way Carlsen described his suspicions reminded me of "connoisseurship" in the art world. Now that's a "skill" that's not as important as it once was but once the science has given its results and there are still no firm conclusions, connoisseurship is all you have.
Magnus cares deeply about the image of chess as a sport. He has done a great deal to popularize chess. Cheating threatens the legitimacy of chess itself.
It makes sense that Magnus would take a stand on it, even if he risks losing face by doing so.
My understanding of the Russian sub captain that I'm aware of is that he was able to explain it clearly - it appeared that only one missile had been fired, and he knew it made absolutely no sense that the US would start a nuclear war by firing a single missile.
I might take into consideration rapid rise in ratings, and even this chess.com report, but please, this argument about post game interview is pure nonsense. It is not a 'tell' in the slightest. Any player with at least IM title will give you a decent analysis of that position if he wants, and Niemann is certainly better than IM even without alleged computer help. He was visibly disinterested in the interview and it was conducted in a rather hostile manner, so it is perfectly understandable that he probably just wanted a break and rest.
It’s definitely evidence just not very strong evidence on it’s own. Combined with a history of cheating and a few other tells and things look rather damming.
Whatever people do at young age does not have to define the rest of their lives. Did you never do anything stupid in your life?
Also, I don't know why alleged cheating when playing on some site should affect OTB tournament games. They are even governed by different bodies! Just have really thorough anti-cheating measures in place, and see how strong he plays.
I don’t know if you are aware but he was removed from chess.com in 2020 and admired he was cheating then. So has a long term and recent history with cheating, this wasn’t just some youthful indiscretion.
The report includes strong evidence he was recently and repeatedly cheating in games for prize money which shows a serious lack of ethics.
Anyway, I don’t see any significant difference in OTB vs online cheating. It’s at most slightly easier to cheat online, but the OTB prize pools are significant.
I think this lines up with the other circumstantial evidence, but can you quantify this? Like, was he pretty much never willing to explain his plays? Has any other rising star or top competitor been similarly uncooperative?
People aren't coins, with each toss unaffected by previous landings, but at the same time, not giving evidence shouldn't be considered evidence itself.
The word "evidence" is badly misunderstood, often even by the very people throwing it around.
There's a rather large contingent of people who use it as a synonym for "proof", thus demonstrating their complete lack of understanding of the very concept even as they think they are looking smart. There's a lot of people who think that it is somehow the responsibility of someone like Carlson to have unambiguous proof that is often physically, legally, or morally impossible for them to have. Not that the Kantian imperative is the be-all, end-all of morality or philosophy, but it's still a useful idea, and if one runs this memeset through that grid it quickly reveals that you can't use this as the bar people must meet. It creates a society where anything that can be hidden, often not even hidden particularly well but just hidden at all since the standard is "proof", will be gotten away with. This is impractical.
(Although there is an extent to which we do indeed live in that society.)
There's another smaller contingent (from what I can see, the former is the dominant group) who thinks that "evidence" doesn't have to be proof per se, but that for something to be "evidence" it must be single-handedly capable of meeting some bar, be it "preponderance of evidence" or whatever is being used. These people are blind to the fact that it is often possible to produce ten pieces of evidence that are individually weak, but together are too improbable to ignore. While this case must certainly be treated with care since it is sensitive to how well done the Bayesian-style analysis of their probabilities is, it is perfectly reasonable to use such evidence to come to conclusions. This contingent will often try to defeat the evidence in detail, decrying each individual one and downplaying it, and completely failing to address the totality, be it either as a method of being disingenuous, or, I am convinced, often just lacking the intellectual firepower necessary to address the totality of evidence holistically.
It's important not to fall into that trap because I think in the real world, this is how many very important questions can be settled... and I don't just mean big philosophical or societal questions, or even news of the day like this, but even little personal things. The signs that your partner is cheating on you often come in like this... you may not catch them in the act, nor even receive some individually huge clue, because there's one or two humans intelligently trying to deceive you. Such situations often end up giving off a lot of little clues, each of them individually explainable-away, but the totality pointing to the truth. Or you can determine some new direction your company may be trying to take by a pattern of little changes long before they announce it publicly. Any number of things in the world where you can carefully assemble a lot of little things to come to some reasonably strong conclusion.
Back on topic, the combination of the fact that Neimann was known to have cheated before and the accusation of the current best player in chess, who was kind of going out on a limb to do so, was quite strong evidence that Niemann did cheat. Neither individually would be enough for me to come to that conclusion strongly on its own, but the combination was compelling. I considered that enough proof for my personal opinion. Proof enough for authority figures to sanction would require a higher standard and I support and applaud them for being more careful.
You have summed it up beautifully.
In the real world, we have to tolerate the awful smell of people/companies getting away with bad things because it is too easy for a brazen person to sail below the level of proof needed to stop them.
We shouldn’t have to tolerate this in sports, which are an escape from the real world.
The fact that an athlete in a competitive sport was allowed to partake in an event even after admitting to cheating not only once, but twice, is outrageous in itself.
This is, I think, the single biggest factor in the proliferation of cheating. Most cheaters are smart enough to do the math on how they should win at the sport, or is smart enough to hire someone who can do the math. In other words, cheaters are rational actors.
Allowing people back into the sport swings the EV math heavily in favor of cheating if the penalty isn't massive given that the chance of getting caught is so low (as long as you know what you're doing). The only way to make the EV of cheating negative is to make the sanction very, very bad. Losing all of your future earnings from the sport is a good way to do that.
I used to run Magic: the Gathering tournaments, and there was a tremendous amount of "minor" cheating - forgetting the rules when it benefits them, shuffling in suspicious ways, peeking at opponents decks, etc. Many competitive players even openly admitted to doing this. Even if a tournament official could call them on the cheating and disqualify them (which was frowned upon without hard evidence), they would likely not be suspended from sanctioned play at all unless the evidence was overwhelming. Several famous cheaters did it many times and got caught several times. Minor cheating was very common as a result.
This aptly describes the modern state of thoroughbred horse racing. The sport is littered with these so called “super-trainers”. All of which possess precedent defying win percentages. It’s gotten so bad, a federal governing body has been tasked to combat it. The anti-doping rules will take effect this January [1].
This is why I constantly cheated in school. I got caught once and the penalty was a 0 on the test and a talking to. And only because I was a cheating noob.
The benefits were in the thousands and thousands of scholarship dollars.
I cheat now in my employment. I work three full time jobs remotely and do the bare minimum in each. The risk is getting fired (and if I only get fired from two of the jobs, I am still ahead of honest work). The payoff is decades taken off my working life.
Being a TA and discovering that about half the class was engaged in a singular cheating ring (that does not mean the other half is free from cheating) changed my perspective as to how cheating should be dealt with.
In general I feel that if enough people are doing the "wrong" thing, then punishing most of the population is probably an even worse move. Failing individuals, marking their transcript, or kicking them out of college may seem acceptable when you have the perspective that only individuals cheat. But when you hypothetically punish over half the student body by taking their money and kicking them out...
It’s a feedback loop where if there are no penalties for cheating then more people cheat which eventually forces people to cheat just to compete.
In a collage setting having a high number of cheaters reduces the value of a degree as people get used to graduates being incompetent. That also hurts non cheaters.
I feel that the raison d'etre of morality is in the promotion of healthy relations and prosperous communities, and my policy intuition tells me that punishing over half of a population is probably the wrong move.
The thing is, it's only half the population now. Once you set the precedent, it won't be half the population any more. You can also just slowly ratchet up the pressure, cutting off the cheating over time.
>But when you hypothetically punish over half the student body by taking their money and kicking them out...
The opposite also applies though, if you have a large amount of cheaters in each graduating cohort you devalue the degrees and trash the reputation of the institution. Which hurts all of the students, including the cheaters.
There will always be cheaters when money is involved. The Saudi route of death penalty is probably too high. It’s better to just invest money into anti cheat architecture.
Why not both? Particularly in a game or a sport, where losing access to the competitive scene doesn't really negatively impact your life. Like it or not, there aren't very many robbers in Saudi Arabia - they get their hands cut off.
> Like it or not, there aren't very many robbers in Saudi Arabia - they get their hands cut off.
Is this actually the case or it is apocryphal? A quick google tells me that thefts make up 47% of all total reported crimes in Saudia Arabia in 2002 [1]. That seems like the opposite of "aren't very many", especially when compared to Canada, whose number appear to be 28% in 2020 [2]. (Just the numbers I could find - I'm sure there's reporting issues at play here.)
There's petty theft, but not a lot of robbery. Also, the crime rate in genetal is very low: 0.83 per 100k people in 2019. Compared to 47.7 per 100k in the US. The number is even lower than Denmark, which is well known for having very low crime.
Armed robbery is, to my knowledge, punished with capital punishment. Petty theft or theft of unattended or inadequatly protected goods is not susceptible to cutting of the hand. Etc...
> I work three full time jobs remotely and do the bare minimum in each
I always wonder what the expected value on this strategy is. I'm a naive sucker, so I have worked my ass off at my job, and I have had 250% salary growth in 5 years at it. Maybe that's standard if you're job hopping. Do you ever get raises? Do these jobs actually pay over 33% of the best job you could get? Would it be more stressful to juggle this kind of thing than the level of stress at a normal job you're invested in?
I applaud you but can never tell if I should join you...
Most people do not get meaningful raises without moving to new companies. Google, Amazon, and others also often have a compensation cliff at year 4 if you don't get a promotion by year 2-3.
Depends the sacrifices you are willing to make and what you want.
I earn 300K CAD between the jobs plus a pension. Let's call it 230K USD. I have three years of experience. I live in a low cost city in Canada as all my jobs are remote. I suppose it depends on whether you view this as a pro or a con, but my earnings are virtually all cash (some 20K in stock in total), so I am not taking a beating with the current markets. I work about 5-6 hours a day, mostly by being willing to volunteer for stuff that others hate or consider useless careerwise internally (I will happily be the support dev for example, despite that meaning I show far fewer achievements come review time).
Being support dev (monitor Sentry and resolve all the bugs) works because I never join teams with core production responsibilities, so support is never urgent. Say that you are with Netflix. You want to be on the analytics team, not the streaming team. But other devs still hate it, so nobody will question taking a day to answer a question as everyone else doesn't even want to think about it. I went to the extreme and stretched out a config issue for three weeks. My manager and the other members of my team wrote me letters of praise and the skip manager had a meeting to praise me over handling it. Niche knowledge can be quite powerful. Debugging is also a skill in itself. I have also survived several layoffs, so plenty of opportunities to get rid of me.
Pick your teams very strategically. The equivalent of the streaming team at my Job 1 has a horrendous work schedule and 3AM on-call. I have never worked a job with on-call.
Also, choose to work on tools for work, a.k.a things that nobody will complain about over the weekend.
> Do you ever get raises?
I don't generally stick around at any org long enough to get raises, as the job hops have led to huge increases. I was earning 65K two years ago and that was two jobs ago. But I am told that I will be getting at least 8% this year at Job 1. Job 2 has a union ratchet, so performance hardly matters. Job 3, probably not, as they are stingy in every other way (but you can disappear for days and have it not be a big deal).
I personally view raises as kind of a scam. Another dev on one of my teams is brilliant and highly productive, far more so than I am. She didn't get a raise with her promo. I am getting a raise for existing at Job 1. Be friendly, be funny, and you can get away with a lot.
> Do these jobs actually pay over 33% of the best job you could get?
Given the sacrifices I am willing/unwilling to make, yes. If I were willing to make other sacrifices like relocating or working harder, no. I also cannot leetcode that well. If you work for Google, you are beating this strategy.
> Would it be more stressful to juggle this kind of thing than the level of stress at a normal job you're invested in?
I find it less stressful as you just stop caring about all the little games. You stop caring about whether your standup report is meaningful or shows sufficient work. You stop caring about showing initiative. You stop caring about going the extra mile, or about leaving a bug unfixed over the weekend. You find yourself awash in so much cash that losing your job for years wouldn't matter. You don't worry about delivering, as deadlines are meaningless.
Obviously don't blow high profile things, but as long as you deliver the bigger noticeable stuff to a decent standard (and bugs are one area to do that), all is well.
At least in my case, I can coast to retirement within a year and will have a fully paid off upper middle class house before I am 30. That is also a huge stress reliever, as (contingent on responsible spending and prudent investing) I only need to keep up the high salary for 4-5 years.
I like your approach. Thanks for posting an informative reply. You provided some valuable insight which, while intuitive, is much more useful when codified.
I work one job, make a bit more but not a lot, have house and boat payments, and bank most of the rest. Just started collecting SS. I could retire, but with the uncertain US economy, I'm looking to go part-time, or work remote instead. Remote would give me back the ~10hrs/wk of commute time to do other things. But virtually no chance of going remote without a job change.
I had an AWS interview which looked great, sounded great, nice increase, and was mostly remote. I aced the pre-interview(he told me so), thought I aced the interview (8rs over 2 days), but was "not selected", and "no specific feedback". Since, they've invited me to interview for several other positions. I've ignored them as 1) large expenditure of time and energy to prep and perform in the interview, and 2) I think there may have been some age "consideration" on their part. Not sure I'd want to stay long enough to be fully vested in the stock compensation. I can play that from the outside.
Technically, they might sue you if you represent that you are working exclusively for them, which is a clause in most of these contracts. Still, not illegal.
"I cheat now in my employment. I work three full time jobs remotely and do the bare minimum in each."
Do you earn more from the three jobs than one job "honestly"? Perhaps ... but then it becomes complicated because I suspect you have to maintain three lots of "reality" to deal with each employer. Now it may be that you have managed full on parasite and are able to live with that and prosper. I'd keep an eye out over my shoulder if I was you.
Sociopathic behaviour can work for a while, quite a long while but eventually society might lose more than it can afford to easily lose and looks for scapegoats and then deals with it. Then you had better have some remarkable camouflage or discover the joys of summary justice.
You describe one unpleasant aspect of society that we all are aware of: the parasite. I'm warning you that society has fangs beyond the police and the law. We might call it natural justice or whatever but please do not fall afoul of it.
There is of course way more to your story and my response but please do be careful.
1. He admitted to cheating twice, so it's not a question of an innocent man being punished by mistake.
2. As noted already, it's not a game, it's a professional sport that people at his level make their living doing, and every cheater in this scenario is stealing money from someone who has earned it.
Yeah, it doesn't have to involve banning people for life on borderline cases of cheating, but if you are caught red-handed, a lifetime ban seems in order.
12 is fine... 16 is iffy... it was only 3 years ago.
I'm personally a bit frustrated with the ever changing standards for adolescents. They are as responsible or naive as people want them to be for whatever their bias calls for. (not saying you btw, just in general).
Neither am I... I honestly have no idea what the kids punishment should be. Not irredeemable by any means... that seems cruel for the sake of being cruel... but its also not fair to have people compete with a known cheater (and potentially, hopefully not, a liar).
>What's your opinion of the National Sex Offender Registry?
People are on it for simply peeing in public. And teenage minors in a relationship sending nudes to each other due to a lack of "Romeo and Juliet" laws.
I talked to a guy who was on a sex offender registry for "urination in public" at a bar one time. Sounded like a travisty of justice when he explained it that way. Talked to someone else about him afterwards and while yes he was "just peeing in public" he did so in the view of a few young girls who walked past his house on their way to school on multiple occasions and with a erection.
Knew another guy who did a few years in prison for "just a bag of weed", again that was true in a technical sense, he was on parole for a strong arm robbery and had the bag in plain view when he got pulled over.
I'm not saying nobody is ever innocent, but everyone I talk to claims to be and it never holds up.
There are several good arguments put forward by criminologists, legal scholars, and other researchers which argue that the registry is ineffective at best and unjust at worst.
Not to take away from the point you are making, but this is simply not a good example of an uncontroversial case of scarlet lettering.
neither ages make him exempt from repercussions. If a 9yo pro chess prodigy had cheated in a profession tournament he absolutely should of gotten temporary bans or fines. But even if a 60 yo chess prodigy used a chess engine in one online stakless match, other than a week chess.com ban I do nto see what sort of punishment would want to give them that would be reasonable.
What we are talking about here is a minor who admitted to using a chess engine in a meaningless online match 2 times. Like all the grandmasters don't play with chess engines just to see how they work.
True. I can agree with this. I guess I say fine in the sense that its more forgivable for a 12 year old to cheat. I would never suggest a 12 year old shouldn't be punished if caught in the act... or even retroactively.
This assertion keeps on being made and it seems almost deliberately obtuse to me.
If you do something bad when you are 17.9 should we wipe the slate clean once the odometer rolls over to exactly 18.0 where for some reason that age creates a solid barrier where the person emerges like a chrysalis and all their sins are washed clean?
And as a 50 year old, the difference between a 16 year old and a 19 year old are not very big. An unfortunate fact is that if you fuck up pretty big when you're 16 that people aren't going to trust you very much when you're 19. You need to do the time to build up more collateral. I've seen people who were assholes when they were teenagers change, but they didn't wake up on some magic birthday a new person. They were still assholes in their early 20s but their trajectory was such that by the time their early 30s came around they had changed themselves.
The rate at which we forgive and forget prior actions should decrease as someone ages in a monotonic way. Reason being an individual’s capacity and willingness to learn and change their values and behavior decreases with time. Sure, the 18yo cliff makes no sense.
50 year olds may be set in their ways because they don't see any need to change and what they've got going works for them, but you can change at any age.
When I said ‘generally’ I meant generally. Children “prosecuted as an adult” is a thing. I also said there’s a common belief in redemption, not automatic forgiveness.
As for the difference between a 16-year-old and 19 not being big, that probably just depends. At 19, I was absolutely mortified at things I did in high school.
I don't think it's unreasonable to issue a 5 year ban from competitive chess to a 16 year old who gets caught cheating online in a cash prize tournament. Hans is only 3 years past his admitted cheating event, and I don't think its unjust to say that his cheating was too recent to justify giving him a second chance.
He already admitted to cheating a lot. He didn’t say he cheated in two games, he said cheated at two times in his life. He even detailed how his second time was pumping up his rating, you can’t pump a rating with only one game. Sounds like if it went to 2020 then he would have been 17 at least, not 16 but that’s pretty close at least.
> “I cheated on random games on Chess.com. I was confronted. I confessed. And this is the single biggest mistake of my life. And I am completely ashamed. I am telling the world because I don’t want misrepresentations and I don’t want rumours. I have never cheated in an over-the-board game. And other than when I was 12 years old I have never cheated in a tournament with prize money.”
This report identifies 3 separate tournaments with prize money in 2020 alone (2 SCC Grand Prix, and the Pro Chess League) that he appears to have cheated in, blatantly contradicting what he previously said.
There are a few competitive sports where the same pattern occurs. Namely decentralized sports, particularly boxing where it's not rare for some elite athlete to be banned temporarily after testing positive for PEDs. Most bans are for 6-12 months which is a joke.
My guess is that the more decentralized a sport is, the more likely it is for cheating to occur and go unpunished. Chess is unofficially becoming a decentralized sport since the pandemic due to the shift to online playing. Even if some organizations claim to be in power, there is only so much they can do. Banning cheaters permanently may not even be possible.
> Most bans are for 6-12 months which is a joke.
An athlete's professional career is roughly ten years* with the majority of their earning potential to be an even smaller set of those years. A ban from being paid for 12 months may represent 10% or more of an athlete's career earning potential.
*Of course this varies a lot by sport, gymnastics careers are obviously very short, a golfer's career may be much longer.
Even worse, professional athletes fund full-time training through ways that wouldn't be available during a ban. Skip full-time training for a year and you'll probably not be competitive after.
Multiple governing bodies. For instance boxing has four major governing bodies and dozens of small organizations. Other than that every area has its own athletic commission that is allowed to freely interpret some rules.
I'm slightly confused about the relationship between chess.com and these tournaments. If he gets caught cheating at a FIDE tournament, they could do whatever they want -- ban him for life, whatever, it is up to them. If he gets caught cheating on an online game, whether it is chess.com or counterstrike, who cares? It is an unranked online game (or the ranking is tied to some account gamerscore thing).
Unless their chess.com scores feed into their FIDE ELO scores or something?
> If he gets caught cheating on an online game, whether it is chess.com or counterstrike, who cares?
Chess.com isn’t the yahoo chess web app or whatever, there’s more at stake there than “gamerscore”. Some of these 100 games were in online tournaments for cash prizes.
Just because it wasn’t a FIDE run tournament doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter or that no one cares. The chess.com Pro Chess League they suggest he cheated in 12 games of had a $100,000 prize fund.
You understand that this whole discussion is about how chess.com detected this at the time and booted him, right? They appear to be doing a better job of detecting cheating than OTB tournaments, which doesn’t say to me “anybody can cheat by using a computer”
Their statistical models aren't going to detect accurately a player getting help for a couple of moves during a game, which is already enough to make a big difference.
They may be able to detect consistent cheating over many games, but still, one can assume that cheating is pervasive in online platforms.
If you consider 17 an adult and that the report is correctly identifying those games. This is no different than cheating in a video game online. It’s playing random people from matchmaking for rating points tied to that game. Maybe there were multiple tournaments as well for small prizes (probably under $1000 prize money) if the report on the report is correct though. I’d compare it to an NBA player cheating in a pick up game of basketball.
His past cheating AND the statistical anomalies related to his fast progress may also be explained by cheating in an Occam’s Razor sort of way is what is raising the flags.
I don’t care one way or the other, but I’d assume the worst.
He's still a child. He cheated when he was 16 (now we have evidence that he cheated at 17 too), and he's only 19. I don't think a 5 year ban (or honestly, even a 10 year ban) is all that extreme.
> In pretty much everything else, you cheat, you're basically done.
The penalty for cheating in most major sports is way more lenient than you think. Most leagues will suspend you for a handful of games in the first instance. In the NBA for example you can be caught three times before being suspended for one season.
This is a super on-point and sharp critique based on the assertion that Michael Jordan's first retirement from the NBA to go play Minor League baseball was an under-the-table suspension for gambling on NBA games (dude has a legit problem) while playing in the NBA Championships. This happened right after a three-peat (3 Championships in a row).
And in one fell marketing miracle, the status quo and marketability of both the NBA and Michael Jordan was protected. One and a half years later, MJ "un-retired" to light up the league for another 3 straight championships.
Citation: Pete Rose, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Curt Schilling will never get in the Hall of Fame.
You're right that that's not "basically done," but once they're retired, HoF is all they have to look forward to. Being officially in disgrace is pretty done.
Yet I can cite hundreds of cases of cheating in all the major sports in which, yes, there was a suspension or other penalty, but the players or people involved were then allowed to participate again. The examples you cited are very extreme, but even in these cases, they don't support your argument. None of those players were removed from the game during their playing careers and barred. And again, those are just the most extreme cases. There are many, many less severe cases, all of which support my argument and not yours.
You might want to remove Schilling from your list, btw. He hasn't been accused of any cheating; instead, he did other embarrassing things.
Is there a single sport in the world where a player will get a lifetime ban for admitting to cheating in the past? All major ones will let you compete even after being caught doping/fixing a half dozen times in your career. The bar is a lot lower than you think.
Whatever happened during online play on a second rate chess site is hardly a reason to ban player from OTB events without evidence of cheating in such events.
chess.com is a first rate entity in the chess world (a peer of FIDE and lichess), and Hans was caught cheating in events that had cash prizes. Hans cheated for money, that's plenty of indication that he would cheat in more important situations as well.
Chess.com has no problem allowing Niemann to participate in tournaments after they allegedly 'caught' him, and they only became very principled after their business partner Carlsen had lost to Niemann and instigated the conflict in a very disingenuous way. In any court their testimony would be thrown out.
Also, he allegedly cheated for money at 12yo. Yeah, right, that's definitely a grave unforgivable sin that should ruin his whole career. /s
I had the same thought. I don't have a particularly strong opinion about whether chess players should be called athletes or not, but this was the first time that I had ever seen chess players referred to as athletes.
The first result when you google "Are chess players athletes" says no [1], but I realize that this is more of an opinion piece. I would be curious to hear what more members of the competitive chess community think of the designation as athletes.
Edit: Upon further googling, I have learned that the IOC recognizes chess as a sport. Reading up further on how the matches last for 7+ hours, and how important physical conditioning is, I think it's totally valid to refer to chess players as athletes. In different sports there is wide spectrum of physical and mental demands - and I think chess just falls on the incredibly-demanding-mentally-but-less-demanding-physically end of the spectrum.
A common definition is:
"Sport pertains to any form of competitive physical activity or game that aims to use, maintain, or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport
When I was in high school in the 70s, the school decided that chess was a sport and you could letter in it. One of the chess players took it to heart, got a letter jacket, put his chess letter on it, and wore it every day.
It's a real red flag that he plays stronger moves after the browser window loses focus. I'd argue that's much less circumstantial than anything else so far.
yeah exactly. if you're cheating online at a high-level, would this not be the exact first thing you'd think about dealing with? chess.com can have all the crazy algorithms in the world to try and figure out if you're playing like a human, but if you're tabbing out every time your opponent plays a move, you're giving the game away in move 1 (or - to take a more literal approach - whatever move takes you out of your opening repertoire...)
and yeah you could argue that if you're not into web dev it's not hyper obvious that websites are able to know when you lose focus on them, but I'd argue that it is fairly obvious. there are indications that should make it clear. facebook flashing notifications in their tab title until you click on them, to take a simple example.
Well, if you are just 16 you are bound to make some slip-ups like this due to having an incomplete idea of the possible "attack" surface that the defender can use (to accuse you of cheating).
Which shows ... I don't know ... naivety, or cockiness, or something. If I'm cheating at chess (or poker or whatever) online and I know that there are likely to be some form of anti-cheat scanning happening... why wouldn't you run your chess client on a computer beside you - then everything surrounding that is undetectable (processes, focus, CPU utilization, etc.)
People are still rather short-sighted when it comes to what a computer can do.
They can really only think in front of them. If I put information into this program, I get information out. They don't think that applications can monitor their own meta-state. Or the state of other applications.
So I'm not terribly surprised that he thought running the engine in another browser window would have been sufficient. He might have even had it open in "incognito mode". And since it's incognito, it can't be detected, right?
Most people don't realize that the online chat functions for a lot of customer service sites show every character you type, not when you hit 'enter' or 'send'.
Didn't know that. Is this really true? What would be the point of it?
When chatting with a customer support it's quite apparent the csr is involved in many chats at once; wouldn't it be quite taxing for them to have to monitor not just the responses but every keystroke of the people they interact with?
there are easily observed indications that websites can detect window focus. take facebook for example. if you get a notification while a facebook tab is open but not in focus, the tab title will irritatingly and eye-drawingly flash between "facebook" and "x messaged you" until you focus on the tab. or youtube. if you open a youtube video in the background it will not autoplay until you focus on that tab. these things are not hidden from the user
Easily observed to people who know what to look for or how these things work. I'm sure a mechanic would scoff at how many "obvious signs" the average driver misses about potential problems with their vehicle.
I kinda see what you’re saying, but I also really think that observing that websites often act differently when you’re not focused on them is a pretty standard-level observation to make even if you’re not a programmer
also knowing how an internal combustion engine works is not equivalent to knowing that html code goes in angle braces. it’s more equivalent to knowing that you need to use a certain type of wrench when working on a certain type of car (I don’t know if this is actually true because I don’t know how to fix cars, but it’s more equivalent)
>I also really think that observing that websites often act differently when you’re not focused on them is a pretty standard-level observation
Agreed, and I would guess that is the extent of what people do with that observation. They see it, and have no clue why or how or what that means. Is it only certain browsers that do it, or does it depend on if it's a phone or laptop? Maybe it's a AT&T service feature on phones now? Or maybe just iPhones do it. Maybe it's only on previously visited sites? Or maybe it's a virus or a scam of some sort.
People with no frame of reference see things very differently. It's a magic box.
The next 'move' for cheaters is to use chess computers in a way that passes 'Chess Turing Test' and makes cheating indistinguishable from normal human play under analysis.
When there is money in the game, there is incentive to cheat.
> The report says dozens of grandmasters have been caught cheating on the website, including four of the top-100 players in the world who confessed.
There are probably smart cheaters already playing who are able to evade detection.
Cheat detection isn't done by only by move analysis, but by an extensive profiling of a person and games based on many factors beyond even just the moves. For instance one of the easiest ways to catch a weak player cheating is move times. Such a player will have no idea whether a move is trivial or works only due to an exceptionally precise and lengthy series of counter-intuitive calculations that no human could do without a significant think. And so they'll tend to rely both in approximately the same amount of time.
Even during the Carlsen-Niemann game it was meta-factors that initially clued Carlsen in. Niemann was playing without any significant effort or tension, in spite of playing in a game where he was outplaying the world champion. And after the game he was unable to explain his own ideas, proposed ideas that were simply losing, referenced games that did not exist, and was generally (relative to the class of player here) clueless. None of that final section is definitive proof of cheating to say the least, but it helps create a probabilistic profile of a player (and a game).
The point of this is that even a computer that played human-like (which I would argue will not happen for the distantly foreseeable future), would be just one factor among many in busting cheaters. I expect this is why Magnus was also initially reluctant to directly accuse him of cheating. He felt he was cheating based on the meta-factors and probably got folks more capable than himself to evaluate the technical factors, and when that also came up as a redflag - yeah, the dude's a cheater.
> For instance one of the easiest ways to catch a weak player cheating is move times. Such a player will have no idea whether a move is trivial or works only due to an exceptionally precise and lengthy series of counter-intuitive calculations that no human could do without a significant think
Ok, but what prevents the helper to communicate the difficulty or the number of minutes to think-pretend as well as the move itself?
Everything that can be measured can and will be gamed. That's why anti-fraud units are so secretive.
There are always extra factors that can be discovered.
There was a video game speedrun cheating incident where the cheater was caught splicing. But their splices were perfect. No audio artifacts, no video artifacts, for a long time no evidence at all because the cheater perfectly conformed to all known cheat detection.
Then one day it was discovered that the loading animation was dependent on a frame counter that persisted across all game states. If the run wasn't spliced, the loading animation's current sprite should have matched a perfectly predictable pattern.
It didn't. But this counter/consistency wasn't discovered until much after the run was achieved, so the cheater had no way of avoiding detection.
This is basically what happened with Hans. Hans knew all the traditional methods for detecting chess cheating successfully evaded them.
but new techniques for cheat detection were developed in direct response to accusations against Hans, and Hans had not perfectly emulated a prodigy human with his cheating. He did things that only an assisted player would be capable of.
This is exactly how I get clued in on how someone is cheating in a shooting game I play.
You can tell how experienced someone is based off the gun they use (some are stronger than others), whether they use cover or just run out into open spaces and shoot, how they move, whether they use 'gadgets' like grenades, and so on. A lot of novice players don't even use the sprint function to run.
When someone who literally just walks around the map but can laser everyone with headshots (which have a significant damage multiplier)? They're cheating.
The strongest players would be the "best" cheaters but also the least likely to cheat. Top n players for small n would only need one "this move is important" hint per game to significantly improve their rating. Very hard to detect of course. But when you hear the actual top players talk about chess they genuinely seem interested in playing the game and not so much driven by chasing some accomplishment of winning. It's quite hard to get to that level without having the genuine interest.
But also their games are subject to the most scrutiny and study and they themselves will spend a lot of time publicly talking about and analyzing their own games, those "cheat" moves would stand out as ones which were hard to see and had bad explanations after a while.
A strong chess player would have to weigh the risk of losing all their progress and reputation if caught cheating.
After this current situation, I expect the penalties for being caught cheating will be severe. Whether the cheater is banned from all future events or not, nobody will want to support them, nobody will want to associate with them, and they will essentially be cast out of the entire chess world.
> And after the game he was unable to explain his own ideas, proposed ideas that were simply losing, referenced games that did not exist, and was generally (relative to the class of player here) clueless
Aside from Niemann's case, how is it strategically beneficial to a chess player to provide the "inside scoop" on his plays?
You're presupposing incompetence, but another explanation would be a deliberate strategy to throw off future opponents.
> Niemann was playing without any significant effort or tension, in spite of playing in a game where he was outplaying the world champion.
Carlsen was making mistakes. That wasn't his best game at all. Are we sure we aren't talking of this because someone's ego was hurt?
> And after the game he was unable to explain his own ideas, proposed ideas that were simply losing,
That doesn't mean anything at all
> referenced games that did not exist,
That did exist close enough to the period he mentioned. Remembering the position and analysis is necessary, remembering when exactly this position happened and even between whom exactly is utterly useless.
> and was generally (relative to the class of player here) clueless.
He didn't make a clueless impression to me. But I'm not Carlsen's fanboy whos accusations can cloud my own reasoning. If I was, I'd probably believe that Niemann is a proven cheater and would look for facts to confirm that bias.
Whatever happened when he was a kid and played online is absolutely irrelevant in otb tournament that had anticheating measures which organisers considered to be sufficient to stop cheating.
This is exactly right and confirmed by at least 20 GMs as well as Regan.
But once something is leaked to the WSJ, people believe it and downvote based on "authority". Which is why the leak occurred just before the US championships for maximum impact.
> makes cheating indistinguishable from normal human play under analysis.
From what I understand, Niemann got into trouble because people thought that he wasn't able to adequately provide the analysis i.e. the reasoning behind some of his own moves. You'd need a live auxiliary AI to tutor the cheater in how to explain why a particular move was made.
Well, that's only one of many reasons. GM Hikaru was laughing at him on his channel when replaying that interview with Hans - a lot of his answers were strange and deflective. A player at this level should be able to fluently describe their analysis at any move in the game.
At one point he described one of his own moves as "a weird move" without offering any explanation, sounding more as if he was observing the move rather than being the one who had actually analyzed it and chosen to play it!
> The next 'move' for cheaters is to use chess computers in a way that passes 'Chess Turing Test' and makes cheating indistinguishable from normal human play under analysis.
If it's indistinguishable from human play, then there is no advantage to cheating with a chess engine. The point of cheating is that the chess engine is stronger than human play and will give you mistake-free moves that put you in winning positions. If all your moves are equivalent to human moves, then you're playing no better than a human, at whatever level that is, let's assume GM 2700-2900. So what advantage does a human GM get from doing that?
I believe the critical aspect here is not the specific cheating that chess.com found, but that this appears to contain written statements by Niemann himself which contradict his public statement.
And if it now turns out that he lied in his confession, too, then that's a really bad look w.r.t. his trustworthiness.
- "written statements by Niemann himself which contradict his public statement"
The article doesn't say that Niemann's admissions to Chess.com were about cheating in prize-money tournaments, nor the other disputed facts. The spreadsheet of incidents they show us isn't what Niemann admitted to cheating in, but was Chess.com's internal anticheat flagged -- we can tell because they label it as "suspect games" and it uses qualifiers like "likely". The inferences that the cheating was for real money prizes, or at an age older than 16, or on for-profit Twitch streams, are drawn from from this list of suspected games.
We don't currently know what facts Niemann confessed too: it's not public whether the facts Niemann is allegedly lying about overlap with the facts Niemann admitted to in writing in 2020. WSJ may have evidence that's dispositive on this point (i.e. those Slack texts), but they haven't printed it yet.
Confessions have an important role in forgiveness, but given that, the public arena is never the right place for confessions; i.e., do you expect someone to say "Actually, I also hit on another employee last May." That would get you nailed to a cross and no lawyer would ever advise that except on the calculus of further damage control.
Computers have “nearly infallible tactical calculation,” the report says, and are capable of beating even the best human every single time. The report says dozens of grandmasters have been caught cheating on the website, including four of the top-100 players in the world who confessed.
I can't really comment it, but I leave it here if you haven't read the article.
I can 100% garenty you that anyone interested enouhg to get into the top 50k chess players is going to be interested enough in chess to want to play around with a chess engine, and why not use it in the most convenient way possible, to play a few chess.com matches with it.
How aren't they impartial? They are obviously an interested party, but do they have an incentive to skew the facts? If so in which direction?
Not doubting you, just genuinely interested.
As mentioned in the article they are in talks to buy Magnus's app Play Magnus.
That being said, if they have literal screenshots of the discussions between Niemann and chess.com admitting to cheating and appealing the ban, those seem like smoking guns in addition to all this other analysis
>if they have literal screenshots of the discussions between Niemann and chess.com admitting to cheating
Screenshots are easy enough to fake perfectly that if I didn't trust a party to give an honest summary of the discussion and (as in the current stake) thousands of dollars or more is at stake, then I wouldn't trust screenshots either.
Screenshots in this case are perfectly reliable. If they are literally faking screenshots of what Hans said, it'd be incredibly easy for him to prove it and sue them for the falsification.
Can you explain how Hans could prove that screenshots are fake? I suppose you mean Hans could subpoena records from his own ISP or Chess.com or Chess.com's ISP that reveal the content of Hans's communication; right?
He can subpoena records if he files a lawsuit, convinces a judge that the lawsuit shouldn't be immediately dismissed and survives arguments by opposing counsel that the records should be protected from the discovery process. I.e., not "incredibly easy", as you say. Also, ISPs usually claim in response to subpoenas that they do not retain the bodies of emails and other "contents" of communications I gather.
Also, Hans (initially) didn't want chess.com to be able to publish the communications, so he might've avoided using gmail in favor of some method that is guaranteed not to leave a verifiable record.
I would say that more than relationships with Magnus, chess.com are not impartial in the same way that the tabloid press are not impartial. controversy -> attention -> money. I bet their brand recognition is through the fucking roof after being in international news and spread all over tiktok for a couple of weeks
this isn't to say that I don't think Niemann cheated. I think he probably did, just that chess.com is getting great publicity from all this and it would be un-shocking for them to want to string it out a bit longer. it would be poor business not to, in fact
Its not that much, but the article ignores the fact that chess.com knew all of this and invited him to their tournaments. Then once the Singfield cup event happened and Magnus got mad they banned him.
They have been selectively releasing information about him and his one time coach for a few weeks now. While in the past they have never, not once, released any of their cheating information. Why now?
If they dont release the report they are talking about then this article is nothing.
Apparently they have a policy of only dealing internally, with their own online systems. Basically they just quietly ban players caught cheating, and don't report it anywhere normally.
Even now, they haven't released this publicly yet.
Serious question: why isnt online play excluded at this level of competition? Why not restrict these "pro" matches to regulated conditions as in any other pro competition?
We dont generally place full trust in online job interviews so why lower the bar to "honor system" when it comes to the most cheat-friendly competition in the universe?
Because it takes a lot of time and money to set up an in-person tournament. A virtual one is basically free and will get a lot more participation from top players.
To be fair, what kicked out this whole saga was a real life match between him and Magnus Carlson. There are plenty of theories out there about how he could've cheated, some more absurd than others.
Also, there has been history of people cheating in IRL games by taking many bathroom breaks and looking up solutions while on break.
So, I'm not much of a chess person, much less a competitive chess person.
Can the "over the board" cheating potential be reduced with a 5 minute "tape delay" of broadcasting the game? Is that enough time to thwart the influence of an external signal?
Seems to me the only way this person can redeem himself is through over the board play under strict conditions ("Come dressed in shorts, a t-shirt and sandals").
But I don't know if how long they're allowed per move, and if 5 minutes is enough time to thwart external influence.
That's a question I was going to ask. Sure, not _every_ move is 5 min, but wouldn't a 5 min delay almost ensure any cheater would play mostly more than 5 min, each turn? (besides some simple moves, ofc)
Or is it that they only need to cheat at a few points where taking more than 5 min wouldn't be abnormal at all?
The latter. The article briefly points out that cheating on only a few moves can give one grandmaster a significant advantage, which makes cheating difficult to detect. In discussion of a previous article, some HN commenters suggested that even having a binary “be careful here” signal based on a chess engine could make a big difference.
The delay would have to be a lot longer than 5 minutes. It's not uncommon for players to take 30+ mins on a single move in OTB chess.
Also, if your cheating device allows you to somehow input chess positions, then you wouldn't even require an external signal. Though it would be extremely impressive if somebody could pull that off.
If blitz type game where players have <5 minutes to decide a move, then yes, delayed broadcast might be effective. Other game types allow for >5 minutes per move so tape delay would be ineffective since cheater could just stall.
Cheating type also matters. There's external help (friend in the audience communicating 1 or more bits of information via auditory, optical, radio, or some other signal), and there's also internal help (raspberry pi zero + battery and pressure sensor embedded in your shoe or something). There are so many ways to cheat that it's hard to enumerate all of them let alone prevent all of them.
It might work if there are no spectators live in person. Otherwise you can easily have someone in person relaying the information to a computer, or you have to search everyone, not just the players.
If it happened, I don't think it happened realtime.
Given sufficient notoriety and money involved, it would be possible to just hire someone to essentially run a training model of alpha zero against moves specifically selected to be likely to be made by Magnus, and then all you really need is memorization of key scenarios (which for a good chess person should be no problem) to identify the right move to make.
That specific scenario is just considered normal good prep - they will even play games against people who "play" their opponent's openings. That's all well known but you can't memorize enough to make a major difference.
Which is odd, considering how many games Hans played at 90-100% match for chess engine moves, which seems to be a lot more than other GMs, where typically their best games are in the 70% range. See Hikaru and other chess YT channels.
While it says Niemann’s improvement has been “statistically extraordinary.” Chess.com noted that it hasn’t historically been involved with cheat detection for classical over-the-board chess, and it stopped short of any conclusive statements about whether he has cheated in person. Still, it pointed to several of Niemann’s strongest events, which it believes “merit further investigation based on the data.” FIDE, chess’s world governing body, is conducting its own investigation into the Niemann-Carlsen affair.
I imagine everything is being analyzed but given that cheating in 11 online tournaments is enough to invalidate someone’s career it makes for an appropriate topic of article.
Why don't cheaters just use two machines or even just their phone and a laptop? The evidence is often around other processes or browser tabs running on their device (and in this case also focus loss) but an immediate thought must be to simply use multiple devices.
Yeah, I think fail to consider survivor bias to be relevant in cases like this.
It's also why there are occasional surges in cheating (or crime, or whatever) after significant instances - subsequent examination then finds other cases because it's now looking for them, but the reality is the cheating (or whatever) was always there and just not noticed.
No, the evidence is usually around analysis of the moves and how they compare to those generated by chess engines and how the same player has played in the past. The mechanics of the cheating are mostly irrelevant.
You're totally right, some of the articles I looked at focused on tangential causes... whereas analysis of moves compared to decisions by a vastly superior system has got to be the smoking gun.
I suppose new algorithms will be designed or trained to account for the user's performance history.
One of the reporters adds a detail that several from the WSJ article means 6 (which we all would have immediately known had chess.com simply published on their site instead of leaking the 72-page report):
>The report made no conclusions about Niemann's in-person games. But it also flagged his play from six over-the-board events, saying those merit further investigation.
It is a premature conclusion that Hans was cheating in this game. Let the proper process play out, whatever that may be. Magnus has not presented any actual evidence. Chess.com is not an impartial player here in this drama and cannot be considered source-of-truth (they just purchased Magnus' startup for ~$80M; their fortunes are linked and would be subject to similar biases). WSJ article has not really done a deep dive.
As Magnus pointed out, the issue is more about how can you trust that a regular cheater is not cheating in a particular game if the regulators aren't doing enough to prevent it.
"I would never, could even fathom doing it, in a real game" .. well, that's a lie, considering he already admitted to doing it in games with monetary prizes when he was younger.
Noob here: how did he cheat without getting caught? did he memorize chess engine responses? Or did he have a secret computer somewhere feeding him the moves?
I see. Yes the article which I read later, did mention players looking at gadgets in the toilet...among other techniques. I guess the future of chess championships would be interesting...
GothamChess coverage on YouTube [1]. Part of this is showing and reading the article itself so if the WSJ paywall is getting in your way you can read it in the video.
How is this person like at all able to even compete over the board? Seems like this type of history and even a history of cheating at all should just be a permanent nix.
He is a genuinely very good player. That also makes it potentially very hard to detect if he has indeed cheated. His current coach has been quoted in a past interview saying how easy it would be to cheat undetected if you were already at GM level. You only need the engine to guide you in 2-3 moves to swing a game.
Also, before you ask, "if he is already at GM level, why does he feel the need to cheat?" the answer is that the stronger players and athletes often feel more inclined to cheat because they have such high expectations of themselves. Past cheating scandals in sports have proven this.
True, in pro cycling over the last few decades it became almost mandatory (unless you were phenomenally gifted) to take PEDs in order to be able to compete.
The difference between being in a top team and a lower ranked team is measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars. Riders who spent 10-15 years of their childhood training to be a pro were faced with a difficult choice - cheat and realize your dream, or stay clean and walk away from the sport.
You can run a chess engine that can beat any human on a small portable device, so external communication wouldn't be necessary. Perhaps combined with a metal detector it could work? Honestly though I think the more significant reason is that that would require building the cages, and would prevent live audiences.
Not a majority shareholder, majority would be 50%+. He holds around 20% if I recall correctly. It's still a large portion, but it was outlined specifically in the article that he was not included in this investigation and didn't influence it.
And it’s disingenious to suggest that he’s actively trying to destroy Hans’ career because his ego couldn’t stand losing to him in that OTB game, because it’s an extremely serious allegation from human perspective.
In case you’re looking for whether this says anything about the butt plug allegations, this report does not. It only concerns cheating on an online platform, not in person cheating
The chess.com campaign continues. 100 games are nothing online, Carlsen/Firouzja play that in a single night. The headline is pure propaganda and omits the word "online".
In fact, the article tries to paint Niemann as a liar while the purported facts pretty much match what he admitted to. One cheating in a titled tournament at age 12 and multiple cheats at the beginning of 2020. He said he was 16, so he was barely 17 according to the article. That isn't a lie, that can easily happen in an interview.
If that is all that chess.com has, their behavior is extremely poor. Also, what about all those other cheating titled players who did not have the misfortune to win against multi-million asset Carlsen?
It is time for Europeans to send GDPR requests for cheating scores etc. and terminate their accounts. The risk is too great.
Likely, because he was thinking of something else. It happens often when playing weaker opponents, you are so concentrated on some genius master plan to defeat an opponent, that when an opponent does something dumb you fail to see it immediately. Of course, my lichess rating is slightly below Carlsen's so I'm probably not the world's best expert on such things.
(I don't quite understand what you mean by 'those conversation would never have happened .. ')
Did I miss where cheating online is somehow not as bad as cheating in person? I understand it's harder to cheat in person, but I never thought it was "worse" to cheat in person because it's the worst thing you can do to your opponents in either an online, or an in-person game.
You miss that 100 classical games OTB are an eternity, and 100 online blitz games are nothing.
And yes, while cheating online is shabby, hardly anyone took online chess seriously before the big money tournaments started during the pandemic.
And that the whole chess.com affair is a side show that is exploited for streamer content and clicks. The relevant issue is cheating or not cheating in the Sinquefield cup.
A cheater is a cheater. They are making a choice to cheat. It's not an accident. They know it's wrong, they know their conduct is hurtful. It doesn't make any sense to say that no one took it serious. I'm sure people that lost to him would feel otherwise. If he's so good why would he even bother cheating in tournaments?
Cheating at 3+2 games while streaming? How's it is even possible to input all moves/positions into a chess program in parallel too main game and also while commenting? IMO it is impossible without some very specialized software or external assistance who would do the clicks. And how does he cheat in over the board events?
Things that are easy for some members of HN crowd are likely not that easy for a 19yo person who's only notable achievement in life so far is being really good at chess (well, presumably). Such software also doesn't explain his OTB results, which are consistent with his online results.
Some OTB tournaments allow players to go to the bathroom with their phone, others allow audience in same room - so an accomplice (such as Hans' coach Maxim Dlugy - another admitted cheat) could relay moves via signal. I've seen suggestion on Hiraku's channel that current scanning for players for communication devices is sub-par, although Hans has offered to play naked to disprove that theory (some porno site is calling his bluff by offering him $1M to actually do it). Anal beads? I dunno ...
Magnus has estimated it would usually only take one or two computer corrections per game for himself to play perfectly, so we're not talking about every move, just at key points. Apparently even just an indication that there is some key/winning move at a given point, without indicating what it is, is enough for the player to stop and put in the time to find it.
I don't know how market leading chess cheating software works, but it's not that hard to imagine that it just captures the screen, or scrapes the moves in any number of ways automatically is it? I'm sure it's not needed to manually type in all the moves.
As to how he'd cheat over the board, that's the big question. There are a couple of theories floating around, some more realistic than others, but if we knew for sure than this whole debacle would already be over.
Anyway his over the board results are more or less consistent with his online results, so either he has invented some cheating method that had evaded detection for many years at top level events, or that he is really good on his own.
I mean, probably the worst way to cheat is 'mindlessly'. If you're doing nothing more than 'transcribing' moves from one client to the other, sure. But if I'm cheating and trying to figure out maximum ROI, I'm looking at what the computer did for me, trying to understand it and figure it out. That way I can learn and get better myself, as well as talk/bluff intelligently about why "I" might have made a certain move.
3+2 is a lot of time to input the moves several times over and prepare coffee in the meantime. Seriously, it's not a slightest problem for a competent online blitz player.
OTB cheating: there are many possible ways. The simplest one being having a script reading the moves from the live broadcast and feeding them to an engine and then sending the info to the player. Hans' strength magically decreased in the Sinquefield cup once broadcast delay was introduced for example.
> Hans' strength magically decreased in the Sinquefield cup once broadcast delay was introduced for example.
So you discount a possibility that the controversy and allegations against him had at least some effect in him playing worse in the Sinquefield Cup?
Anyway, there were studies out there that there were no statistical differences in his rating gains in tournaments broadcasted with delays and without it. Study by Kenneth Regan also found no irregularities in his play, so the only 'evidence' of him using computer help are allegations by a company that is in business relationship with Carlsen, and his 'bad' analysis in post game interview. I'm not very impressed.
> Anyway, there were studies out there that there were no statistical differences in his rating gains in tournaments broadcasted with delays and without it.
It is exactly the opposite of what you claim: there is a massive statistical aberration in his performance of broadcast tournaments vs. non-broadcast. He is 200 Elo higher in the former.
Because I have seen these claims you are referring to and they were refuted by a more full analysis. This is a carefully doctored result that took only a slice of data 2019-2020, and if you look at a bigger picture, which is actually in a reply to a tweet linked in the post you are referring to, irregularities even out:
Well, I'm probably into it because I don't believe in presumption of guilt over vague allegations. Also, someone is _wrong_ on the internet, you know.
What is happening is nothing but bullying, Magnus is using his popularity and fanbase to destroy am opponent and his fans are like a mob on a witch hunt who are out for blood, demanding severe punishment. I believe it is unfair and an aberration of sports conduct and my ideas of justice. Just crank up anti-cheating measures to 11 at the next OTB event, and see how Hans will play.
That's not a "more full analysis". It's a) not a statistical analysis, b) not "more full" as it's covering a totally different time period rather than being a superset, c) I don't really understand why the "Tournaments" and "no live games" section have totally different columns.
(Oh, haha, 2 out of the 3 tournaments under "no live games" from that tweet are in the small set that the chess.com report says merit investigation.)
Yet earlier in this thread, you were incredulous about even the possibility that a chess game state could be entered into software or communicated during play. Which is clearly a ludicrously blind statement. So pardon us if it's hard to be particularly impressed by, well, whatever you are impressed or not impressed by. Because you don't seem to have much grasp on the basics involved, here.
This statement came from an experiment I conducted. I just tried playing lichess 3+2 game while running a nearby chess.com/analysis on a second display. ...
... and I was barely keeping up with all the clicks, and in the endgame was unable to keep up. So no, efficient cheating in fast games requires at least a special training, and better some automated software to keep up with the moves and to communicate best moves back to player.
I don't claim to have great cheating skills, yet, I'm pretty sure that doing such operations while streaming is very difficult and would be easily visible to the audience. They likely require an assistant or some specialized software.
It is very easy indeed. Stockfish would be an immense help. Best moves are calculated progressively, that is they are refined over a few seconds. Inexperienced players are given away by delaying over obvious moves waiting for the best move. It is definitely not rocket science. You can download and run Stockfish yourself. I think chess.com possibly runs it in the browser.
I know the basics how to do it, it is rather obvious. I just feel that operating two boards manually is really a chore, and definitely not while streaming.
StarCraft players also aren't really thinking, all micro is mostly almost reflexes. Chess does require way more analysis, so if you are on a very short time limit, checking up with an engine and operating it would eat all your time.
Interesting piece. It highlights how it's hard to differentiate between someone genuinely playing at a level higher, and a cheater. A few things I noted from this article:
1. The driving force behind the original accusations is that Magnus felt his opponent wasn't "exerting" himself enough, compared to other young prodigies.
2. Chess.com's case is that his results are "statistically extraordinary."
3. There is a history of cheating
4. Allegations that he admitted cheating privately (though it's not clear to whom)
1, 2, and 3 could easily be cause for suspicion; however, that's not the same as evidence. The one crucial piece absent from this article is any suggestion of how he cheated.
Without providing a means, I find this piece premature and questionable. That said, I don't know anything about chess, lot alone cheating at the master level. So maybe the "how" is common sense and not difficult?
And of course, there's also this:
> The report also addresses the relationship during the saga between Carlsen and Chess.com, which is buying Carlsen’s “Play Magnus” app for nearly $83 million.
FIDE are doing their own investigation, but the chess.com cheat detection algorithm is apparently well regarded, and online cheating is obviously very simple to do. He's admitted cheating online as recently as 3 years ago. If he can reasonably be proved to having cheated online more often and more recently than he has admitted to, then that gives good reason to suspect he'll have cheated OTB too given the chance.
There are various ways one might cheat OTB, from taking one's phone the bathroom in the middle of a tournament (some allow this!!), to getting signals from an accomplice who is seeing the game in real time. Signals could be electronic to some device on the player, or visual from an audience member in the room. It's been proposed to introduce a 15-30 min broadcast delay in tournament games as one way to prevent cheating. Some tournaments scan the players for electronic devices - not sure how foolproof this is.
> it's hard to differentiate between someone genuinely playing at a level higher, and a cheater
Actually, it isn't! Great chess bots have very different play styles and there are people currently studying them. It's very unlikely someone will come out of nowhere so to speak (as in, not on some amazing rise as a young child) with these types of techniques. I'm nowhere near these levels of chess players but have played competitively for my county as a school-kid and still play a couple hundred games a year so have some idea.
A smart cheater isn't just going to replicate bot moves and make it easy to detect. They may just use it to decide between 2 moves they were 50/50 on already. Do this 2 or 3 times and it would make a big difference at the grand master level. This would be quite hard to detect.
