A key fact to understand in thinking about cheating in over the board chess: a strong player can defeat a much stronger opponent with just 1-3 hints per game indicating the strongest move. For example, most chess experts agree that a ~2600 rated player with 2-3 hints at key moments per game would be expected to beat a ~2800 rated player. Many people might assume that a cheater needs guidance every move, thereby requiring a potentially more obvious cheating mechanism. That is not the case.
Also, clever cheating devices have been found in over the board chess competitions. So, this is possible. Moreover, one needn't carry a device on themselves. A cheater may have accomplices providing hints, if they carry a device.
It will be interesting to see how chess tournaments, as well as FIDE, chess.com, and other major chess institutions react to this situation. The potential for cheating has now been brought to the absolute forefront of chess discussion. And Carlsen's actions have been questioned by FIDE in recent interviews, with FIDE staff condemning "vigilantism" of a kind.
Some set of resolutions seems necessary--perhaps standards for security in major chess tournaments, perhaps an alliance to share cheating or reliability data amongst major chess operations, perhaps a standard term in major chess tournament agreements that no previously identified cheaters (online or otherwise) will be allowed to play, and perhaps sanctions in some form against Carlsen (or Niemann, if concrete evidence against him emerges).
> Also, clever cheating devices have been found in over the board chess competitions
The most convincing candidate for such a device I've seen is an Illuminati Thumper Pro hidden in Hans's shoe: https://illuminati-magic.com/products/thumper. If you watch the footage of him getting scanned before his match with Alireza (and, crucially, before Magnus announced he was dropping), there are a couple of subtle things that are consistent with this theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIulWkTHuu0:
1. He swallows (seemingly nervously) at 4 seconds shortly before his left shoe is scanned.
2. As the left shoe is being scanned, there are 2 beeping noises that at least to me, sound like they are coming from the wand, but are seemingly ignored by the wander. The same beeps do not repeat when his right shoe is scanned (that is, it's not just metal parts built into the shoes themselves). Two caveats to this part: First, I've heard differing opinions on whether the thumper will trigger metal detectors. Second, it's possible (even if unlikely IMO) that those beeps are not from that wand and it's just a coincidence that another wand or object beeped - since we can't see the wand in frame.
3. At 1:17 he starts nervously fidgeting with the credit card as the RF scanner gets close to his left foot and noticeably slows down when the scanner switches from his left foot to the right foot, and appears to stop completely as soon as the scanner is moving up away from his right foot. The RF scanner, to my understanding, would only detect devices that are actively transmitting which the thumper shouldn't need to do at all if Hans were using purely to receive engine moves/hints during the but the fact that it theoretically could transmit would explain why he'd be nervous about getting scanned anyway.
Of course none of these observations are proof but they sure look suspicious to me.
You don't need something that transmits if you're searching for bug-like devices or any general integrated circuits with a nonlinear junction detector:
I am very far removed from anything related to Chess, but if they want to get serious about this they should hire people who specialize in the federal-contracting adjacent field of TSCM (technical surveillance countermeasures).
I also think that people putting a lot of focus into shoes or other clothing articles underestimate the motivation and capability of people to use the traditional "prison wallet" method of concealing things.
The wiki said that it doesn't work against shielded electronics, however who knows how accurate that actually is. I really enjoyed the anecdote about the US embassy in Moscow having diodes embedded in the cement throughout to make finding actual bugs much harder.
With that nest of hair I wonder maybe he disassembles the device and puts small parts in various locations, the most detectable in the shoe or "the pocket".
Someone familiar with slight of hand could comfortably scratch here and there while dropping pieces in a 'build' pocket.
You've seen the film The Man with the Golden Gun ? A cufflink here, a pen there, that pack of chewing gum... assembled together could be a cheating device.
I love it. The idea that someone would undergo training as a magician in order to cheat at chess is just hilarious! It’s not totally absurd though, given the history of cheating (as well as espionage) in sport.
The tricks people have pulled to cheat in baseball and (NFL) football are similarly amusing!
Doesn’t seem absurd at all to me. There might not be as much money in chess cheating as other scams but someone could be motivated to just become known as one of the best chess players.
>I also think that people putting a lot of focus into shoes or other clothing articles underestimate the motivation and capability of people to use the traditional "prison wallet" method of concealing things.
I felt silly for even thinking this, but seeing as you've mentioned it. It would be so hilarious if true considering he has offered to play naked[1] to prove his innocence!
You miss the vitally important point: they weren't needed in the game in question, so we don't even get to the point where fanciful theorising is relevant.
Magnus didn't play particularly well and Hans played ok. This was not an example of a superhuman intelligence passing hints to overcome Magnus at his best.
Understated part of Magnus’ play is that he may have been playing a worse line that should have pushed Hans out of theory, but apparently didn’t.
I don’t totally buy Hans didn’t prepare the weird line, but it’s worth calling out; it’s at least marginally possible that Magnus out himself in an unwinnable position on purpose, but couldn’t convert it.
> Magnus didn't play particularly well and Hans played ok.
Everyone says this, but do you really know? Those statements are after-the-fact observations of engine evaluations. They don't speak to the amount of mental work that Hans would have had to put in to play optimally (or 'ok' as you say) in those positions.
You might find yourself making the same remarks when looking at the post-game analysis of any top player against an engine. Everyone crumples eventually against perfect play.
Yah, even to club level players, Magnus played a bad game. Hans had nowhere close to perfect play ( I think the stock fish analysis says it’s close to 70% best moves, which is equivalent to Hans rating ). As a club level player, it blows my mind how many people are siding with Magnus.
: edit, typo
> They don't speak to the amount of mental work that Hans would have had to put in to play optimally (or 'ok' as you say) in those positions.
Yes, they do. When Magnus makes poor choice - not giving himself an advantage or playing moves giving black an advantage - it makes it easier for black. That’s the whole point.
No, that is not how that works. An engine evaluation saying that a position is better for black does not mean that it is easier for a human to play that position. Easy to play and winning for an engine are orthogonal concepts.
Putting your opponent in positions that are better according to the engine but only with engine-like perfect play is a strategy at the highest levels of chess. Because the move is objectively worse, it won't be played, because it's not played, your opponent won't know it, because they don't know it, you'll play it better, then you win.
Even better, in that video he has a pack of gum that sets off the sensor, the security guard takes it, finishes the scan, and then gives it back! Obviously not proof of cheating but how hard would it have been to hide a device in that pack of gum?
is there any thinking on how many bits of information do you need to cheat, and how many can be communicated via thumper?
e.g. is the bit of information "move the knight" aka theres only about 4 bits of info, or is it "move the knight to E6" which is a good deal more bits, that could be lossy/error prone.
just on the surface of it, i dont see how this thing could give enough info but i suppose with a loooot of training you could improve the info transfer rate?
Here's a relevant quote from Magnus regarding cheating:
"I would just needed to cheat one or two times during a match, and I would not even need to be given moves, just the answer on which move was way better, or here there is a possibility of winning and here you need to be more careful. That is all I would need in order to be almost invincible."
Even just 1 bit - an indication to be careful - would be enough to boost the strength of a GM. An accomplice coughing in the background to let you know there's something to watch for. For a strong player - and there's no doubt that Niemann is a strong player, the question is just how strong - that's all they need to avoid making mistakes. GMs can solve insanely hard puzzles, because they know it's a puzzle and has a specific solution. Same thing with 1 bit of info.
Of course, realistically they could simply use Morse code instead of "bits" and transmit two squares (just 4 Morse "letters").
yes but against magnus, who is supposedly two levels above Hans, this is not just a one move cheat, he'd have to cheat + have a continuous absence of mistakes, which is an awful lot of information to transmit.
i dont have a horse in this race i just like thinking about things in terms of information theory since this is a remarkable applied case
another way to decide this - have them play blitz (where the moves are way too fast for info transmission to happen), and see if the skill level scales accordingly?
have them play blitz (where the moves are way too fast for info transmission to happen), and see if the skill level scales accordingly?
Not a fair contest. There are plenty of top classical chess players who are weaker in blitz and vice versa. It’s a different skillset. Classical is all about preparation for the opening followed by some deep thinking in the midgame. Blitz is all about pattern recognition and the ability to simplify down to an ending where you can blitz out the exact solution from a database.
It's true that some people are worse at blitz, but if Niemann's OTB blitz rating is as good as his OTB rating at slower time controls, that's evidence against him cheating ... at least in ways that materially affect his rating. I guess it would be possible to cheat with an engine tuned to your actual rating just to make it less stressful.
Well, even endgames with as few as 5 pieces on the board are beyond what a human can solve with memorization. I don't disagree that blitz is mostly pattern recognition and rapid tactical thinking, but that applies all the way down to the end.
magnus completely destroyed hans in two games, as black. I think the ease with which magnus took hans apart in these beach games, presumably added to his suspicion when hans played so much better in the Sinquefield cup.
Eh casual play has so many factors. I wouldn't put much weight on how badly a gm loses on the beach. For example, drugs could have been involved.
I do think Hans is cheating, but I think the proof will lie in statistical analysis of his games and demonstrating that he has an unusual (>3200 rated) propensity to clutch out specific moves. I think everyone suspects at this point that if Hans is cheating, its only a handful of moves per game.
>this is not just a one move cheat, he'd have to cheat + have a continuous absence of mistakes
Blunders are exactly what a device like the one described would seriously help with. If the buzz means both "there is an only move here and it's not immediately obvious" and "at least one of the natural moves here is a blunder or very inaccurate" then you need to just send a buzz and you've probably cut inaccuracies significantly. That said, a very simple communication device like this is probably badly hurt by a 15 minute delay.
> at least one of the natural moves here is a blunder
Interesting, I'm not sure if a computer has the ability to recognize something as a "natural move but also a blunder." It would require a very human-like way of thinking about moves, which computers don't generally have.
Anyone 1500+ can recognize the natural move--that's what makes it natural.
Probably the easiest case of "natural move but blunder" is anything that is a top 3 engine move when looking 3-5 moves deep, but losing significantly on deeper evaluation.
Also, this sort of categorization is at the heart of how chess puzzle collections are automatically assembled. A good chess puzzle contains an unnatural move that wins--the exact opposite of the natural but blunder. Chess sites scan their online play databases for these all the time, and serve them up as puzzles.
> he'd have to cheat + have a continuous absence of mistakes, which is an awful lot of information to transmit.
Perhaps a top-level player can jump to a higher level if they can stop worrying about coming up with brilliances in the macro strategy, and instead focus entirely on making their micro-level play spotless.
This is the opposite of what a computer-assisted player would do. Computer chess engines (generally speaking, somewhat less true of the latest generation) are not great at high level strategy but will never miss a tactic (micro level play).
ELO gives you a statistical evaluation of how likely victory is for one of the player. Hans rating means he has non insignificant chance of winning against Magnus.
Hans can win without cheating as this last game proves. There is not a shred of evidence against him after all.
Sounds like not just the players need to be checked for cheating devices, but the audience too. Or the players have to play in a faraday cage without an audience.
It's not going to make the game more fun, but it's probably necessary.
From what I understand you only need one bit. The assistance doesn't need to be "move piece P to square S", but "this position is critical, if you spend extra time exploring here you will find a winning move".
As these players are on timers there is a race against a clock. So if you know where to focus your time/effort you can easily gain an advantage.
Just "e6" would likely be enough context in most situations. Sometimes only one piece can legally move there. Sometimes it's obvious which piece should move there once the position is pointed out.
I watched the livestreams of Andrea Botez's games in Vegas. Something I was really struck by is even though she's not a GM strength player, her mental board visualization skills are way up there. She did post game debriefs on the streams where she went rapid fire through hundreds of variations with her cohost just verbally. She'd go through them faster than the host could click to show chat at times.
Now imagine what people like the Super GMs are capable of.
They put a number of mid-game positions on the board, and Magnus was able to guess the players, tournament, game number, who won, what the next few moves were. Who was playing on the table next to him. What their moves were.
Yeah. This is why I think those people are full of shit.
First, those people should look at his YouTube. Obviously he's capable of analyzing games. To think he'd be incapable of analyzing a game he just played? What? It makes no sense.
To think that someone, even if they were cheating in every game, was not a 2600ish rated player and to perform like Hans is just ridiculous. Every 2600 player can out analyze anyone who is a 2100 player (Botez).
You don't have to imagine, check out any post match press conference or when players discuss over the board after the game.
They remember all the variations they consider, and they've considered most of the variations their opponents have calculated, so the variations aren't new branches, they're just pointers to spots in the game tree both players have in their heads.
At their level it's pretty much known what location / piece they're thinking about. For key moments, it may be enough to transmit the piece name only. And have some follow up for destination if they really need them.
Not many at all. For instance it takes a maximum of 6 bits to encode a given destination square on the board. This is probably sufficient, or very close to it.
As opposed to chess, magic is about lying and cheating. Everybody knows it and everybody is fine with it in magic, as you can see here in Dary's legendary ambitious card routine:
Nonetheless there's a rough ranking of "acceptable lies", and a thumper - anything with a secretly complicit audience member, really - ranks near the bottom of that.
> Many people might assume that a cheater needs guidance every move, thereby requiring a potentially more obvious cheating mechanism. That is not the case.
IMO, this reasoning potentially implicates every high level player. If it's possible that two hints can account for the difference between 2600 and 2800, and a 19 year old kid under heavy scrutiny can exploit this weakness without being detected, it seems assured that other more experienced players are also exploiting this.
A bunch of grandmasters have now talked about the psychological aspect of even just wondering if your opponent could possibly by cheating, and second guessing if a bad looking move by your opponent might actually be a brilliant engine line.
It seems that might even be enough for Hans as a 2675 rated player to get an edge against 2800+ player without even actually cheating
IIRC Kasparov was psychologically defeated by Deep Blue with the exact opposite of this play.
After playing what seemed at the time like 'computer-type chess' - relentlessly accurate goal-seeking strategy, Deep Blue started to play far less obvious and riskier moves. Kasparov's prejudice that a computer couldn't play like that led him to believe that Bobby Fisher was hiding inside the machine with an oxygen tank and a sandwich.
I thought his primary complaint at the time was that they were reprogramming in the evenings in response to the day's games, providing a lot of grandmaster human input during the tournament. I could be wrong there.
I watched his later matches against Deep Junior, around 2004 (?) in New York City. Match was tied, in the final game Junior made a mid-game move that was surprising to everyone in the analysis room. They were using a different software to analyze the potential lines and not finding the advantage for DJ. Yasser Seirawan and Maurice Ashley couldn't 100% agree that it was a bad move, but they said from what they can see it looked like a mistake by Deep Junior. Kasparov to a lot of time to ponder, and they accepted an exchange that would lead to a draw.
It was a very psychological moment in that era when machines were not clearly superior to the best humans.
I've definitely experienced that, playing mahjong against a guy who was behaving oddly in the European championships. But all you can do is have strict referreeing and stricter penalties for anyone who is caught cheating even once (which seems to be missing in the chess world given the player in question's record). You certainly can't try to retroactively impose a vigilante penalty that FIDE haven't.
To some extent yes, but humans tend to make moves that follow some kind of reasoning or logic. When you play a strong opponent, it's possible that you won't see the next move that they play, but once they have played it, you can deduce the logic they used in order to make it. An engine move on the other hand can easily reject the standard strategies and can appear highly irrational. When you see this kind of move, it becomes easier to suspect cheating.
yes but the computer is just so much more powerful, as well as it makes seemingly weird moves more often, as well as it can get itself out of a "bad" line if pushed that way much easier.
That doesn't scale down the skill level. At top level of just about any thing the difference between player is decided by few mistakes (by that I define less than optimal action).
If average player does 100 mistakes per match fixing 4 of them won't matter. But if great player makes 6, fixing even single one can be deciding
Software running in a smartphone can play deep games against each other.
Chess engines aren't like car engines are to sprinting. They are more akin to text-to-image AIs but as though every single picture they produce is better than what any artist ever could produce.
Part of that is because Chess is easily defined (the win conditions are comparatively simple).
I'm rambling now and I think that's enough wall of text for a hot take.
Machines can throw objects faster, further, and more accurate than humans, but field sports are still popular. It's interesting not because the object goes far, but because it's being done by a human.
> Chess is a game of symbol manipulation. It isn't played in the real world and its rules don't require human bodies the way field sports do.
I didn't mean "humanoid" as in "C3PO sitting across from the player at a table", I meant humanoid thought processes.
As far as I know, none of the chess engines are humanoid in the way they determine the next best move.
For one, they are all using far, far more instant-recall capacity than any human, ever.
> its rules don't require human bodies the way field sports do.
Which rule in football, tennis, american football, baseball, basketball or hockey requires humanoid players?
They may preclude robots as players, but that's a post-hoc fallacy - "they require all players to be humans, so therefore robots cannot replace humans like in Chess".
> I didn't mean "humanoid" as in "C3PO sitting across from the player at a table", I meant humanoid thought processes. As far as I know, none of the chess engines are humanoid in the way they determine the next best move.
Sure, and if you had android basketball players or soccer players, they would probably play the game differently as well.
> Which rule in football, tennis, american football, baseball, basketball or hockey requires humanoid players?
The totality of the rules put together tend to require that. For instance, in the NFL, whether or not a player carrying the ball is considered "down" depends upon their elbow or knee touching the ground, which implies that they need to have elbows and knees. Whether or not a catch is considered in bounds depends upon both feet touching the ground in bounds, which implies that they need to have feet. And so forth. Soccer has specific rules about the hands, feet, and head, while basketball's rules around dribbling specify hands and footsteps.
Obviously you could build a robot that looked like a dalek with a pneumatic cannon and design the robot to shoot a ball, and that robot would probably be better than human players at shooting baskets or completing football passes, but it wouldn't actually be able to play the full game according to the same rules that apply to human players.
From what I've read on this exact topic w.r.t. robotics, there are a few select places you could probably replace humans with a robot using current technology, and achieve almost perfect results. Kickers in American football, free throws in basketball are two such examples.
Kickers have to sometimes tackle, run fakes, kick onsides, deal with mishandled snaps or holds, and adjust for the conditions, like wind or how the opponent is trying to bother the kick. Plus the kick is from different parts of the field, unlike a free throw. But it doesn't matter, since someone taking a free throw has to be already in the game playing. There's no designated FT shooter.
At some point, being able to score 3 points from unlimited range just breaks the game of football to the degree that an increased risk of mishandling a bad snap/hold doesn't really matter, and you won't ever need to kick onside, either.
I don’t really think you can compare those though; robots are crap and easily beaten at most physical sports. I mean, as far as I can find, there is not even a bipedal robot that outruns humans (there is the cheetah robot but it has 4 legs ; that’s like having a dog or, you know, cheetah compete against Usain).
But yes, people will continue to play chess, go and spear throwing because it doesn’t matter if something non human is better.
It’s not required, we just don’t allow anything else because it would no longer be interesting at all. That’s the point. Same why we don’t watch grandmasters play computers; they lose. But humans vs humans is still a good watch.
Are they? The throwing sports? How many people do you know who regularly follow shotputting or javelin (outside of possibly the olympics). How much do the top 20 javelin throwers in the world earn in sponsorship and prize money and how does that compare to other actually popular sports.
I have no doubt that chess will remain at least as popular as javelin or shot-put for the foreseable future. I'm just not sure that counts as 'popular'.
what if Hans is not human, but an advance AI cyborg? maybe he's not communicating with a chess engine, he IS the chess engine. Maybe his name is an anagram for the word Enigma or something.
In a similar vein, Tool Assisted Speedruns for video games can always outperform human players, but TAS streams and youtube videos don't get nearly as many viewers as real humans running. And human speedrunners caught cheating and using tools etc. have drastic hits to their popularity after they're exposed.
I'm actually on the whole more interested in a TAS. I would often watch a big fraction of the TAS block at a GDQ, and only RTA for niche cases where I especially care about that game.
However, TAS is very unlikely Computer Chess because the TAS is actually a composite of a vast number of individual human player inputs - assembled by in effecting rewinding and continuing the game over and over. The TAS is not a machine beating the game, but the effect if humans played the game as well as they know how. That's why they have "sync" problems during a GDQ, the playback device has no idea how to play, it's just robotically carrying out actions.
Yeah I know what you mean but human chess is much more exciting because you can see themes appear in a player's strategy. You can sort of follow what they're thinking. Computer chess is next level precisely because the computer has decided that is the best move, but it's not part of some kind of narrative, it's just based on the engine's analysis.
Isn't that way more beautiful? Pure brilliance and perfection. There is no emotion in the machine making dumb mistakes. There is no fear in the machine questioning his move. Is there some kind of video of a GM analyzing an engines moves step by step? Can they even understand every move without seeing the whole picture?
Yeah, in a way it's more beautiful I think, but only in some abstract sense because it's still above everyone's heads. What's missing to make it interesting to watch is that narrative I was talking about, and that's a distinctly human feature of gameplay. I don't know if there's a video of GM's analyzing engine's moves, mostly because I think that's literally what the engine is for. And I don't think they can understand every move, which just goes to show how strong engines are. It's like alien tech strong.
> Chess engines aren't like car engines are to sprinting.
I think this is questionable. While we can understand the physical limitations of a human compared to an engine, we tend to alleviate the intellectual limitations. Just like an engine can deliver far more power than a human could ever do regardless of their training, a computer performs far more chess move computations than a human ever could, regardless of their training. It's just that our brain is biased toward alleviating computational cost, because we implicitly think "in the end, a human could as well play the same moves as a computer"
I do agree however on the premise that chess is a zombie sport, but I think it has more to do with the ease of cheating. If you consider cycling for example, there has also been cases of cheating with an electric engine inside the bike, and new cheating methods are likely to be developed faster detection procedures. And in this case "Bike engines are like car engines are to sprinting"
In fighting games, most AIs are discredited and stupid because they have no reaction time. I don't know of any that name in a nondeterministic 10-15f of reaction time. It really complicated things.
That's fairly counterintuitive to me. The easiest avenue for an AI to gain advantage over a human is reaction time and accuracy. E.g. an AI that reacts in microseconds will never be beaten on pure reaction by a human given that there's a floor of some 50-100msec for a human to be physically able to react to stimulus.
E.g. I remember early 3rd party Starcraft AIs would beat humans just by micromanaging certain nimble flying units.
> (or Niemann, if concrete evidence against him emerges)
This window seems closed though. Carlsen seems to have no evidence. Where else could the evidence come from? All we have is character attacks. Even if justified, they can't prove that he cheated.
All we know for sure is that Carlsen accused him of cheating with no evidence.
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".
Usain Bolt is another interesting case. Commentators have made a pretty compelling case based on the circumstantial evidence that he was doping, but due to weaknesses in Jamaica's anti-doping program it's likely impossible to prove one way or the other.
A huge number of (male) athletes across all sports are doping now. Testosterone deficiency is a medical condition, and taking “testosterone replacement therapy” is explicitly allowed by many sports. Even if it’s not allowed, it’s not really possible to robustly test for, because in some forms at least it’s simply increasing the levels of the same hormones that your body is naturally producing. Same goes for human growth hormone. Just take enough to put your levels at a very high, but plausibly natural level and you essentially can’t fail a drug test.
It’s only called “testosterone replacement therapy” when it’s prescribed by a doctor btw. Taking exactly the same course of medication in any other circumstances is called “taking steroids”.
Is trivially Easy to test for TRT. Taking testosterone shuts off your body’s LH and FSH production and those can be tested. These can be biologically mimicked with hCG and HMG but those don’t chemically show up on LH and FSH tests.
LH ratios aren’t a robust test, aren’t accepted by any governing body alone as far as I’m aware, and are only a very weak indicator if you’re only testing urine. Testosterone to epitestosterone ratio is still the gold standard, and to fail that test you need a ratio about 3x above normal. The efficacy of these tests are also highly impacted by when the PEDs were last taken, and that’s true for all classes of PEDs, not just the bio identical ones.
There are also faaaaaar more PEDs than the labs test for. The state of PED testing is completely unreliable, and you really have to be an idiot to get caught. But that’s only if your PEDs are actually prohibited, which they often aren’t.
FIFA call it a “therapeutic use exemption”, which basically anybody can get with a note from a doctor. A lot of other sports have similar exemption processes. I know the NFL does too.
> FIFA call it a “therapeutic use exemption”, which basically anybody can get with a note from a doctor.
In my quick research on this, the TUE process appeared to be quite strict, and definitely not an easy "you just need a note from a doctor" kind of thing. For example, in the NFL, the only example I could find where they'd give a testosterone exemption is if you had testicular cancer and had removal of 1 or both testes, which seems reasonable. I also found examples where both the NFL and FIFA had recently suspended players for testosterone use.
If you have any other examples or sources that counter this info, I'd be very interested to see it.
You can’t find examples because the treatments are part of the players private medical records and are not published. But it is as simple as getting a doctor to say that therapeutic use is required.
What hard evidence—exactly—do you expect Carlsen to be able to produce? Alternatively, imagine anyone in a similar position. What hard evidence can anyone produce in situations such as this?
I don't expect him to produce evidence, but I expect him to say more than "I suspect he cheated"
If he saw something unusual, like "Hans was messing with his shoe" or "I heard several vibrations coming from Hans during the game" etc.. that would be at least something.
Magnus has produced what he can given the situation and has staked something of extreme personal value—his legendary near-2900 ELO—on it with his move-1 resignation.
If he'd heard the guy's damn shoe buzzing he would have insisted on a search.
I believe you could have an engine look at the historical games of a player and identify the "strength" of each move. How strong (in terms of elo) does a player have to be before they find a certain move? How often do the top players find moves that greatly exceed their own elo? Does Hans find top moves more frequently than his opponents?
The challenge with this appoach of course is identifying a players strengths and adjusting for their preparation. Making 20 top engine moves in a row is not odd if both players studied that exact line before the match.
What's odd is making 20 top moves in a row on a bizzare line that nobody has ever played before that Magnus specifically prepared because he knew it was unusual (and engine disadvantaged) and unlikely to be in anyone's prep.
Niemann have admitted cheating before when playing online, so Carlsen is just not making this up about any random player. There is a history of cheating.
There is no smoking gun, but there is a lot of smoke. The ease with which Niemann pulled out of the hand a couple of brilliant moves, without spending too much time thinking about it, on an unusual line, is highly suspicious.
That probably would have been even worse of a shit-storm. You think you are rational and will ask good questions, but if you are not a trained journalist, and you haven’t prepared, you will most likely only ask really dumb question that do nothing except cause more drama.
I expect people to hold off the public allegations if they can't prove anything.
I could name specific players who I'm pretty sure were cheating in my own game. I've sometimes had a quiet word with a ref and asked them to watch a particular player closely. I've occasionally had a louder word with a ref and asked them to enforce the rules that are in place to make cheating harder. But you can't pull something like this based off of nothing but your own feelings.
I don't know much about chess, but it seems like Niemann now has to either maintain his performance in Chess without cheating, or cheat to maintain it if he can't without - in which case he could still be caught.
That's not true. Both he and Chess.com both say that they have evidence to the extent of Hans' cheating. Both have asked Neimann for the ability to speak freely without threat of libel.
Apparently this (the idea that telling the truth is necessarily not libelous) is untrue in some jurisdictions? Or perhaps they fear that they are not 100% correct?
Not quite. There is still a possibility that Niemann will admit cheating. If he actually cheated there may be a time—in years or decades rather then months—that he fills with remorse and admits it (hopefully with a detailed description on how he did it so we can verify). If however he didn’t cheat, we will probably never actually know the truth.
Very interesting. I don’t really understand chess beyond the basics but when I think of sports the difference between good and great really seems to be, in baseball just a hit or two per week, in American football a running back who has the vision to cut decisively a second or less before another running would.
When you see it consistently the difference seems enormous, but the math … is surprisingly tiny.
“or less” is doing a lot of work in that first paragraph. Running plays typically only last like two seconds, maybe four if they get to the second level (linebackers).
Also, I agree the “math is tiny“ but the talent, work ethic, luck, etc. required to separate oneself from the good to be great is *enormous*.
You're right: the hint doesn't even have to be a move. It could also be an evaluation "it's better for white", or even: "there is a winning combination" which might be enough to get them to focus on finding it.
As an electrical engineer currently in the process of getting a dental implant, I would say it's definitely doable. But it would present a pretty serious packaging challenge, particularly the power supply.
[UPDATE] Turns out you can get dental implant hardware on eBay:
In 1945 the Soviet Union gifted a wall hung artwork to the USA embassy which passively transmitted audio signal from the room with no power supply or active electronics.
No internal power supply. Very important distinction.
"The device, a passive cavity resonator, became active only when a radio signal of the correct frequency was sent to the device from an external transmitter."
But the Thing was a transmitter. A receiver could be entirely passive and very small. It could easily fit in a dental implant. (There have been reports of people hearing AM radio broadcasts through their fillings.) But the risk of detection would be very high.
It's a pretty straightforward calculation, which I don't feel like doing right now. But I think Stockfish is going to be pretty power-hungry at the grandmaster level.
I have some smart light switches in my house that don’t contain batteries and aren’t wired to mains. They’re powered purely by the force of pressing the switch. A bite-powered receiver might not even need batteries. Okay, maybe I’m getting too crazy?
You don’t need a faraday cage if you suspect he gets the moves from outside. Just put a 20 minute delay to the video feed and don’t allow random people in the room.
The St. Louis chess club provided more checking / scrutiny than any other OTB tournament I have seen. How would you improve their process? Honestly would love to hear.
Daniel Naroditsky[1] said at the St Louis chess club specifically it would be pretty easy to cheat OTB no matter what searches they do. He said there is a balcony which the players have access to when they walk away from the board which has a clear view of the car park and you could have an assistant signal from there at crucial moments. He also cited a case of a player who was definitely cheating OTB[2] and was never caught and where no mechanism was ever found.
It really seems to me that everyone is overthinking this. Hans has admitted to cheating and just says he didn't cheat here. The idea we should give him the benefit of the doubt seems really odd. It doesn't really matter to me whether he cheated in this specific tournament - he shouldn't have a place in the chess world.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJVzSXsZ10I&t=3291s
[2] in the sense that every move for an extended period covering multiple tournaments was exactly the top engine move - way more accurate than any human ever
Word, I hear ya, a cheater is always gonna be a cheater. … But, honestly, we are going through a strange transition in chess. I’m not very familiar with online chess, so I take that sort of cheating lightly. Was surprised that online games can effect OTB ratings. I’m guessing FIDE, USCF , and other orgs will start separating online vs. OTB ratings as a result of this friction.
Chess tournaments could use the services of already existing casino anti cheating experts. But I imagine that would be very expensive and not feasible for most events.
I can't think of any effective way to curb online cheating in chess. Ultimately, online chess with money prizes shouldn't really exist.
Chess is not a game where there is always one right move, but where positions are threatened/protected to a greater/lesser degree, and the _value_ of those threats/protection can only be realized much further along in the game.
The best players in the world, these 2700+ rated players have:
1. Played many many positions many times over and have incredible recall of those general positions.
2. Know how to analyze a position/state of the game at any given moment and have a better "feel" for who is advantaged and/or where the greatest strengths/weaknesses of black/white are located.
However, none of them have the power of chess engines, which analyze singular moves (or poll a db) for the hundreds/thousands of possible outcomes 1, 2, 3, ..., n moves ahead (this is why the best engines are strictly better than humans at this point), so unless a player has both played and committed to memory the exact line being played in a game, the best they tend to get to is "having a feeling" about the state of the game (please forgive my oversimplification here, chess fans)
Now if a 2600 rated player - someone who's still easily in the top 1% of chess players and incredibly capable player of the game - were to be playing a game against a 2800 rated opponent, but had a computer tell them "Hey, this one move is critical" without being told the exact move, they would almost _certainly_ become heavily favored to win. That "feeling" about a position is now irrelevant. There are only a few pieces that will be likely moved on any given turn, and now you can narrow down your own analysis to what is different about moving any one of them in particular because you've been given advanced warning that the most-likely-to-be-played moves will result in wildly different consequences n moves later.
These are hours-long games. Taking 15-20 minutes on a turn is not unheard of, and doing so on a turn that is proven-critical can make all the difference.
You don't know there are exactly 3 bugs to start with. While in chess, esp if you're experienced, you know what your possibilities are. Just need to pick one.
chess experts do agree on that, they've all been saying it on various youtube channels, i was even irritated when I saw it written here cuz I was like "you're just repeating the same stuff I've been hearing"
200 points difference means a 25% chance to win, so I doubt just 1 hint is enough to bridge that gap consistently. Many high level games are won by grinding out a small advantage. I'll take a 2700 with 3 hints against a 2800 though.
The "200 points difference means 25% chance to win" breaks down at the highest levels. It works fine near the middle of the bell curve -- i.e. 800-2000 Elo -- but once you get to 2200 Elo you are talking about the >99th percentile. For example, I don't know of a single 2400 player who can score an average of 0.25 against 2600 players.
Even at my own mediocre level of 1800, I definitely do not score 0.25 against 2000 rated players. More like 0.1 if I'm feeling sharp.
As an example of this, until the Niemann game Magnus had a 53-game win^H^H^Hunbeaten streak. Prior to this he had a 125-game unbeaten streak. Many (most?) of these games were played against competitors within 200 Elo. Many of these were played against the 10 next-best chess players in the world.
The back of the envelope percentage calculation absolutely does not apply at this level of chess. In reality if Niemann were to play Magnus in 100 games, he would be exceedingly lucky to win one game.
I disagree with the second paragraph but not enough to get into a public debate about it. But it is worth pointing out that Carlsen's 53-game streak was a non-loss streak, not a win streak. Many of those games were draws.
First, I said he would be lucky to have a 1 in 100 chance. Second, absolutely nobody is saying that's the only reason to be suspicious of this game. Regardless of whether or not you believe Niemann cheated, if you think the fact that he won is the only claim in this accusation you simply aren't paying attention.
>I don't know of a single 2400 player who can score an average of 0.25 against 2600 players
I mean, you can look at the stats. They play all the time and while it becomes less accurate at the highest ratings (more so at the 2800+ level), 2400 vs 2600 does still result in something in the general range of 0.25. However, if it's 0.1 (like in your example) then my point is even stronger since it would be even harder to turn that into a win consistently with just 1 hint.
>Even at my own mediocre level of 1800, I definitely do not score 0.25 against 2000 rated players.
If you are noticing that at your level, it is probably either selective memory or specific to your play as ELO-estimated winning chances hold up well enough at 1800-2000.
The Elo system is calibrated so that that the expected value from playing a player 200 points stronger than you is 0.24. This is true independent of the strength of the players. If you are scoring 0.10 against players 200 points stronger than you (that would mean, for example, 1 draw and 4 losses over 5 games) but maintaining a stable rating, then you must be crushing players that are weaker than you and/or doing very well against players at your level.
(FWIW, I am 2000 USCF and an expected value of 0.24 vs a 2200 and 0.76 vs an 1800 feels quite reasonable to me.)
Elo assumes that performance across n^2 players fits the logistic curve model of n players. There is no reason to believe that assumption is remotely accurate and that Elo would ever stabilize. Players often avoid playing lower rated players, for this reason.
I don't think people are saying that it cannot happen, just that you need to prove it instead of hurling empty accusations, especially when it can destroy someone's career. I personally think it sets a bad precedent if every top player immediately starts crying "cheating!" when beaten by a lower ranked one.
Surely he means just that; i.e. Hans Niemann is known to have cheated in past games (these were online games and it must be noted that Niemann maintains that he has never cheated before or since the and never in an "over the board" tournament).
Imagine you know someone with a history of stealing cars and other valuable objects. He has been caught multiple times. Now you see him with a shiny new car that you’re pretty sure he can’t afford.
Did he steal it? Not necessarily — it’s entirely possible that he got a higher-paying legit job and saved up for it, or inherited money from a relative, or got it legally in some other way. He shouldn’t be convicted of a new crime with no other evidence just because he committed similar crimes in the past.
However, it would be entirely natural for a reasonable person to assume that theft is the most likely explanation of the facts, and to avoid trusting that person.
This is basically what happened with Hans. He has been caught cheating multiple times, and then had an unusually fast rise in rating. Is that rise impossible? No. But it’s consistent with cheating, and given his history, cheating is the simplest explanation.
So it would be totally normal for Magnus to refuse to trust such a person even though it can’t be conclusively proven that he’s still dirty. But even then, Magnus agreed to play against him, until further circumstantial evidence came to light and it just got to be too much.
So, is it possible that Hans is clean? Sure. If that’s indeed the case, do I feel sorry for him? No. He made the choice to destroy his own reputation when he cheated multiple times. If he doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt now, it’s on him.
Magnus' evidence of "it didn't seem like he was thinking very hard during critical junctures" is the nail in the coffin for me.
If he has a history of stealing cars AND his new car is hot wired? Possible it's legal? Sure. Let's not twist our hands about a grand theft auto charge, however.
I don’t think you can call the opinion of the famous player who lost about how hard he thought his opponent was thinking during the game evidence without twisting the meaning of the word past the breaking point.
This is a hilariously inaccurate description of magnus. He is widely regarded as the greatest chess player to have ever lived. His opinion on what it takes to play high level chess is worth taking extremely seriously. It's not like he has a history of temper tantrums or petulant behavior; he's an upstanding custodian of the mantle of world champion.
Not only is that a logical fallacy (appeal to authority) but magnus lost to him and is claiming cheating which is clearly a huge conflict of interest. His opinion should be heavily scrutinized.
> Not only is that a logical fallacy (appeal to authority)
You know appeal to authorities are not always logical fallacies right? It can be, but it's not a "haha you quoted someone therefore you are wrong". Heavily invested and repeatedly successful individuals can be great sources for information on heuristic endevours.
> magnus lost to him and is claiming cheating which is clearly a huge conflict of interest
Except it is verifiable that he talked about leaving the tournament before even playing him. Therefore his suspicions and problems are older than the result. Also you might be overestimating how much chess players care about losing at that level. They play constantly against each other and most have pretty equal head to heads. Magnus usually is a bit ahead like 5 victories to 3 and then like 15 draws against most of them. Losing once against Hans is not gonna make someone cause all of this.
> His opinion should be heavily scrutinized.
By FIDE sure, not by people online whose knowledge of chess comes from the first Harry potter movie.
Which pilots were the best pilots in the world? At a certain point, expertise does matter.
We're not talking commodity expertise, this person is literally the best to have ever done his craft. And has show the ability to "legitly" lose to others.
You’re not addressing the content of the argument and instead trying to dismiss it because of a phrase I used.
Just because magnus is a world class expert at chess does not necessarily mean he is good at detecting a cheater. Furthermore I would argue that taking an experts “gut feeling” as evidence is a terrible argument.
>You’re not addressing the content of the argument and instead trying to dismiss it because of a phrase I used.
The phrase you used has a well-known meaning. If that wasn't what you meant, then you shouldn't have used it.
Magnus may not be great at spotting a cheater, but his expertise in this game suggests that he could be, and adding that fact to an existing body of evidence isn't even close to committing an appeal to authority fallacy. To bring up that fallacy here is just lazy thinking.
> Magnus may not be great at spotting a cheater, but his expertise in this game suggests that he could be, and adding that fact to an existing body of evidence isn't even close to committing an appeal to authority fallacy.
OP:
> He is widely regarded as the greatest chess player to have ever lived. His opinion on what it takes to play high level chess is worth taking extremely seriously.
- A: Magnus is a great chess player
- B: Magnus claims cheating because "gut"
- C: Therefore Hans cheated
The argument rests solely on the fact that since he's an expert his word should be taken "seriously," heavily implying that Hans cheated.
> To bring up that fallacy here is just lazy thinking.
I disagree and you're not going to convince me otherwise with statements like this one.
You are intentionally misrepresenting the argument, to the point of being outright dishonest. The main piece of evidence in this comment thread is that Hans cheated in the past, not Magnus's expertise. So your letter A should be about Hans admitting to cheating, and somewhere further down--maybe C or D--would mention Magnus's expertise, if you were trying to debate in good faith (which you're not).
As for his "gut" feeling being part of the argument, you're not quoting anyone here; you are again intentionally misrepresenting what others are saying.
If you're going to analyze an argument someone else is making, be honest about it or there is really no point in discussing anything with you.
> not like he has a history of temper tantrums or petulant behavior;
He absolutely does. People forget because he so rarely loses a classical game. But he almost always shows petulant behavior when he loses an important classical game.
> He is widely regarded as the greatest chess player to have ever lived.
By whom exactly? He has a large fan club on the internet and uses modern social network very well but I don’t think there is a wide consensus that he is better than Kasparov at his prime. I personally don’t believe him to be better than neither Fischer nor Botvinnik but that’s only me and is impossible to verify anyway.
And no, his opinion against his own opponent after suffering an embarrassing defeat poorly playing with white doesn’t hold much credibility.
It seems like ELO skill ratings fall apart when comparing players of two different eras, since ELO Ratings involve the skill level of your opponents too.
Maybe a better metric would be running both players games through a computer to see the "%best move" metric?
> Maybe a better metric would be running both players games through a computer to see the "%best move" metric?
Due to computers being common place now, Magnus would absolutely destroy that metric compared to older eras. Chess has changed a ton in the past 10-20 years due to computers, being able to analyse lines. And now Magnus is known for playing "Ai Lines" which is the kind of stuff the new ML models do which tends to be pretty bonkers and un-human but gets long term results.
I don't think you can casually dismiss the ability of one of the greatest chess players to ever live to identify when his opponents are engaged, concentrating and thinking hard, and when they are not, without twisting common sense past its breaking point either.
> calling how hard he thought his opponent was thinking during the game evidence
we can't accept Magnus's testimony on this point, but we can understand that Magnus can consider it himself to be evidence, and he's simply telling us that's what he's doing.
I also think Magnus believes he has additional information about the extent of Hans's cheating, and that's what he can't share without Hans's permission, probably Hans's logs of his online activity that chess.com has, or something like that.
My issue with this is that it's all circumstantial evidence. If you suspect someone of cheating but can't show it, then enact some anti-cheating provisions and move on. We can't have a rule of law based on just the suspicions of interested parties.
Of course we can rule out people by past cheating. Technology changes, it makes it easier to cheat but harder to hide cheating history (as most of the games between people at this time are online). Rules have to adapt to technology.
You can punish people for past cheating. But you can't say "he cheated before, therefore he's cheating now and that's why he won." I've seen that sentiment a bit too often.
Nobody is claiming they should be. FIDE isn’t banning Hans based on Magnus’s vague suspicions, as indeed they shouldn’t.
Magnus is just refusing to invest time and energy (and rating points) to play against someone he doesn’t like, which is absolutely his right. Nobody has the right to force Magnus or anyone else to play against them.
I think you might want to read the rules of chess tournaments. You will quickly realise that in fact Magnus doesn’t have a choice of who he plays against and can’t actually resign for no reason.
I am not insinuating anything. I am stating that tournaments have rules which include a format – determining which player another player encounters – and sportsman behaviours and terms of play. Most were put in place to avoid players throwing games to get more rest and avoid collusion.
For exemple, Carlsen had to play at least one move for the game not to be forfeited and I’m fairly sure he is running afoul a sportsman behaviour rules by resigning on move one but the tournament isn’t pressing because he is Magnus.
I'm not sure about the specifics of chess, but in most other kinds of competitions there are either explicit rules against or implicit agreements not to resign too early, i.e. throwing the match. If you resign when you are not actually losing, you are advantaging your opponent over all other players in the tournament (this matters a lot for tournaments with round-based elimination).
That reason makes sense, and there are certainly rules in tournaments against early draws, but I'd never heard of a rule against resigning early. My understanding of Magnus playing one move was that you couldn't resign until the game started, so he just started the game and resigned immediately, but maybe that's mistaken.
I guess it hasn't come up much since the personal loss of losing a game is usually pretty great at a high level. Maybe we'll see such rules after Magnus' resignation.
I agree with you, and I think throwing the game against Hans was poor form. My point was just that he has the right not to enter future tournaments to which Hans is invited.
That's not a complete analogy tho. Everyone knows Hans cheated in the past. But Magnus is going beyond that and saying that Hans cheated in the over-the-board game against him.
Coming back to your analogy. So now imagine this person suddenly has a new shiny car but he also has the Title and registration for that car. Not only that, someone reported him to the cops and the cops said that the car is not stolen. He also has income tax returns that show that he has a legit source of income. Would it be natural for a reasonable person to assume that theft is the most likely explanation?
I don’t understand your analogy. There’s no evidence that Hans didn’t cheat in the game against Magnus. This isn’t Hans’s fault, as it’s hard to imagine what such evidence could even be possible, but the fact remains that there’s nothing comparable to having the title, etc. to a car.
He has been caught of cheating online. Where you just open a new window and follow engine moves. Or you have a friend sitting beside you giving engine moves.
In his over-the-board match, he didn't have a laptop. He didn't have a friend giving him moves. He didn't have any communication device. He was mostly looking at the board or into the distance while he was playing. He was scanned with a metal detector. So we know he definitely didn't use any of his earlier methods of cheating if he even did cheat. Carlsen's statement confirms that his preparation wasn't leaked or hacked. I count these as evidence of him not cheating with his usual MO.
But in your analogy, it's completely possible for the guy to have used his usual MO to steal the new shiny car.
Now of course I'm not saying he didn't cheat. It's possible he used some other sophisticated method of cheating. But it would not be natural for a reasonable person to assume that theft using his usual MO is the most likely explanation.
There is a video explaining how Hans played ten 100% games (his moves matching 100% moves of what an engine would do) in the last three years and a lot of >90%:
For reference, Magnus at his best does a 70% match with engines, and between 70-75% is historically enough to earn you the World Championship. This guy is consistently over 80%, come on.
Reminds me of Lance Armstrong: a mediocre 90's cyclist that suddenly becomes the best in history, in such dominant fashion that I think everybody suspected something, but without proof you cannot do nothing about it.
And here's Hikaru's video examining the Yosha's evidence by comparing it to games he and other GMs have played. There's definitely something going on with Hans having so many >90% games, when the other higher rated players struggle to
80%.
Exactly. And Nakamura takes in that video the position that 100% is the perfect game. It's not. 100% means you made exactly the same moves an engine would made, but engines sometimes have two best moves with only a minimal preference for one of them. Those decisions are the ones that made Nakamura best games "mere" 80'ish%, in less important moves he did the second bests according to the engine.
If you are a top player and cheat, you would only require a couple of decisions here an there in complex positions, and the games would be still at roughly 75%. But if you don't fully understand the line, or you're not in the zone, and the engine suggest something crazy (but winner) you need all the following moves.
>Would it be natural for a reasonable person to assume that theft is the most likely explanation?
Based off of their previous behavior of stealing cars? Yes it would absolutely be the most likely explanation. Under such a circumstance, it would simply mean that their skill at stealing cars has improved to now include forging documents, and possibly bribing police.
Given their passed behavior, the objective is no longer for you to prove guilt, but for them to prove innocence. It is illogical to continually approach accusations of theft, or cheating, under a neutral assumption when a pattern emerges.
If you own ten chickens and come out one morning to nine, and a pile of feathers next to a fox, you have your culprit. Should you wander around demanding to see feathers each time another chicken goes missing before you blame the fox sleeping at your doorstep? The fox is there. There are fewer chickens. The easiest answer is the most likely.
There is enough certainty for the alternative to be inconsequential.
I believe people might be seriously underestimating just how good Magnus may be at detecting cheating.
Dude probably trains with computers regularly. He has a better memory than 10 average Joe's combined. He's been the absolute #1 of the world for what, 10 years now?
He wouldn't risk his whole reputation for nothing.
I personally take his suspicions very seriously, though I agree that evidence has to be presented sooner or later.
Hans is known to have cheated, his coach is known to have cheated, add low security in the event, Hans beating Magnus (a player two tiers above him) on black pieces (Magnus has lost only 15 games against black in an entire world champion career) and Hans acting suspicious during the game and here we are.
chess.com suggests Hans cheated more than he admits. He did (much?) better in tournaments with zero delay. In a few consecutive tournaments, he made a lot of top engine moves, slightly above Magnus/Kasparov/Fisher at their best. He had a hard time explaining his lines in the interview after the game (with Firouzja I think).
The analysis of him doing better in broadcast/non-broadcast games was flawed, the analysis mis-categorized several of the tournaments in a way that made the conclusion stronger.
I would say there is more than a cheating history and a single game that triggered Magnus. However, most of it has a possible explanation. Like, I would be very nervous if you put me in front of a camera at 19 years. Are these arguments together strong enough? Hard to judge.
I don't know if there's data but people who have cheated in the past often seem to cheat in the future. Having watched some videos about the state of speed-running video games lately intersected with how gambling cheaters seems to never stop cheating supports that.
He admits to cheating in the video linked below. However, that's when he was 12 (and 16) and his friend helped. It is much more different situation then anal beads or electronics in your shoe.
Disclaimer: don't know much about chess, let alone professional chess.
The fundamental asummetry at play here is that cheating is a lot easier than detecting cheaters in modern chess. As such, I'm not sure insisting on people shutting up unless they can provide ironclad evidence won't just lead to professional chess becoming rife with cheaters (which is presumably the "existential threat" to proffessional chess that Carlsen reffers to in his statement).
I admit that it is a trickly problem, and I agree that Carlsen's behavior here is not beyond reproach. Withdrawing from the tournament only after having lost a game makes the statement much less impactfull since one can not discount the possibility that he's just being a rather sore looser. I would personally have respected his decision much more if he had followed his impulse (again, referred to in his statement) to withdraw as soon as Niemann had been invited to the tournament in the first place.
Magnus is obviously extremely qualified to detect cheating, I see many other people who are honestly just as qualified as him say that Hans isn't cheating. I'm going to also say emotions are going to play a massive role here, both in terms of defence of Hans and against Hans.
The interesting thing is the one party MORE qualified than Magnus and the other grandmasters to detect cheating is the chesscom statistics team and they think Hans has cheated online recently and didn't admit to it. Still, there's no smoking gun that proves the OTB matches were fixed, Hans can be innocent at least in those specific circumstances, but if he's been guilty in online chess recently is it truly fair to make the world champion play against him OTB?
>He wouldn't risk his whole reputation for nothing.
It is pretty important to realise in terms of Magnus's mindset he has given up on defending the world championship and doing anything other than achieving 2900 elo, the highest rating ever achieved. He is a champion, and that is his goal in life, he wants that rating in a way most people can't fathom. If he proves Hans Neimann is a cheater, Han's win's against Magnus are void, and Magnus's rating goes up. Imagine being the world champion and having your dream drift further away because of a known cheater beating you when they're at a disadvantage, what goes through your head? What goes through your head when you think of how many people COULD be cheating and making getting 2900 impossible? What can others do about the spectre of chess cheating, the world champion, doesn't stand up?
So what I'm saying here is, I wouldn't be super confident that Magnus wouldn't throw his reputation in the trash to become the greatest chess player who ever lived. I think he would absolutely throw away his reputation, but not for nothing.
Not sure Chess.com is entirely objective. They recently acquired Play Magnus after all, so he will have some influence. The timing is pretty suspicious.
Chesscom is known for being a little extra responsive to abuse reports from the players that it sponsors, which has raised some eyebrows. Their neutrality is a question.
Still people literally know the chesscom cheating team. IM Danny Rensch is the face. I would say there is a fair amount of respect for that team within the community, as well as a healthy scepticism. If anything they probably get more criticism for ignoring cheating than for taking action.
It’s a tough gig, chess cheating is very hard to prove.
It was obvious that Hans did not make a real effort while playing chess with Magnus. Hans was not concentrating. Hans was constantly moving his hand, covering his mouth. Hans was not paying attention.
That just shows that he is fallible, which I empathize with.
Also don't forget the bishop blunder by Nepo in the world championship against Magnus. That was a 1800 level blunder trapping the bishop. Nepo is in top 5 GM list.
The fact of the matter is that all GMs including Magnus have the potential to make blunders.
Niemann, as black, equalized reasonably early on and then had a consistent lead against Magnus the entire game. Magnus did make mistakes in the game, but only after a near-perfect grind for 27 moves.
To be clear, I'm not saying this to make a claim that this is definitive proof of anything. I'm pointing out that the theory that Magnus simply blundered away the game doesn't hold water. Niemann had the advantage—as black no less—for essentially the entire game against someone who is widely known for being capable of grinding away nearly-perfectly for extensive periods of time.
On Hikaru's YouTube channel today he posted a video about today's developments [1]. In the later part of that video ran some software that used Stockfish to analyze that game and show percentage of moves where each player made the top engine move.
Magnus only matched the top engine move 43% of the time, which is quite low for a super-GM. Hikaru said he'd bet money that it was Magnus' worst performance in any game in the last 3 years.
If Magnus was playing to detect cheating and not just to win, his play would reflect that. He did play some very obscure lines just to see if it would trigger Hans to “think” but Hans seemed to play the optimal moves quite easily every time. Analyzing the game myself, it appears Magnus was dragging out the game on purpose by picking highly dynamic lines of continuation that should’ve required long and heavy thinks from Hans.
If the evidence shows that Magnus played badly, we do not have to jump to the conclusion that actually he was playing badly on purpose, for the intent of trying to detect a cheater. He himself wasn't even stupid enough to claim this.
No, instead, I am going to trust other grandmasters opinions that he was merely playing badly.
Later in Hikaru’s stream he analyzed some of his own personal best games and one of them only got a 43% engine match score. So whatever the tool does, it does not conform exactly to ideas of whether a super GM played good or bad, at least not for any single game.
(Sorry for the dupe reply, too late to edit my other comment)
For sure! It's absolutely reasonable to believe that Hans beat Magnus completely fairly. It's also completely reasonable to believe there's a better-than-even chance that Hans cheated in this game.
There are a number of comments here which promote the idea that this is simply sour grapes by Magnus and totally uncalled for, and I find those perspectives to be overwhelmingly uncompelling.
> Niemann, as black, equalized reasonably early on and then had a consistent lead against Magnus the entire game. Magnus did make mistakes in the game, but only after a near-perfect grind for 27 moves.
Of course he played near-perfectly for 27 moves. That's what it means to be a 2700 (or even a 2500, if you think his recent ratings growth is the product of cheating). Virtually any high-level game will look like that - the players playing mostly perfectly, with on average one or two significant mistakes, but sometimes not even that.
One of the chief complaints here is that it was an unusual line, specifically chosen by Magnus to be unlikely to have been explored during preparation.
This. It’s like how some people in here have built amazing intuition about where a bug in a system may be, even if it’s a system they haven’t written or designed themselves
Those data points are cherry-picked by anecdote and statistically useless, unless you're also counting all the times someone thought they had such intuition that turned out not to be correct at all.
I was agreeing with your complete post, except for the last line.
No more evidence is required. The quality of Hans Niemann's moves, recently as well as during his rise from 2400-rating three years ago, is enough evidence against him.
"
My practice at home is with the computer. When I study chess with other people, we always have a chess board. But on my own, it's always at the computer.
"
Some interesting meta observations for the few people who read my comment in this already enormous thread. I noticed that opinions on the issue seemed split rather 50/50 until I started seeing the same couple of names over and over on the "no evidence of cheating" side. And in fact, searching the HTML document for this page for a particularly prolific name yields that they make up about 10% of all posts in the thread.
I'm not sure why someone would respond to dozens of all comment threads, but the different tones of voice, presented familiarity with the topic, between posts are disconcerting. I've never accused anyone of being a bot or shill (nor am I now) because I've seen starry-eyed true believers of just about every cause, idea, and entity, but this behavior is exceptionally unusual.
I think this is another example of the very common pattern of 90% of the contributions in online discourse come from 10% of the population with 90% of post coming from a 1% minority of the overall population. It's not unusual at all.
I have experienced no such limitation and never see it myself. Googling shows me the current policy is rate limiting accounts when they "post too many low-quality comments and/or get involved in flamewars."
I've been thinking about this after having read https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ again recently. That research was shared in 2006/9. They didn't quantify a upvote/reward driven website but I suspect hacker news is closer to the blog numbers than the general, so the percentage would be skewed. The closest statistics would be Reddit's, the self selecting "top 1%" subreddit has imposed a minimum of roughly 107000 combined karma/points which is roughly 114k users out of an estimated 52 million daily, 430 million monthly, and 1.5 billion registered total users.
I am into chess, was studying it, have read few books on chess.
People who know near zero about chess seem to come out of woodwork to defend underdog who is attacked by the top level clique. Its understandable, but to me its akin to the flat earth arguments. All based on emotions, never have much to say about chess.
Anyone who knows a bit about chess (lets say advanced level), would point to the post game interview of game vs Firouzja as amazingly suspicious. It feels like a guy in group project who did noting and is trying to explain the project to their professor.
50/50 split is either illusion or its due to inflation of randoms giving their opinions.
No sound human would bee asking random ppl to determine if a patient has a cancer as a diagnostic tool. Cheating in chess is at top level extremely subtle, how is a random 1000 player any authority on the topic?
Agreed. Not only the firouzja interview but also the post game interview after the magnus match. It struck me as someone cheating on a test and being unable to show their work after the fact. Alejandro was pushing back against his analysis even before the cheating allegations came out. And his apology interview was full of inconsistencies where he couldn’t keep his story straight. This video does a body language analysis of the apology. While I don’t think you can put too much stock into the defensive postures, his behavior and his story is suspect at best https://youtu.be/OK9ZkoSQNFs
The issue I have with this is Hans is obviously either some god-level cheater (who can also cheat at rapid formats?? in casual settings - like in parks, on the beach, etc??) or he's actually 2500-2600 (or, let's even say 2400).
If he's 2400, he can still analyze. This leads me to believe that the dude is just trolling. IDK. I haven't watched all his interviews, but he seems like a troll.
I don’t think he necessarily has to be god level. This has been talked about ad nauseum but it’s not that hard to cheat just a little to gain significant advantage. Security has been lax at these events and there are numerous examples of cheating at the top level of many sports and throughout chess history. It’s definitely not that outrageous to see the possibility. Rapid and classical are different games that require different skill sets. He is definitely strong regardless which I think most people agree on. So you may have a point that he should still be able to have better analysis than what he showed. Especially if it’s a classical game where you have been thinking and calculating deeply for 2 hours. Perhaps the analysis was whack exactly because he wasn’t thinking and calculating deeply in these critical positions as magnus suggests in his statement.
None of us know for sure and it’s all speculation at this point. He could be trolling. He could be cheating. At some level he lied in his apology interview. He has not acknowledged the statement chess.com made in which they accused him of lying and cheating more often and more recently than he admitted. There’s just a lot of suspicion and sometimes where there’s smoke there is fire. My guess is he is a strong grandmaster that desperately wanted to be a super gm and took some shortcuts to get there.
My point is the argument "he can't even do analysis" does not match up with the argument "it’s not that hard to cheat just a little to gain significant advantage"
To do the second, you need to still be extremely good at chess. Way beyond the level required to do any type of analysis.
"Perhaps the analysis was whack exactly because he wasn’t thinking and calculating deeply in these critical positions as magnus suggests in his statement."
You'd still need to calculate, if you're "just cheating a little"
I'm happy to take your word for the fact that it's reasonably split, I don't have a dog in this particular race.
The strange thing to me then, is that with regards to this Hacker News thread, it is fairly split in sentiment if you look at the total number of comments in either direction, but if you look at unique commenters it overwhelmingly swings one direction.
My question from that premise is, why is that the case? Specifically, I've never seen a hacker news thread with 250+ comments where a single person or a handful make up such a large percentage of the comments. The human effort required for such a thing is significant, and obviously that can't scale forever. I'd be surprised that with tiktok and youtube videos with 30000+ comments, if there's ever been a case of a single person responding 3000+ times.
This is against terms of use here, many of us have been nailed stating similar for other posts. The guideline is "assume the best" (or something like that).
Thanks. Edited such that my post isn't so targeted, at least. If it's still insufficient and gets taken down, it happens. I think my post is far less interesting than the observed behavior I mention.
I tend to agree that there are interesting things like this, or at least there are interesing things to consider. Perhaps there is need for a "shadow HN", it's a forum explicitly for the purposes of discussing the meta of posts, mapped 1:1. Browser plugin injects a link to flip/toggle the thread to shadow mode. Nice visual overlays of all the assertions and how they were inferred, some bot calculations, etc.
Maybe you're talking about me. I don't even like Hans. I just think people are morons for spewing bile that harms someone's real life.
I know a little bit about the situation (though not an expert - I haven't researched it a ton, just tried to think critically about the situation) due to the fact that yeah, drama is entertaining. But I also think what the WC is doing is disgusting - he is using his position of power to harm someone, and doesn't have much evidence, really, none at all, other than him saying "trust me."
Also, the parallels between this and political discord are really interesting to me, and I wish I were smart enough to boil that down on a sociological level and express myself but unfortunately I am not.
I didn't know anything about Hans until Magnus dropped out of the tournament and this all started. I follow chess, and I didn't even know (consciously, I am sure I heard it and didn't take close note) at the time that he beat Magnus, until he dropped out.
I probably should not care too much, and do something more useful with my time, but it is super annoying to me that people are spreading misinformation to such a degree and no one seems to really care that that this can really impact someone's life.
On top of that, I strongly do not believe that someone should be branded for life due to their past actions.
Do you even need to search the HTML? Just a generic find of the browser's search will reveal the same info. Not sure why you'd need to go to that trouble.
at the time I read this and replied, your comment was top of the stack. without reading the full comments, i'm already reading your comment as someone that's got their knickers in a twist rather than reading a substantive comment. so hopefully that's what you wanted?
New comments start out at the top and sink within a few minutes, only a select few will have that problem.
Ctrl+f gives false positives for name mentions, and searching the html is just as easy. Benefits of having spent so much time dealing with css style/class related bugs, I guess.
This whole situation is _not_ a Hans problem…it’s a FIDE problem. They don’t know how to reliably adjudicate claims of cheating, so it ends up being a massive game of “he said he said.” As the game gets more popular, they have a tremendous amount of work to do to guarantee game integrity – not unlike the work baseball had to do with steroids.
If other world top-50 players even think Hans cheated and got away with it, it creates an open door for lots more unscrupulous players to look for their own cheating schemes. We need to stop being so focused on a 19-year-old child and start asking chess organizers some hard questions about what they are planning to do to guarantee clean chess.
1. Ramp up anti cheat across the board. Stream delay, collect metrics which trigger an INTERNAL review at a certain threshold, etc.
2. Give players a process for lodging a suspicion of cheating. Part of this would be working with FIDE, not starting public drama. Fine them if they break the rules of that process.
If you get caught cheating, even once, you should be banned for life.
Otherwise we end up in a lose-lose situation.
It’s almost impossible for Magnus to prove Niemann cheated on that game.
It’s impossible for Niemann to prove he didn’t cheat.
But shouldn’t matter. He was caught cheating before, he shouldn’t have been allowed to compete again.
I don’t remember Ben Johnson or Lance Armstrong getting a pass
Edit: Replies seem to focus on my examples. Forget about them. Proposition stands. If you are old enough to compete you are old enough to be banned for life if you cheat. Online or OTB.
Permanent ban is standard punishment for cheating in lots of things in life. It's bizarre to me that it's not so in chess. Was he only caught while under 18. I can understand giving a second chance to children.
Imagine if they did that at the FAANG. There would be no more recruits. What percentage of all technical interviews at FAANG involve the candidate googling the answer in a way that the interviewer didn't know about?
At least pre-pandemic, that would be hard to do at the last stage (on-sites). You're generally in a room with one or more people and often whiteboarding rather than using a laptop. In the stages leading up to on-sites, in many cases, you're actually allowed to use reference materials like the official documentation -- which might contain examples -- because the interviewers don't necessarily expect you to have the entire standard library of the language you're using memorized. I've certainly Googled stuff during remote interviews myself, but I disclose that I'm doing that and explain what I'm searching for.
Steroids aren't even the best analogy. If you get caught with those, you get punished, but eventually you're allowed to play again. Cheating with an engine is more like fixing the game, which is usually a life time ban in most sports.
The situation for steroids is worse though: former steroid users gain benefits today even if they've been clean for a decade, due to how muscle cells work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyFfCVxGTIc
Lance’s case is interesting. Cheating is (was?) rampant in cycling. As Bill Burr joked “our roided up guy beat your roided up guy, what’s the big deal?”
I don’t think chess is as bad as cycling. Doesn’t excuse bad behavior, but gives some perspective
Understandable. There is just too much money and fame in sports - people are going to try to cheat. It is upto the governing bodies to reduce cheating to a minimum, if eliminating it completely isn’t practically feasible.
I agree with other comments here who suggested zero tolerance policy. Cheat once and get banned for life. I remember as a kid, watching hours of cricket. Then I found out some of my heroes were fixing matches. I stopped watching that day. No fan wants to see cheats and match fixers and other bad characters. That is what politics is for!
Hans has admitted to cheating in tournaments for money. Money is surely the line between professional and amateur. As for forgiving young people, we should codify that if we are serious about that. For example, we might have a 3-strikes rule that allows all young people to cheat at least 3 times before they are given an adult punishment, and we might also desire the ability to seal prior history.
I wasn’t aware of the cheating for money. Do have a source?
As for codification, criminal leniency for juveniles, which is widespread, gets you pretty close.
For chess to have its own codifications, I think, as Magnus clearly does too, that they need to generally up their game across the board. All the way from detection, investigation, protocols/procedures around suspicions, accusations and hearings/tribunals … and then the penalties can be codified.
I don’t know what’s in place now and what its history is, but Magnus is either chucking a massive rage-quit for losing or telling the chess world they need to get serious and catch up quick vc (or why not both I suppose).
Well the best way for Hans to prove he didn’t cheat is to give amazing analysis after the game demonstrating his super-elite chess thinking. Unfortunately, he often sounds like someone who did nothing on a group project trying to explain how it works to the professor.
I know this isn’t proof he cheated, but it doesn’t do him any favors when he’s already under suspicion.
Edit: Way back, decades ago, in Warcraft 2, I became strong enough to regularly get accused of cheating by people who weren’t familiar with me. However the converse side of this is I was extremely accurate at detecting actual cheating.
> I don’t remember Ben Johnson or Lance Armstrong getting a pass
I do not want to suggest anything here, just side note that there are cases in cycling when someone was cheating and than suspended/relegated but without life ban like Alberto Contador in Tour de France 2010.
Magnus isn't trying to be judge, jury and executioner by refusing to play Hans. He has stated before that merely having suspicions (e.g. based on past cheating as in Niemann's case) about your opponent possibly cheating completely ruins one's mentality during a game.
He simply wants to avoid going through that, which imo is understandable.
Some other GMs mentioned the same thing, having doubts whether the opponent is cheating or not makes you play differently (if they blunder, you might consider it could be a really deep engine line).
There is no way that this is possible. Niemann's performance has such a wide variance between:
- his best days, where he is pressing for victory or easily winning against the very best players in the world (not only Carlsen, but also Aronian, Mamedyarov, Firouzja), and
- his bad days, where he plays like an average grandmaster.
Someone who can play as bad as Niemann does on his bad days could never beat Carlsen legitimately in my opinion.
Any opponent could cheat at anytime. Cheating in chess is a fact of life, and can't be stopped. Other professional sports have mostly come to terms with this, and chess needs to as well.
When you have proof of cheating the sport's authorities take action (not individual players). When you don't you let the games go on knowing some folks are getting away with it sometimes.
The thing is that FIDE isn't really doing anything. This has been mentioned elsewhere in the comments, but what they really need to do is take this seriously and hire magicians, GM's, ex-intelligence, etc... to assess the situation and with transparency provide recommendations on how to move forward.
If you look at FIDE's statement, they basically said they were made that Magnus did this and they're using "sophisticated" techniques to prevent cheating. I don't think that is a responsible way to act, given that this presents an existential threat to the sport.
With today's system, there is no way to get proof of cheating, without catching someone red handed, and there's no way to bring awareness because FIDE is either not interested, incompetent, or both. Also, there might be a lot of cheating in chess, and it could be just an ugly secret that they're protecting.
It's almost impossible to detect cheating, but it's trivial to statistically find a cheater from many thousands of online games that he has to play online to get to this level.
> it's trivial to statistically find a cheater from many thousands of online games
you assume that cheater is stupid and uses cheats for every move in every game.
If you use engine as a crutch to stop you from blundering and suggest moves that you understand, combined with adhering to steady but not explosive growth in elo points,you most likely end up undetected.
> Magnus isn't trying to be judge, jury and executioner by refusing to play Hans.
Yes, he most definitely is and the rest of your comment doesn’t disprove that in any way.
Magnus isn’t trying to be judge, jury and executioner. He has just decided that the guy is irrevocably a cheater and as a sentence he will never play a game against him again.
There are two things that must be understood before making any judgement on this case:
1. It is solidly within the realm of possibility that a person who spends all his time devoted to succeeding in tournament chess would be able to devise a cheating method that cannot be easily detected by standard protocols
2. It is impossible to prove a negative, so it is impossible to disprove Magnus' claims
With these things being said, it is both possible that Hans didn't cheat and we'll never know for sure, or that he did cheat and we'll never know how. Given these facts, the most productive analysis would be to find just how unusual Hans' performance, both in the game and prior, really was.
A few things could be determined:
1. How many other high level players have a history of cheating? Have any players who have once cheated in a lower stakes match later been proven to have cheated in a higher stakes one?
2. Based on improvement per game played, how unusually rapid was Hans' development in the past 2 years? Are there other players which have progressed as rapidly as he has despite having progressed slower earlier in their careers?
3. Do all the engine correlation analyses that implicate Hans not fire warning signals when analysis any other game by confirmed non-cheaters? Do they signal cheating in a similar way when analyzing games of proven cheaters?
It is easier to prove a positive since it requires only the "smoking gun" to be made apparent. It is much harder to disprove a negative because it requires hypothetical smoking gun that could have caused the effect (Han's beating of Magnus) to be disproven. Since we don't have a record of every electromagnetic and sonic wave which passed through the room the day Hans beat Magnus, disproving the cheating claim is likely impossible.
This is a straw man. Truth values of paradoxes can not be determined, only postulated. It is a paradox because if it were proven true it would be false, and vice versa. In precisely the same way, "this phrase is false," is also a paradox, and whether or not the truth value can be determined (it can not) is not relevant to whether it is a paradox.
Yes, truth values of paradoxes cannot be determined, but it's you who called it a paradox. On its face, it isn't a paradox.
If we're being pedantic, which your initial response struck me as, there are again true statements with no proof, and this isn't a paradox, it's Gödel's first incompleteness theorem (which is specifically different from the liar's paradox you mentioned, precisely in the difference between what is true and what is provable).
Hans is clearly cheating. Comparing his past games against what an engine would do is pretty damning. Chess engines are far superior to players and the best players in the world top out in the high 70s percent correlations (Magnus averages around 70%).
Hans has a string of games at 100% correlation[0], meaning he's playing perfect games. Past players who achieved this later went on to admit to cheating[1]. Magnus knows this because he owns part of chess.com and presumably sees the data.
Magnus has a lot riding on his statement. He wouldn't make it unless he was sure.
It's cherry-picked games and it doesn't compare to the "engine correlation" of other high ranked players against similar opponents. I would not rely on it as evidence that Hans is "clearly cheating."
She says that the ROI probability calculation is wrong, which is the last part of her video and a separate topic.
The part about correlations has not been retracted AFAIK. I agree that there's a need for a baseline though, there is one example on her recent twitter feed but more samples are needed to get a better picture.
No it's not. Just the probability calculation had a few flaws.
The string of 100% games, esp. in the few tournament games he needed a win, is decisive. Note that he played a lot of games in each tournament on the 70% level, to fool statistics.
When I was younger, I spent many, many hours playing one particular video game. I became a “known cheater” at the game, despite never actually cheating (I’d cheated at other games in my early teens, but had since given up that lifestyle).
I can recall several players on discussion boards analysing my statistics and explaining how I was clearly cheating because it was impossible for a human to play like me. Humans, they said, just weren’t that accurate.
One cheat-detection algorithm even “caught” me one day, and I was promptly banned from that server. Confused about what had happened, I sought out the server documentation online so I could see what they had used to “detect” me. My crime, it turns out, was scoring too many kills per second.
I keep this in mind whenever I see another person accused of something similar. Sometimes people have just put in more effort and study than we choose to comprehend.
In one of my high school computer classes we'd often set up UT2003 LAN games. I was once called a cheater by someone sitting behind me who, at any point, could have directly observed my every move and corresponding input. I was baffled and amused at the same time. People that lose games have plenty of incentive to claim their opponent is cheating.
On the other hand, as my skill level increased in FPS games it became more and more obvious when one of my opponents was cheating. So IMO you can trust Magnus' ability to accurately estimate the chance of Hans cheating, but you can't trust his motivations for making the claim.
Aside: When you combine high skill levels with cheats that were designed first and foremost to avoid detection, it becomes almost impossible to do detect them. For example in FPS games "aim-bots" are crude compared to "hit-scanners" that simply auto-trigger when your crosshair happens to pass over a valid target. Combine a hit scanner with a player who already has top tier accuracy, and you get super-human accuracy. Let the player enable and disable the hit scanner in real time and they control exactly how accurate they are without any conspicuous appearances. You'd have to (externally) record and sync the monitor's output with a camera that monitors their mouse movements, and even then you'd need EXTREMELY accurate timing - most likely a capture rate higher than the monitor refresh rate.
Chess has a rating system, and we know what the best humans rate out at compared to the best chess engines, and we know the likelihood of lower ranked players beating higher ranked ones, just depending on how much difference there is, and where in the ratings the two players are. Chess is not some video game one person perfected playing.
The parent said they were accused of cheating at a game because they played it enough to perfect it, which isn't something humans can achieve with chess. Even the best chess engines don't play perfect chess, they just play at such a high level that no human can beat them.
At any rate, a 19 year old ranking a couple hundred points below the world champion for the past decade isn't going to have enough practice to use that as an excuse. So no, it's not the same thing.
Outlier players exist in every game, probably because of normal distribution.
Federer for tennis, Carlsen for chess, Serral for SC2 and dorkwood for his game.
The only way to certify their level is through strictly controlled competitions. eSports and chess do the same.
My most pro game experience was Battlefield 2 and I'd go on a public 64 player server and score most kills with only the knife. Thing is: My team mates and other pros were capable of doing the same. No pro would accuse us of cheating, just the average Joe's.
I saw something about a runner being disqualified because they moved 9 hundredths of a second after the gun. Ten hundredths is permitted but nine is not.
It’s not impossible to believe someone could be just a sliver faster.
Ten hundredth is what’s impossible plus a generous safety margin. If you are under it’s definitely a false start. If you are just over, it was most likely a false start but you were lucky this time.
It is extremely unlikely that a human being can hear a sound and move their foot within 100ms. Based on what we know of the brain and nervous system, it's most likely that anyone who reacts under 120ms has jumped the gun.[1]
In case anyone is curious, the starting times for the first five runners at the 110mH event at the 2022 World Championships were (in milliseconds) 99, 108, 109, 124, and 126.
While I personally disagree with the comment I am replying to regarding reaction times under 120ms, the issue at this World Championships was more likely that the reaction timing was wrong ...
Agreed. His ELO improvement alone is evidence enough imo.
His rating plateaued around 2300 from end of 2015 to mid 2018. Then in the last 2 years, I believe his improvement from 2400 to 2700 is the most rapid in history.
If you compare his rating with other young players like Duda, Firouzja, Gukesh - then his rating increase looks very unique.
I'm not aware of any chess prodigies that have followed a trajectory quite like this. So maybe Hans is an unusual talent. Or maybe, he's receiving computer assistance.
Daniel Rensch and others have said that Magnus has not seen chesscom cheating algorithms or lists. It had been a rumor in the chess world for a while that Hans has cheated before
He hasn't been officially shown but that doesn't mean that someone in the know hasn't leaked it to him. He's deeply connected and respected in the chess world.
Further, even if he didn't see it people notice when GMs get bans as their accounts turn inactive (which they had in this case).
In one of those games, Nieman was losing by 1.3 points in the first 10 moves despite being 100% according to this analysis so I'll take it with a grain of salt. This only looks at having moves within the top 3 engine moves done by one of the engines tested, and sometimes there's just 1-2 good moves so doing 1 out of 10 (or whatever) possible moves doesn't mean you did anything good. Further, it's unclear how cherry-picked it is. If it was that obvious I'd think the other analysis would've caught it which they didn't.
You can find more discussion of it on reddit, but the threads are generally all over the place.
A 1.3 difference out of an opening sideline is neither rare nor lost, and mostly simply comes down to the fact that the engine doesn't understand the opening. Even the mod pin in the link you posted clearly outlines that this is a misleading way to frame this. It would be better to read more into the discussion before helping misinformation spread.
I didn't describe it as lost like the poster did, I said 'losing by 1.3' which is accurate. At any rate, if you actually did read deeper you'd see that losing by 1.3 is plenty relevant, when claiming 100% engine play correlation, and that the mod is somewhat cherry-picking. Further, playing openings where you are -1.3 in 2000 blitz is fine, but in super GM games 1.3 points down is more often than not pretty bad.
"The engine doesn't understand the opening" might have applied 10 years ago but you'll have a very hard time finding a single opening in all of chess where it would be the case now.
While interesting, this does not seem very convincing to me. They successfully show that Niemann was playing many games with a high percentage of "engine perfect" moves, but they do not do enough to show that this is inconsistent with what top players usually do. A whole distribution of scores is shown for Niemann but only limited summary statistics are shown for other top players. A proper comparison would involve showing the same type of data for both.
> They successfully show that Niemann was playing many games with a high percentage of "engine perfect" moves, but they do not do enough to show that this is inconsistent with what top players usually do.
I thought the video very much did make that case. A single known cheating game had a 98% correlation (Sebastien Feller Paris 2010), other GMs have generally at most 75% average correlation. The analysis had more than half a dozen games with Niemann at 100% correlation. If that's cherry picking, it seems like there are a lot of cherries to pick.
Yes, that's the question that I wish she had tried to answer. What are the chances? Without checking for that pattern by other 2600+ GMs, we don't know the answer.
Yeah, because Carlsen's is only a sample of 426 games
The first 4 are the most interesting, having same sample size of 4000. But across the board players tend to have little distinction between choosing moves between 0.0 & 0.1, except one player
Me, as a 1600 player, have played some 0-0-0 games on Lichess. I didn't cheat. I just play a lot of chess games and during those games, my opponent was really bad, so I had a perfect game (according to the engine).
You're conflating accuracy with engine correlation. Having a perfectly accurate game means you didn't make any moves that caused a centipawn loss. Having 100% engine correlation means you're making the exact moves the engine would make.
I think I have on 3-4 occasions played a game where, after evaluating on chess.com, got a 100% accuracy (which is engine correlation). A couple times were all theory and then blundering a mate in 1, but...
I did have one game where I didn't know the theory except a very vague recollection in the beginning. I actually thought I had blundered in that game and was trying to figure out what I'd do if my opponent made a certain move — they didn't find it, I ended up winning material in a tactic and they resigned — I was in complete shock when it came back 100% accuracy (and I definitely did not see the engine response to the move I was worried about, which was the best move).
I'm only around 1600-1700 on chess.com.
Not taking a position either way on Hans, but I have no doubt he knows far more theory than I do (and I do know some lines 20+ moves deep), and correlating with an engine is not impossible even outside of book.
To repeat what was said above, accuracy is not the same as engine correlation.
Engines often play moves that are counterintuitive and weird, but nonetheless good. This is because they can evaluate large trees of tactics in a way that humans cannot.
If a human finds a natural move that is just as good as the engine move (in terms of evaluation), they are still playing accurately, but they are uncorrelated with the engine. Playing accurately is not a sign of cheating. Playing many engine moves is a sign of cheating.
The engine scores centipawn loss against the perfect move (according to the engine). The engine plays the move with the lowest centipawn loss itself. How are those two different?
So there are "really bad" opponents at the 1600 level, but is it reasonable to think there are "really bad" opponents at the 2600 level? It's a different world up there.
Right, op is making a mistake in thinking that a perfect game against a 1600 is the same as a perfect game against a GM. GMs will intentionally play less perfect moves to head towards complications where they will come out ahead. When I start to bang out 15 moves of theory against a IM/GM they will recognize it and play something I’m not familiar with and just win more quickly.
This is complete garbage. Real statistical analysis has been done, and has been inconclusive so far. Cherry picking games is ridiculous - at the 2800 level, a GM will only deviate from the engine's top moves 0-3 times. It would be expected that an exceptional performance would remain within top engine moves if someone was able to play at that level.
Hans isn't at the 2800 level, but Magnus is almost 2900, and probably has good reason to be suspicious of someone playing way above their rating in tough matches.
Yeah this is interesting … she shows that Hans had many tournaments where he shows record setting move accuracy as measured by correlation to Stockfish 15, and that 6 of these tournaments occurred in a row. She also shows that for those tournaments even by Reagans model, Hans results would be like a 1/70000 chance if legit.
The key point (in the end) seems to be that the odds for a streak like Niemann had are about 1 in 80k. Statistically speaking, I'd say that's a long shot from a smoking gun. Here's a good rundown of a case where a cheater is considered to have been exposed by statistical evidence, but those odds were on a completely different scale, 10^22:
Basically the mistake that is easy to make is that we shouldn't ask: "what is the probability that Hans plays five tournaments like that in a row?", but "what is the probability that someone will play five tournaments like that in a row?". Even if we correct for the fact that there are probably more Minecraft speedruns happening than GM tournaments, odds of 80k just seem a bit too low to call it evidence.
Using an ultra-high ELO chess engine to score each possible move, then reversing through the players moves and seeing how often it would have been a positive move (one that shifts the balance of the game in your favor) - or perfect move (not sure which). It is extremely rare to make 100% perfect moves in a game, let alone a series of games. Typical gameplay for high level chess player doesn't peak over 72-75% for a given series of N games. Niemann has several tournaments over this and several games with 100% perfect moves. The inconsistency is also a concern since he goes from mid-60's to 78/79 in a span of one tournament.
It's also worth pointing out that a player's odds of making the perfect move are inverse to their opponent's ELO: as the level of play rises, finding the right play becomes exponentially harder. The data suggests he's sometimes playing other grandmasters as good as those grandmasters would play a rando on Lichess.
yeah - if I pulled a random willing powerball ticket out of my massive pile of powerball tickets, that would be a really, really rare event. It would make me believe that it isn't such a rare thing, for sure.
FM Yosha puts forward a fairly convincing argument about odds and engine correlation, but another commenter rightly pointed out that these statistics are not seen as incriminating in and of themselves. Unfortunately, even when the preponderance of evidence seems to be against a player - best example is Sebastian Feller (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9bastien_Feller) playing with superhuman accuracy at crucial moments, and whose team captain later admitted to helping him cheat - they can still cast enough doubt to be allowed to continue playing at the highest level.
Here is a blunder that Feller played on move 13 just over a month ago (https://new.chess24.com/wall/news/grandmaster-blunders-mate-...) - this same guy managed to draw against Magnus Carlsen in 2008, in a game where Carlsen also found the moves/mannerisms of his opponent highly unusual.
Perfect when compared to the moves the top chess engines would make? Hikaru says he only scored 100% one time, and 70% is more typical for a GM, yet everyone does it?
the gist seems to be that he has unrealistically high correlation with game-engine recommendations, often all the way up to 100%, but only when playing "tough" opponents, and far lower / realistic correlation scores (around 50%) in other games.
for reference, magnus carlsen's correlation score at his peak averages around 70% (according to the video)
This is super cool! I tried it on a video I recorded a while ago that I completely forgot about and was like wait wow the summary came away with points that I'd be glad a viewer got.
One thing is it was a very long and rambling video and probably didn't do a great job of motivating examples rather than just getting bogged down in them for a while, so the summary doesn't really say how the examples support the central claim, but that may be the fault of the video honestly lol...
Also a few basic errors like writing "medium" where I'm pretty sure I said or at least meant "median" and in one case, I'd have to go back and watch this to be sure, but it seems like the summary says something is better in B than in A when I was saying it's better in A than B. The summary definitely touches the right content but I'm not sure it's correct.
Also funnily I have a tendency to sprinkle the word "like" liberally(for better or worse) and the summary copies some of the sentences verbatim, starting with "Like..."
(completely off the topic of cheating in chess, sorry...)
He played several games with 100% correlation with what chess engines considered to be the best move, and also played in 5 consecutive tournaments with such a high fraction of engine-preferred moves that his performance rivals the best players in history at the pinnacle of their careers.
It would be nice to get an ELI5 on this too. I used to play chess and have an understanding of the significance... but I don't think I can fully appreciate it as well as someone with a solid background in both.
It's actually fairly easy to cheat statistics. It happens literally all the time in Academia. There's a thousand ways to make a statistical analysis believably say what you want in a way where even other professionals don't realize is the case unless an expert does a thorough analysis.
It's easy to cheat a statistic you create. It's quite hard to cheat a statistic where you don't know who will look when at which particular data points.
I did not intend to attack or defend Hans with that statement, I just wanted to point out that both you and the original comment could be right at the same time. That being said, it's quite funny that this case showed both sides.
Since younger players are growing up and developing with these incredibly powerful chess engines, I wonder if that plays a role in their ability to play at such a level.
If this were the case, I think we'd see younger players more likely to get these 100s more often as they're learning from chess engines.
Does anyone familiarized with the topic know if this makes sense?
Chess is, in a way, doomed. At this point cheating by a smart perpetrator is nearly impossible to detect.
- Miniature devices can even be implanted. You can probably already have a chess engine onboard your body.
- Accomplices of a cheater only need to transmit a few bits of information to be useful - making cheating cheap when audience is allowed.
- Statistical methods will not be able to detect a player increasing their apparent skill by a small margin (help with occasional moves, successively picking suggestions from a varied group of chess engines so that adherence to one engine cannot be proven)
Given this, we will be left with cheaters getting caught rarely through obvious slips in op-sec (device falls out, gets picked by a detector through unlucky occurrence)
or
We will be forever accusing people of cheating. They will deny it. We will ask them to explain why they made certain moves. They will fail to explain themselves sufficiently... Are we here yet?
You could play in a Faraday cage, use an SDR and check for weird radio signals, and other steps. Some of this would only really be feasible at the highest levels, but that's where going to those lengths is needed.
This seems like an overreaction. We regularly use scanners to detect foreign or hidden objects on people, such as at airport security. It's not out of the question to use such approaches at high level chess where the cost/benefit is worth it.
Airport security is trying to find bombs and knives. Those are potentially orders of magnitudes bigger than the cheating devices we're talking about here.
Airport security won't find my 0.1mm knife, and it's not a problem if they don't.
It’s a deeply unsatisfactory situation, because on one side we expect evidence for such a serious accusation, and on the other side we know such evidence is all but impossible to gather retrospectively.
I believe the takeaway is exactly that. We are in a situation where we can’t know for certain. We can’t go back in time and learn if there was cheating going on. But we can go forward and increase security so the next time we are more likely to be confident about if cheating happened or not. And that is what Carlsen is asking for.
No, that's all he has said thus far. You don't have the faintest idea what he "can say". In fact, Magnus hints that he has more to say, if GM Cheatboy gives him permission to do so without threat of a lawsuit.
I have no opinions on the actual event given I have no clue what the details are.
But accusing someone of cheating without any concrete evidence doesn’t sit well with me. It creates a situation where it declares all exceptional cases impossible. It’s impossible for growth. It’s impossible that someone could lose to a weaker player.
I suspect that people are able to say “even without concrete evidence, this is astronomically unlikely and the simplest explanation by far is that they cheated.”
Nevertheless, it all just doesn’t quite sit right with me. There’s something manifestly unpalatable about saying, “they cheated because surely nobody could ever do that.”
Please don’t see this comment as something that warrants explanation for why the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. I’m not really interested in the merits of this specific case. I’m also probably doing a poor job communicating this feeling I struggle myself to understand.
There's no smoking gun, but it's so blatantly obvious. Hans has floundered incredibly in postgame analysis after some of his recent wins, saying things like "I don't need to show variations" and "chess speaks for itself". For those who are not familiar, postgame analysis is where a player sits down with a commentator (often a retired GM) and discusses the key positions in the game. This universally involves describing the variations for a potential move, and explaining the logic for choosing a particular line. So his inability to speak coherently about a position where he won the match is perhaps the most glaring clue that his recent wins have not been earned.
The analysis video was weird. But you have to discount that under that 1) he had just lost a winning game, so probably pretty tilted 2) he was already in the eye of the storm about Magnus 3) he might just be a bit of a dick personally.
If a position has 1 winning move out of 10, you have 10% to nail it even if you are a bozo. I'd say that as a good player you'd do better than random. So while unlikely he might have just got lucky against Magnus (if we want to assume the impossibility of him just having become good).
I agree with parent that the accusation is terrible. 1) it comes from someone in a position of power, 2) it comes from someone who is party injured in the matter (saltiness factor) 3) is completely unfounded as of now. There are just suspicions and theories. 4) it's playing with the accusation without committing to it, kinda like "ill commit only if it's convenient to me". 5) his prior cheating is immaterial. Especially as a child. No one cares that he "has cheated", the point of the matter is "did he cheat in this instance".
Is it bad optics that the guy beating Magnus as an underdog is a known past cheater? Yes. Is it relevant to "he beat Magnus here"? no.
I don't really expect folks to keep up with chess drama, but Magnus is not the only player accusing Hans of cheating. A few of his other opponents have also described his play as peculiar. Hans has been recently banned twice from chess.com for cheating, and his current coach has also been caught doing the same.
I think you're uneasy because you're assuming the accusation of cheating has to do with the outcome of Hans's games but I don't believe that's the criterion Magnus is using. Magnus has been beaten many times before, but that doesn't automatically cause him to suspect his opponent of cheating. Magnus's suspicions arise from a sum of many different factors some of which he mentioned in this tweet and some of which he clearly can't talk about. If we judge people based on their past actions, their suspicious behaviour during the game or during the post-game analysis then it doesn't preclude the advancement of a legitimate genius player.
Zero tolerance blacklisting of cheaters is probably the best way forward. If neither Niemann nor Carlsen recant, then I predict chess will fall into general disrepute like baseball or billiards. The way for the professional chess community to salvage this situation is with zero tolerance blacklisting of anybody caught cheating, even as a teenager.
I don't know about high-level billiards, but low level billiards is basically synonymous with hustling and cheating (aka sharking.) Pool sharking is so widespread and infamous, I think it casts the entire sport in a sleazy light.
With baseball, a lot of high level players have gotten caught or admitted it, and have said that it's widespread. Jose Canseco admitted to cheating and claimed as much as 80% of players use steroids. He specifically accused Alex Rodriquez, which was later proven true. Allegations like these from admitted/caught cheats might be attempts to justify themselves, but personally I think cheating is and has been rampant in baseball for a very long time. It's still fun to watch though.
In case anyone is curious, Canseco played in the MLB from 1985 to 2001. It is unclear when the MLB banned steroids, but some possible years include 1990--1991, 1997, or somewhere around 2003--2005.
Note, however, that steroid use was made effectively illegal on a federal level in the United States in 1990. The 1991 date above references a memo from the commissioner that states that illegal drugs are "strictly prohibited". Steroids are mentioned explicitly, though they do not have to be, seeing as how they were in fact illegal.
It may not have stopped entirely, but there are much better safeguards in place, and it's pretty obvious based on power hitting statistics (home runs mainly) that it's not even close to as bad as it was in the 90's and early 2000's. The penalties for getting caught doping are quite high.
Most recently, superstar San Diego Padres player Fernando Tatis Jr. was suspended for 80 games after testing positive for steroid use. [1]
At one point in time they would literally fix the World Series. This was a long time ago, but yeah, baseball had big issues with integrity. The steroids thing is nothing compared to how bad it used to be.
He cheated as a minor in online play. He has never been shown to have cheated as an adult or in OTB play. Someone needs to prove one of those things before he can be blacklisted for being a cheater.
Enough with the fiction that cheating is a mistake, or that a 16 year old smart enough to be a chess grandmaster is simultaneously so underdeveloped that they have not learned the consequences of cheating.
Your comparison with murder is ridiculous. First of all, teenage murderers are regularly sentenced to life in prison. A murderer is deprived of fundamental human liberties--Niemann is deprived of being able to compete at the highest competitive level in a tabletop board game, without suspicion.
He cheated online on a second rate chess site. Nobody has any explanations how he could do it over the board.
(Considering that people become more or less aware about their responsibilities and consequences of their actions at about 15 yo, he is now 4 times the responsible age he was at 16.)
They said no evidence was found, not that no cheating took place. (After all, it would most likely be very hard to detect.) And the anti cheating measures were upped after Carlsen quit; therefore they were not adequate in the first place.
If you decide to twist their statement this way, two can play the game. How about this: "No evidence was found that Magnus Carlsen was cheating. It does not mean no cheating took place in his championship matches."
Does that seem fair or reasonable to you? Sure no man can be as good as Magnus, he is clearly cheating in some clear undetected way, right?
To concede that cheating took place would mean that they had failed in their responsibility to stop it happening, and that somehow their method of detection only worked after the cheating was happening, rather than during or before.
For those two reasons, I think that any such "pretty adamant" statement can be discounted.
People really start to mature and become aware of their responsibilities and consequences for their actions at 15. So 16 years old person has only about 1 year of adult life experience vs 4 years at 19.
I believe that your position is utterly immoral and cruel. Everyone deserves a path to redemption, and a kid cheating at chess in his childhood does not deserve an eternal punishment for the rest of his life because of it.
Imagine if he is a generational talent and one of the best in the world, are you really ready to deprive him any future just because he did stupid things as a kid?
Some things matter so little that the penalties can be extremely high; for example, nobody needs to play chess so the penalty for cheating at chess can be a lifetime ban from sanctioned tournaments.
Is it entirely fair to the actually repentant? No. But does it keep out the false-repentant? Yes.
Repeat offender, he's admitted to cheating at age 12 and once again at age 16. Let's not cast this into something melodramatic like a "path to redemption", it is just chess after all, and the right decision is probably for him to be perma-banned, otherwise you're just going to end up with more and more of these types of situations.
You're saying that (shouldn't walk into a Walmart and be searched) as it's a given. Doesn't sound that obvious to me. May be false, may be true, but regardless, it's definitely up for discussion.
He's saying it should be OK to be searched when leaving a store??? What universe do they live in? It barely makes sense to me and I said so. It obviously is not clear. No one is searched when they leave stores. That's insane.
If you robbed from a store at 12 and again at 16, I wouldn't blame that store for banning you for life. If they want to give you some lenience and allow you in only if you agree to a patdown and search of your bags, then they're being more forgiving than I would be.
> No one is searched when they leave stores.
In fact there are stores which will ask to search your bags and check your receipts as you walk out the door, and may ban you if you refuse. You probably realize this and are feigning ignorance.
Anyway, what's really insane is the way you're bouncing around this thread giving so many people such low quality replies, like the one directly above where you try to gaslight karamanolev by falsely claiming their comment was unintelligible. It really seems like you have some undisclosed stake in this matter, because you're not being fair or civil to many of those you respond to.
> In fact there are stores which will ask to search your bags and check your receipts as you walk out the door, and may ban you if you refuse. You probably realize this and are feigning ignorance.
In the US, they can ask - but no one can force you to do anything.
playing competitive Chess is a privilege, not a right like freedom. I'm totally fine with 0-tolerance, because the only penalty is you can't play in competitions. If you want to play chess with your mates, no one is going to stop you.
It's the dude's livelihood, though. There are laws about taking someone's tools if they owe a debt for similar reasons. I think it is a very similar thing.
I think there's little dispute that he's a very good chess player. He could perhaps earn a modest living as a chess tutor. That should be good enough, he's not entitled to riches.
For all the people defending Hans, he has admitted to cheating in real, official, prize money online tournaments, and chess.com believes that in his apology he still lied about the extent of his cheating.
Maybe Hans did cheat OTB, maybe he didn't, but the tough part about reputation is it is very hard to build and very easy to break. And Hans had proven to the world that he would cheat.
I personally don't think Hans did cheat in that particular tournament but at the same time I don't think he deserves too much sympathy. Cheaters literally destroy the game, and Hans at the very least was a cheater.
To be fair to Hans, his claim is he cheated in a prize money tournament when he was 12. If he cheated in prize money games besides that it would be different, but I think most people are willing to forgive a 12 year old.
And the worst part is that Chess.com released a statement saying they've suspended Niemann's account because they have evidence that his cheating was not limited to these two instances. They've invited him to look at the evidence and respond privately to their concerns but it is not publicly known if he has done so.
Yes, the maturity jump from 16 to 19 is marginal at best. If you generalize from crime statistics, a 19 year old is actually more likely to be dishonest than a 16 year old. Criminality peaks in the late teens and drops in the early 20s.
(Yes yes I know, Pinkerton are evil. they have the best plot of this correlation I could find. The crime-age correlation is the strongest that exists in the entire field of criminology.)
I wonder if you plotted "risk/reward" behavior during that same time if you'd get a similar curve, just going to show that adolescents are bad at risk/reward calculations.
It is relevant to remember that he "admitted" to cheating on two different occasions only after he was caught and banned for doing so. He did not voluntarily come forward and confess of his own volition.
Just 3 years ago in that age is a lot. Also he said that he didn't cheat in prize money tournaments or tournaments at all at 16, he cheated because he wanted to boost his rating and play better players, not saying that is okay. I don't know if he cheated against Magnus or not, but to say that he cheated because something he did at twelve is stupid. Magnus saying that Hans wasn't tense and concentrated is far more important than this other stuff.
He only (recently) admitted to those two cases because he was publicly outed. It seems extremely unlikely that the only two times he was caught was also the only two times he cheated. I think it's very probable he has cheated dozens or hundreds of times and not been caught or not been publicly outed for it.
That argument doesn’t make sense to me. If someone has acknowledged that they will cheat when there are NO stakes, why does that make it less likely they will cheat if something is on the line?
If anything someone who is already known to cheat “just because” is even more likely to cheat when there is something to gain.
The claim in the original comment that I replied to was that Hans had admitted to cheating in "real, official, prize money online tournaments", which was when he was 12.
As for cheating and stakes I think it all depends. His claim is he cheated when he was 16 to boost his rating so he could player higher level opponents on stream and boost his career. If you accept that claim it would make sense that he rationalized it that he was just cheating to get to his "true" Elo and stopped cheating once he got there. Now Chess.Com seems to believe that he cheated beyond that but they haven't specified more at this point.
Well steroids and doping are different because they effect your body but sure, if Armstrong had cheated during trials with something like a small motor but not during the actual tour it would have tarnished his legacy but I don't think it would have ruined it like his cheating did.
> He's admitted to cheating at 12 years old and at 16 years old (just 3 years ago)
I see the pattern forming. He clearly has improved his play since but he could also have improved the cheating technique, as others pointed out, just needing a hint or two in the most decisive moments of the game. Has he not cheated against Magnus it's a pity that he got accused with no proofs.
Chess.com (Magnus is a 20% shareholder) did put out a public statement calling out Niemann for cheating more than the once or twice that Niemann admitted to. Chess.com forwarded evidence to Niemann. We're still waiting for a response.
If it's reasonable for a 12yo to be able to play in a for-money tourney, then I don't think it's unreasonable to think they should know the difference between right and wrong.
As a parent of a now 13 year old - it is not reasonable for a 12 year old to play a for money tournament. 12 year olds may "know right from wrong" in some sense, but they do not have adult brains. Expecting them to make decisions like an adult, or understand "right and wrong" the same way an adult does, is ludicrous.
Then why should they be able to win money off adults?
Classic "have your cake and eat it too". If you want to play in tournaments with adult prizes then you should expect adult consequences for misbehavior.
They shouldn't be able to. But either way, kids don't have adult brains, and there's nothing anyone can do about that. They are physically different. You can't expect a 12 year old to dunk a basketball, and you can't expect a 12 year old to think like an adult.
Look, maybe he did not cheat but it's hard to prove he didn't nor that he did. The fact that historically he's not blemish free makes it harder to celebrate his victory. Tough luck indeed..
It's one thing to say an old man cheated when he was 12 years old, it's yet another to say a 19 year old did it just a handful of years ago. He's still a kid.
My intuition is that there's evidence out there that shows he cheated more, but people grow up a lot from age 12 to 19. That time period is basically the entirety of adolescence! I don't think it's fair to pin the actions of their 12 year old self on a 19 year old.
I did broadly equivalent stupid shit when I was 12, 16, 19... I don't think I mellowed out until I was 25-30. 19 is young, 19 year olds are generally still in their peak stupid teenager years. Crime stats back this up: https://pinkerton.com/our-insights/blog/age-crime-curve
The trust is broken and equating it to fractions of someones life is the wrong measure. What has he done since he cheated at 12? Oh, he cheated in random games at 16. Surefire way to rebuild trust...
But cheating wouldn't explain a relaxed state. You could easily expect that he'd be nervous as fuck to cheat OTB against Carlsen. This is just wildly speculative and ultimately meaningless.
Except that you can't really call things a clue if you're just looking for things to confirm your existing opinion. Any stance Hans could have had during that game could be construed as indication of him cheating.
People just spewing their garbage everywhere around this. It is amazing. It is almost like politics. It is crazy how people are getting about this issue.
If FIDE or Chess.com or whoever wanted to ban him from events for his past behavior--or players simply wanted to ostracize him by refusing to play in tournaments with him--they needed to have banned/ostracized him for that behavior. I don't think anyone would complain if Niemann were caught cheating and then permanently banned. That's what Carlsen implies he's after and it's fine.
In contrast, this is "well, you cheated in the past, but we're going to let you play, unless you play really well, in which case we'll assume you cheated". This is just not a sane way to go about it, and creates the scenario in which Niemann is playing with a sort of externally-imposed skill cap. An accusation has to come with evidence specific to that accusation, not some hazy combination of past history + unease with his play. This all sounds like a slow-motion tantrum, which Carlsen can get away with because he's Magnus Carlsen.
I could also decide to cheat when being in the top players in the world. Even better, because I would only need to use my cheats sometimes and hide it even better because my knowledge holds up enough.
Yes and I think this is the real risk that Magnus or others who cares about chess are worried about. Not the 1200 player who plays like the world champion which is blatently obvious, but a 2700 player who selectively uses computer assistance to play like a 2800 and get into the elite circuit of the top players (which also is where all the money is).
All the history of doping in the Olympics would disagree.
It is possible that some people can reach quite a high level but top out in their natural abilities well below the absolute top of the game and be incentivized to cheat to break through their personal, natural ceiling.
Or even further, look at professional cycling in the 90s and 2000s. It wasn't just people doping to break through their ceiling to reach the top, literally everyone at the top was doping and it was necessary to be able to keep up.
Even worse than "some people are cheating to make it to the elite level" would be "everyone at the elite level is cheating, you can't compete without cheating".
No, but once you’re there, it becomes an easier mental hurdle to jump over, because they’re already incredibly talented and skilled. They can justify it with phrases like “it’s just a small edge to help. I could easily do it myself with more training but this is easier/faster/more bulletproof”. you’ll find that at the top level morals can be corrupted easier because it’s such a small edge needed. Oh, i’ll only use the move generator once, i’ll only use it to catch obvious blunders, etc.
> Maybe Hans did cheat OTB, maybe he didn't, but the tough part about reputation is it is very hard to build and very easy to break.
The problem is this was true a month ago. And a year ago. And 2 years ago. If he should be banned by reputation then it should have already happened. If they do it now they just weaponize cheating accusations.
As an outsider to the chess world, this all seems like a roundabout way of saying "we have no evidence that he cheated, but in lieu of evidence let's go with gut feelings".
It certainly doesn't help his case. If you have had troubles with the law prior to a new crime, it gets taken into consideration negatively by the judge. Same with cheaters. It means he is a cheater by definition and has the moral compass to cheat again.
This isn't a court, and it isn't criminal behavior. If it was a court and it was criminal behavior, we'd expect innocent until proven guilty and the benefit of the doubt. Which no one is giving Hans.
Not exactly. Chess GMs have a somewhat "over-fitted gut." On studies done on their memory, they could routinely recall a chess board after seeing that board for only a few moments provided that the layout the pieces could be reached in a regular game. When the board was laid out in an unlikely manner, they performed no better than the control group.[1]
Let's say you arrive home with your 2y/o child and are greeted with dog shit on the floor. If I asked the 2y/o who shat on the floor they wouldn't be able to answer, but you could easily deduce that the dog did it. Why? Because you have an immense bank of experience concerning everyday causality that the 2y/o doesn't have.
Magnus has a bank of human chess moves in his mind, that we don't. He knows that the dog shat on the floor.
And keep in mind that Magnus has not thrown this accusation around in the past, even in the face of defeat.
It kinda smacks of some deficit in the modern game. Consider a hypothetical chess player who does not cheat, never has cheated, but through some combination of the occasional atypical move or odd behavior, makes players think they are cheating.
They seem to be saying that such behavior can confer an advantage — that to seem to be cheating is itself cheating.
I say we carry on like normal. Either Niemann's success falls apart, he messes up and gets caught, or we find out he's actually onto something brilliant.
Nevermind have people shot down this dudes analysis, but he says in the post "But, if you will permit some editorializing, despite Niemann's claims that "it's impossible to play under these conditions," he gives every indication of quite enjoying the attention."
What fucking garbage that is a smear on the face of chess.
So you agree that Magnus is wrong and that Hans did not cheat in the OTB game.
And if you also agree with Magnus that cheating is a major problem then him singling out a single player who happened to beat him in OTB chess, as opposed to asking for wholesale changes for the past so many years to tackle cheating more seriously when he owns one of the top chess organizations and has partnerships with nearly every other chess organization, seems like him just being a sore loser.
I don’t need to defend Hans’s cheating to point out that Magnus’s response has been ridiculous because it’s entirely focused on 1 individual player as opposed to the actual large scale problem of cheating in chess. A guy who happened to beat him OTB in a game where he likely did not cheat at all.
> So you agree that Magnus is wrong and that Hans did not cheat in the OTB game.
There’s a world of difference between holding a personal opinion that X is probably true, and agreeing that X is an established fact.
> Magnus’s response has been ridiculous because it’s entirely focused on 1 individual player as opposed to the actual large scale problem of cheating in chess
From the letter: “I also believe that chess organizers and all those who care about the sanctity of the game we love should seriously consider increasing security measures and methods of cheat detection for over the board chess.”
It's very remarkable that Carlsen is suspicious of Niemann's game against him in Sinquefield, since there's a clear consensus among other top chess players that there was absolutely nothing unusual about it (or at least about the moves played).
You missed a large part. Some of his moves were "somewhat suspect". However, he was interviewed after the game with Magnus and he really could not explain why he was making the moves he made. Even the interviewers were almost laughing as he gave his "analysis" for his own moves. He played off his top engine moves as just getting lucky, while at the same time stating he didn't make other moves because they would have weakened his position (when in fact it was the other way around), while also stating he made other moves to strengthen his position (when in fact it was weakening).
Nothing he said made sense. He is playing against the top players in the entire world, and he can't really describe his games. This is super genius territory, and yet he just claims his skills to mostly just be based on luck.
I agree, but as I tried to state, there is simply more to it. Giving bad interviews doesn't mean anything. Accidentally beating the world champion doesn't mean anything. Spending all night studying a rarely played chess line that just happens to be the exact line played the next day doesn't really mean anything either. Not really being able to analyze like a GM doesn't mean anything too.
But when you have all these factors happening during one game, statistically it is not probable.
And that one just happens to be a kid who was caught cheating online twice (unlike any of his other opponents) and was an unremarkable player until the age of 17 but has since attained 2700+ level (unlike any of the current young 2700+ players who all reached GM level before the age of 15).
You should see the sequence. He was totally unable to explain any lines he had in mind, stating some positions were « obviously winning » (where it was absolutely not obvious, and in fact the engine marked it as loosing), etc. A total disaster.
If you think about it: Magnus, is Magnus. He has an aura about him. People make blunders playing against him they wouldn't against others. This is known. Magnus is ALSO very good. But that "aura"... doesn't hurt him.
If for whatever reason, Hans saw far enough ahead, to not be worried... and Magnus hadn't, what does that say about Magnus?
He mentioned Hans wasn't nervous, in comparison to Magnus he had nothing to lose.
I won't defend his prior cheating. I will say: Prove it Magnus.
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I'll draw a parallel to a game I have played at the national / international level. Bridge.
Bridge has had a TON of cheating scandals. People knew something was fishy. But they took the time, watched the videos, and figured out what happened.
Bridge cheating is a bit different, because you can find the smoking gun from video reviews, etc.
I wonder if "bridge supercomputers" as a cheating method has been tried. I assume the percentages on finesses working, etc, are easy enough for the experts to learn that they're not very worthwhile.
Well, remember, you don't have full information. Especially in an "all pass" auction from opponents.
Interestingly, the computers would to MUCH better on defense. Because as you bid, you speak about the distribution of your hand, and your partner does the same about theirs. (Even in negative inferences.)
And trust me: Good opponents will use that information, already.
So far, bridge has found the smoking guns because honestly: The cheaters have sucked at cheating.
If they bothered to actually encrypt their signals at all, they would have been suspected, but not caught.
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To answer the question: Even today. Good players will know the answer to when to take which finesses. Where good, is probably around Life Master and a bit under.
When Robert Fischer achieved an unprecedented scores in the pretenders matches prior to winning the champion title, I believe that the biggest factor was not the quality of the play of Fischer, but the way he mentally unbalanced and broke his opponents, who absolutely did not give a performance they were capable of.
The unnerving, unbalancing effect Fischer had in the 1971 Candidate's tournament was absolutely due to his play. He put up immense resistance against lines prepared by teams of Soviet GMs (example here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8-90cPf61M), which was the sort of thing that broke their nerve. He was not intimidating or manipulating his opponents outside of the board; if there were any outside-chess forces at play, it was the pressure from Soviet higher-ups embarrassed to lose to a lone American. Also, I don't recall that his opponents played worse than they would have been expected to against an opponent so much stronger than them — maybe after their fifth loss in a six game match, they'd become demoralized.
> He was not intimidating or manipulating his opponents outside of the board
They absolutely were blundering much more than they did vs other opponents, showing a far lower quality off play than usual. Also I believe you didn't read much about his championship match. Remember how the games were moved to a different room, and why?
Arjun blundered against Magnus far more than usual last weekend. That's what stronger players tend to do to you.
I thought you were talking about the Candidate's tournament. As for the championship match, it's not generally believed that Spassky severely underperformed anyway. He won several games and put up good fights in the draws and losses.
>I believe you didn't read much about his championship match
I am quite familiar with the surrounding circumstances, including the pre-match negotiations. I do not see how any of this "mentally unbalanced" or "broke" Spassky, unlike (arguably) Larsen and Taimonov. Furthermore, he's generally been commended for his behavior as a consummate professional and a "gentleman" in the circumstances.
I wonder if you are as familiar with chess (the game, professional play, and its history) as you lead on to be, posting all over this thread.
Well, I only visited the chess school for maybe 6 or 7 years in my childhood, and my peak lichess rapid rating was slightly below 2600, so I believe I'm definitely not the best expert on these matters.
In this case it seems most of the unusual behavior occurred after the match, where (I've seen claimed) Niemann gave obviously wrong reasons why he had played so well on such an uncommon line, and was also not able to explain why he made particular choices he did playing it.
Not only did he fail to explain his reasoning in any satisfactory way, but the suggestions he gave as responses to alternative lines from his opponent were outright losing which showed that he had a poor grasp of the position. This is extremely suspicious behaviour from a player who had just defeated the world champion while using the black pieces.
The consensus among the top GMs was that Hans’s postgame analysis was way below the level you would expect from a player of his rating, never mind a player near Carlsen’s rating (which is much higher)!
No it can't and it is damning evidence. When you wipe the world champion off the board as black (which he did), you need to be able to show you understand how the game progressed in a post-game analysis. Neimann's understanding of his own remarkable performance was seriously deficient.
Being unable to explain your own work is how a lot of academic cheating is confirmed. It doesn't matter if they don't know who you copied from, if you can't understand your own work right after you supposedly made it, they will fail you.
It's like when you get the correct answer on a math test, but then when the math teacher asks you to show your work you bumble around and can't reproduce the thought process required to arrive at the correct answer.
No, it’s more like someone come to see you after a four hours exam while you are tired and want to go home and ask you how you did the very tricky and somewhat open question 4 while suggesting different approaches and asking for your opinion.
The quality of players post-game interview varies widely. Some clearly don’t put much thoughts into them because they would rather go home. Niemann is in good company here. That was nothing particularly exceptional.
If you aced question 4, and most of the rest of the test also, yes, it would be easy to explain. Especially right after it happened, even if you're tired. If an answer is obviously correct to you, you should be able to explain how.
And if you don't want to and just would like to go home, fair enough, but then you really shouldn't give an explanation which is wrong!
It's a pattern with Niemann too, he's infamous for saying only "The chess speaks for itself" after beating Carlsen with black once before.
I think the parallel with academic cheating is accurate.
> If you aced question 4, and most of the rest of the test also, yes, it would be easy to explain. Especially right after it happened, even if you're tired. If an answer is obviously correct to you, you should be able to explain how.
You clearly have never been through a four hours math exam with open questions.
There is no obviously correct answer. There is the way you tackled the problem and the myriad of other ways you could have done which might be more or less obvious, easy or correct.
It’s the same with chess. There is the line you played, the line your opponent played, the other lines you could have played which you did or didn’t consider, same with your opponent. Some of them you considered seriously, other you didn’t. Plus all the things you missed but didn’t matter because your opponent didn’t go there.
Also, you seem to believe chess players are doing post-game interviews because they want to. It’s not the case. It’s a mandatory part of participating in the tournament. Most of them would decline them if they could.
And yes Niemann is infamous for hating post-game interviews and always giving poor answers which is why I’m surprised people actually base their argument on this.
I have, in fact, sat through many, many all days math exams. Not with open ended questions exactly as that wasn't the fashion in math at the time, but in other topics, sure. And yes, I was prepared to explain what I answered and why.
It's an exaggeration to say everyone hates post game discussion. Magnus used to dislike it somewhat, possibly - it was hilarious how Norwegian newspapers tried to turn him into a celebrity in those days because hey! Chess superstar! And it all fell flat because he was so unbelievably boring at the time, lol. He got more social confidence as he got older (and the media got better too, getting people who actually had a clue about chess to talk to him).
But these days, the young GMs are on twitch for heaven's sake. From a social and media standpoint, Niemann is perfectly competent, a lot more so than Magnus was at his age. It's explaining his play he avoids. So yes, it's suspicious. I'm equally surprised at why you would think people would just overlook this.
We can be reasonably sure that Fischer has not been cheating above and beyond unusual conduct. There hasn't been a way to meaningfully cheat. In our times however there are computers which can materially help, and there are technologies allowing someone to receive it, use of which is very difficult to detect without an unacceptably invasive search
Which are totally subjective. And they dont really make sense. He thought he was too relaxed? How would cheating OTB against Carlsen be relaxing? Carlsen is being really unprofessional here, even if he turns out to be correct. But the window has closed - we will never have evidence that he was cheating at this tourney.
And he wasn’t suspicious about his game when he beat Hans a few weeks earlier itself.
If Hans did go to all those extremes to cheat OTB it’s really surprising he would do so while playing black against Magnus Carlsen in an otherwise kind of pointless game.
It's a bit misleading to say that there was absolutely nothing unusual about the game. The Sinquefield game in question showed a very high correlation between engine optimal moves and the moves played by Niemann. His gameplay accuracy here is within the bounds of what the very top players can achieve in individual games, but high enough to raise some suspicion.
The next step is to place that mild suspicion in the context of both his history of admitted cheating, his unwillingness/inability to explain his remarkable moves post-game, and the additional context of many other games played in the last few years with _extraordinary_ accuracy. Now something that could be explained by just a very strong game appears very suspicious.
This is not true at all. For instance Nepominatchi commented on game saying Niemann's play was "more than impressive"[1]. Not commenting on the situation per se, merely your "clear consensus among other top chess players" comment.
You are hung up on the wrong thing. Parent writes: "[clear consensus that] there was absolutely nothing unusual about it", I quote one of the greats saying the game is "more than impressive", which, at least we should agree, is the exact opposite of claiming there is "nothing unusual about this game". Onus is on parent to come up with a list of grandmasters claiming the game was "usual", at least I provided one refutation but there are many.
Correct. They will not come up with a list of GMs saying Hans cheated. Many GMs have said that it doesn't seem like he did (at least during the game with Magnus).
Alireza, Ian, Magnus, Fabi, Wesley, and Levon have since made statements that imply they believe Hans cheated, or at least that they were suspicious of his play, as well as Yasser and Hikaru.
That's the majority of the players in the Sinquefield cup. Even Levon, who was initially skeptical, has since reversed his position.
As is tradition in chess, no one says "He cheated" they say things like "his moves were better than one would have expected" or "superhuman" or "I felt like I should trust my opponent over my calculation".
I watched them on stream. I don't do anything chess related on Reddit. You should perhaps actually engage with criticism and disagreement if you want to post here.
Some of them seem small enough that they won't trigger a metal detector. Currently they don't constantly scan the playing hall for wireless activity, which is what you'd need to detect this in use. I bet they start scanning for wireless transmissions soon, though.
I don’t think the “vibrating anal beads” theory is important because people actually expect it to be true in this instance. It is more about the chrisis if a mind sport where computers defeated humans soundly and througly.
The simple fact is that computers vastly outcompete human chess players. And not just big and expensive purpose built machines but the kind of computers everyone has access to.
Furthermore at the skill levels these players are you don’t even need constant handholding from a computer. A few hints at key moments would be enough to basically shift the balance in someones favour.
So if someone wants to cheat all they have to do is to receive a few bits of information from an accomplice. The question is not even if someone cheated in that particular game, but if cheating is possible.
We can imagine all kind of spy gadgetry one could use to communicate those few bits. People have two hangups with many of them: they can be found in a security screening, or they sound too sci-fy.
The vibrating anal beads combine three properties:
- they could transfer the few bits of information needed to tilt the game in favour of a cheat.
- they are not too far fetched. You can buy them right now commercially.
- they would be very hard to detect by security arrangements. It feels very unlikely that players would agree to the kind of invasive probing which would be necessary to detect one.
So it is not that people think that this particular player in this particular game actually used vibrating anal beads. It is more about the idea that someone could cheat at chess with covert communication methods.
The key takeaway is that if you have someone assisting you (entering the information into the computer) they only need a very simple way of sending a signal - which could be a "do something unexpected" or "this move is crucial". And you'd only need a time or two in a game to get the edge, assuming you're already skilled at the game.
It started out as a silly, obviously joking comment in the twitch chat of a GM chess streamer (Eric Hansen). Then he jokingly overreacted to it, and explained how it's possible, as an obvious joke. Then Elon tweeted about it as an obvious joke. But news websites don't care to make that distinction, and write about it.
2. Chess is full of VERY smart people. One of the most common ways to insult a smart person is to call into question their sexuality; hence why we have to have entire movements related to calling out anti-lgbtq+ statements like "that's so gay". [https://welcomingschools.org/resources/stop-thats-so-gay-ant...]
Anyway, combine those two things, and you get your answer. It's because the world hasn't really evolved at all in the last 30-40 years, outside of what we have been forced to do by law. It's easy and socially acceptable to call a man gay as an insult, so in a roundabout way, that's what we're getting with the anal beads talk.
I sort of laser focused on this last week when I heard this theory for the first time. It just struck me as so. . . odd. Why would that be a thing? That's what I came up with.
The contrast of the paranoid grievance you're responding to, with a sibling comment which does an excellent job of explaining "why anal beads", is remarkable.
Some other top chess players voiced strong suspicions regarding his post-match interview (including the interviewer), because he could not suggest basic lines in the post-match analysis, lines that even the interviewer could find without an engine (and for example Hikaru while watching the interview, being able to say the line instantly).
"I had the impression that he wasn't tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions, while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do."
That's a mere gut feeling, how on earth is Niemann supposed to defend against such a vague allegation? Magnus is a world-class competitor not only in chess but also in fantasy football and even quite decent at poker, so it stands to reason that he knows a thing or two about statistics and game theory. I was hoping he'd have far more concrete evidence than what he shared in this statement (like maybe he was playing a game that he'd deliberately prepared to test how long Niemann will take to compute certain hard-to-spot key moves; even that would still be extremely vague, but at least give Niemann something to concretely address). He is such an outstanding brain that I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but he needs to produce concrete evidence.
In the end Magnus hints that he has more to share, and I hope he will do so soon. Otherwise I don't see how we could get to any sort of satisfying resolution here (short of Niemann suddenly confessing, which seems unlikely, and we still don't have evidence that he has anything to confess at all).
1. How would Niemann have cheated? The shoe computer theory is a bit far fetched - are devices that small capable enough? Is he suspected of having an accomplice?
2. Why didn't Magnus just say something right away? He could have easily made his accusations at the moment to event organizers - quietly - and they could have had Niemann remove his shoes or something. Instead he threw a tantrum. Obviously this isn't just about Hans.
Personally, I think Niemann is just a 19yo kid who has made mistakes and Carlsen is a 31yo professional who is absolutely hammering this kid to make a larger point. He may be frustrated, but taking it out on Hans is a bit much. The imbalance of power here is just off the charts.
Even if Hans somehow cheated in that OTB game - of which there isn't a shred of real evidence - Magnus is the leader of the chess world and needs to accept that responsibility and react in a mature way. He should have taken the high road, simply said "I don't know what happened, but it was highly unusual. Let's guarantee that this doesn't happen in the future," and directed his frustrations totally at the event organizers rather than encouraging the entire world to attack this one kid.
The tech is there, but the risk is insanely high, and it isn't easy.
It is extremely easy to cheat online. You just open an engine on your computer.
For OTB, you'd have to be really sophisticated, and most likely have a partner assist you. And you still have to be really, really good at chess - Hans, even if he's cheating, is still a 2600 rated player.
It is several orders of magnitude harder, so way less opportunity, and the risk is much, much higher. Hans would have to have nerves of steel, for sure, to pull it off. Not saying it is impossible.
The cheating technique could be ingenious in itself. I remember what students were coming up in high-school, back in the day, without modern technology.
Now I'm imagining a Slugworth scenario where someone developed a cheating tool and offered it to Carlsen and he refused it, but suspects that Slugworth also offered it to Hans ...
Why do local compute when you can have a massive Kubernetes cluster in AWS running stockfish and every other engine in the world through an API call on a tiny ESP32 with ESP-NOW protocol to a nearby friend/spy? I/O is a few bytes and ESP32 has a ad-hoc network range of 50 feet or so. I joke about the Kubernetes part :-)
This is a farce. All credibility has been lost when you have to scan players like you scan people when entering a plane.
Chess is touted as an ingenious game when it is little more than a brute-force search with simple prune and huge amounts of memorization.
I would argue that most GMs would easily play up to 200-300 elo points below their current level with little to no practice. But they spend decades of their lives memorizing and memorizing just to get the highest rating they can. And it is diminishing returns --- if you spent 1000 hours memorizing to get 100 points, the next 1000 hours will only get you 50 points. And when you reach your peak --- be prepared to keep memorizing forever just to stay there and inevitably drop when you reach a certain age.
What a waste of intelligence.
It is telling that nobody is pushing for chess960. This would greatly devalue memorization and make chess a brute-force-search-with-simple-prune game once again, as it was meant to be. But that's exactly the problem; if you are at the top after doing all this memorization you don't want to throw it away! In fact, your memorization might be better than your calculation in which case you will be surpassed by other players.
I feel similarly about a lot of games and sports as they're played at the very highest levels.
Scrabble is a fun game to play with kids, or sometimes with adults, and having a bigger vocabulary is an advantage. But competitive Scrabble means memorizing the dictionary of allowable Scrabble words. It's just a different game. There was the story a while back about the Scrabble champion who doesn't speak French but memorized French Scrabble words and won the French-language Scrabble World Championships: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378...
And that's fine - competition spurs invention to find any advantage possible. But to me it'd be more impressive to see someone play an obscure Scrabble world, and then when you ask what the word means, they're actually familiar with it, rather than "eh, it's in the word list".
> It is telling that nobody is pushing for chess960
I mean chess960 seems to be on the up, no? FIDE had their first ever world champs only three years ago (where notably Carlsen still made it to the final, though did end up losing to Wesley So)
This is a weird criticism to me. It's like complaining that a karate master is just drilling the same moves over and over instead of coming up with moves in sparring, or complaining that a football team is rewatching old games to see what plays work instead of just coming up with plays on the field. The memorization and preparedness IS the intelligence, not the waste of it.
The difference is that karate moves are not perfectly reproducible. Everyone performs them differently. Chess moves are perfectly reproducible. I can play the first 5 moves of many openings perfectly, exactly the same way as the world champion plays them.
I have no idea about the main topic of this discussion.
But I did lose all interest in chess years ago when I realized the same thing: at the top level it's not about thinking but about memorizing (at the least) openings.
I believe go is too complex for the human mind to memorize strategies? Human mind, not computer.
> Magnus is not doing this in the best possible way.
You are assuming that his goal is to somehow uncover Hans cheating.
On the other hand if his goal is to highlight that in his opinion the security arrangements are not sufficient to be able to tell if an opponent is cheating or not, then he is doing that just right.
He spoke up and the competition in question introduced anti-cheating measures right the next day. That means there were things they could have been doing but were not before.
> Magnus should act and use his connections in the Chess world to catch him cheating.
How do you propose that could happen? Life is not a TV show with Perry Mason moments.
People have been caught cheating in the past.
Chess cheating is not black magic.
Chess engines are an integral part of the Chess world now, players a training with them, to analyze and prepare. I would not be surprised if many players tried to "enhance" their rating online with such an engine.
Chess.com probably has stats about this behavior.
My gut feeling is that online cheating is very common, and thus, saying that someone was caught cheating online is not a very strong proof that he also did it over the board.
I guess one way, it would be unethical but bear with me, is to wait until there is a very important, must-win scenario for Hans. Then, you have him think he's playing his opponent, but really he's playing Stockfish 15.
If he draws, he's cheating.
I know it's unethical, but what I'm saying is it's not impossible to catch someone cheating. Another idea I had is to telegraph different moves from a game, to a live broadcast. Imagine they just show their faces and then a 2d diagram of the board. Then you see what happens to his play. This only works assuming he's not using an implant or a thumper in his shoe.
What i think should happen is, Hans should play in tournaments which have much more security, and play against Magnus. If he did cheat it should be really obvious because his performance will suddenly drop. If he didn’t than he will play the same, but now with the added security he won’t have to face unbacked accusations, and there is no excuse for Magnus to refuse to play with Hans like he has been doing now.
Even if Hans really did cheat, if there is no credible evidence you can’t fault him. And IMO it’s not enough that he cheated many years ago. Right now all the criticism he’s getting is unfair because it’s based on speculation.
Lets assume just for the sake of argument that Magnus has insider information from chess.com making him 98% certain that Niemann is cheating.
Why would he hand him a game that's going to be watched worldwide, where Magnus has nothing to win. Since if he wins we really still don't know anything one way or the other. But he also has everything to lose. If Hans is cheating and manages to pull off something again, then Magnus is cripeling his own reputation.
Magnus seems to be doing the right thing here, which is voicing his concerns, refusing to play him, and asking Niemann for permission to speak on the matter fully. Niemann is doing what you'd expect of a cheater, which is to stay quiet, dismiss the discussions, having difficulty explaining his plays, and pretty much just holding back from letting chess.com or Magnus divulge what information they have from the inside of his bans.
> If he did cheat it should be really obvious because his performance will suddenly drop
I mean, Magnus is so much more better player than Hans that even if Hans didn't cheat he would probably be worse in rematch. But in all sports sometimes underdogs win. In couple yt videos i watched it was said that Magnus played bad game and that Hans already gained an advantage in opening. Hans said that he prepared opening play but if he is indeed a cheater he maybe used engine just for opening. We'll probably never get an answer if there was cheating or not
Maybe he will get away with it if he only cheated against Magnus, and only in that one match. Because it's perfectly reasonable for him to play against Magnus many more times and lost.
But if he cheated a lot more (as Magnus seems to allege) then he'll also lose to others he used to beat easily.
EDIT: I think a big issue with chess is this "perfection" mentality. Magnus cannot make a single mistake or lose a single game without it being a big show. Hans beating Magnus this one time, even though he was playing against black, should basically mean nothing - Magnus can probably beat Hans 10 times over. If Hans was beating Magnus 10 times it would be different - but also if he was on a streak to Magnus 10 times he would be playing with a lot more scrutiny.
The guy has beating top-50 players in short time controls. In all kinds of settings (casual, tournaments, online). You don't do that if you're not a strong player.
Given how the internet was reacting to Magnus allegations at the time, I marvel that the kid managed to actually finish the tournament without entirely crumbling. The amount of abuse being thrown at Niemann is nothing short of frightening.
If he were a computer, that would work. Being a human, the added stress of “this game will be used to decide whether I will be considered a cheater” may be enough to make him perform worse than he did before.
In this thread, people who have no idea how chess engines work, hell, even just how the game of chess works, are taking centipawn analysis, engine correlation and various other metrics to support their claims. Anyone who has studied with engines for a decent amount of time knows those numbers themselves are often misleading as just statistics.
To be clear, I'm not supporting either side of the debate, I'm just stating that people are throwing in numbers in a confident and convincing tone without understanding what those numbers mean.
It's not convincing to say that Hans was cheating because few people can beat Magnus playing black when Magnus was playing poorly in that game.
I still feel like more information that could come out at any moment that could swing the situation in either direction, and this statement doesn't say much.
I wish Magnus and chess.com would come out with whatever extra information they have.
I don’t think you understand why cheating is so bad. Once you know your opponent COULD BE cheating, your approach changes entirely. You will know this if you played against Stockfish.
What was the evidence that Hans COULD be cheating on top of the two incidents we know about? Was it, for example, video evidence of Hans using Stockfish on an illegal phone during an OTB tournament, or was it second hand accounts of Hans cheating during an online game years ago after he claimed to stop? We have no idea and that's still the issue, even if this topic is entirely about making players more comfortable and not actually about whether Hans was cheating on the game in question.
Would a thoughtfully designed device be detectable via the pre-screening methods at OTB tournaments? You only need to send a few bits of information to swing a chess game.
Anyone who has played online video games long enough won't find this story about a known cheater getting caught again surprising. Its almost remarkable to see the same commentary and excuses being used for a counterstrike (fill in your multiple player game here) cheater playing out with a "proper" game like chess.
It seems like if Nieman wants to clear his name he should offer Carlsen explicit permission to say whatever it is he can't. If Magnus is bluffing and that information doesn't amount to much he'd wind up looking a lot better.
No the best way to clear his name is to keep playing and keep winning. If he can do that then the chess world will get over Magnus's whining pretty quick.
So give him a carte blanche to say whatever he wants and ruin his reputation- warranted or not? Why would someone do this? It’s akin to talking to the cops without a lawyer.
It's pretty obvious to me that Carlsen has evidence of Hans cheating after the 16-year old incident that we know of. And so he's trying to maneuver Hans into a bad place; so that would be reason for Hans to not say anything (which also looks bad; it's the horns of a dilemma).
or better yet... follow the wikipedia model and have a parallel cheater chess league where there are cash prizes for proving after the fact that wins were the most sophisticated and undetectable cheats.
that would make the games themselves extremely boring, which makes it no longer really a game of chess and more like the Penn & Teller Fool Us show but more specific.
This situation is creating an entirely new meta in the chess world. It’s clearly advantageous to have others think you’re cheating. Players should start deactivating their chess.com accounts, start a rumor that they’ve cheated, and then take advantage of other players’ mental state during competition. The only downside is that a top GM could shadow an you by claiming you cheated without providing any evidence.
It was a similar case where cheating was theoretically possible and alleged, but could not be proven. Only difference is that the Mike Postle case was a far bigger statistical anomaly.
This is way too much accusation without any evidence, and a terrible blow to Carlsen's sterling reputation. What he should have said was:
"Niemann is an admitted chess cheater, and has cheated even more than he has admitted to, per Chess.com's recent statement. Cheating destroys the game and I refuse to play against known cheaters. I will not play Hans Niemann or any other known cheaters."
I am confused. Isn't that what he essentially said? What other accusations is he making (the "more than he publicly admitted" part aligns to your Chess.com reference), other than the addition of his observations of his behaviors during their match?
No, I agree with the person you're responding to. Saying "I refuse to play with known cheaters" is better than "He's cheating and so I don't want to play with him". With the letter you suddenly have to prove something really difficult. With the former you have absolutely nothing to prove.
But.... that is what he said. Please highlight the part of the statement where he said something that was closer to "he is a known cheater" vs. "he is cheating".
Except he did play him, and only after that loss did he withdraw from the tournament and refuse to play with him again. The implication is clear to all that Carlsen suspects foul play in that game, I don't see the point in being coy about that now.
One presumes Magnus believed Niemann cheating in an OTB game wasn't possible; now he believes that's not the case and has decided that even OTB games aren't worth the time/effort/risk.
It reminds me of the outcry from Trevor Bauer over the MLB not enforcing the illegal substance rule for pitchers. He had to take matters into his own hands until the league decided to enforce the rules.
Look at all the people who had their careers absolutely destroyed by the US Postal/Discovery Channel/Lance Armstrong/Trek business (including Greg LeMond!) in the era where they were accusing Armstrong of the world's largest ever coordinated doping program, in the era before Armstrong and team were stripped of all their titles.
Ultimately in the fullness of time they were all proven to be correct.
He hasn't cheated in a FIDE event as far as FIDE knows. Banning him for cheating at 12 and 16 in an unrelated to them place (and not even OTB) without anything else would just be bizarre. Even more so, when players who have actually cheated in actual FIDE OTB games as adults start off with a temporary rather than permanent ban.
Part of it is that he cheated on Chess.com which does not publicize bannings for cheating/punishments, so there wasn't really a reason for the tournament to not invite him since at that point from an organizers perspective it was just rumors.
That's a frankly ridiculous point of view. You're talking about a literal child cheating at an online video game. It's not that big of a deal, kids do dumb stuff.
I don’t consider 16 year olds to be children. If they are, they shouldn’t be driving. Yes, all kids do dumb things. But, if you are still behaving stupidly or dishonestly at 16, well that’s a different issue. That it’s no big deal to the younger generation explains why the country is as messed up as it is.
I dont play chess that much but I think this discussion is somewhat interesting, because all the hobby analysts and human lie detectors come out with things like: look how this guy nervously swallowed, look at this timestamp what is he
doing why is he leaning forward and all that stuff. it goes up to the point where even intelligent people will believe that there must have been some device in his shoe, or elsewhere, putting a theory out there as the truth that, now, afterwards, can't be proved, but - more importantly - cant be disproved. That stuff is really dangerous.
It is dangerous, because people who do that know exactly they will not be able to provide evidence for their hypothesis to be true, but the other side won't be able to provide evidence either. So they rely solely on their convincing powers, and persuading others into their own belief system instead applying to reason.
I think, if at all, that all just proves one thing, something that scientists knew all along: if you want your thesis to be true, you will start interpreting reality in a fashion that supports your hypothesis. We don't do science like that for precisely this reason.
After all this, I think Magnus really ridiculed himself with this. His strongest evidence is "he wasn't tense"? Really, though?
I am very sorry to see this position being posted. Niemann has been caught cheating in chess twice before, less than three years ago. He should never have been allowed to play in the cup. It was FIDE's decision not to collect the concrete evidence that would have caught him in the first place, and we must make do with the circumstantial evidence. As it stands, Niemann is a demonstrated cheater, and has more to gain by cheating in a game against the world champion than at any other time. It is very unlikey that Hans only cheated exactly the two times he was caught, and his failure to produce other instances than the times when he was caught are a mark against him.
Remember that we are not giving him the death penalty, we are just trying to establish which scenario is more likely. It is important to be able to render most likely judgments based on incomplete information. Its not a courtroom.
Niemann has admitted cheating, but only in online chess, not over the board.
That's not to say he should be allowed to play, but only to note that live play is kind of a different ball game compared to doing it online. Online, it's you alone in a room (with a second computer). Similar cheating over the board would require some kind of hidden communications device, and probably an assistant.
The largest state that we have successfully managed to isolate from communication with the rest of the universe is on the order of 15 qubits. I think you do not appreciate just how easy it is to get information through a channel. Or rather how difficult it would be to prove that such a channel was used.
This is, however, irrelevant. Hans Niemann is a chess cheat. Allowing him to set the narrative to "I've only cheated online" is the same as allowing him to set the narrative to "I've only ever cheated while wearing green clothes".
Yeah, but imagine if the CEO of the store goes on twitter and talks about you when you try and visit the store at 19, and your name and face is in the news for the rest of your life!
Edit: you've been breaking the HN guidelines a ton lately. If you keep that up, we're going to have to ban you. Please review the rules and stick to them so we don't have to do that.
I know the feeling, believe me, but from a mod perspective I can tell you that everyone always feels that way (myself included). It seems to be a hard-wired bias we all have. Therefore, everyone needs to make a conscious effort to follow the site guidelines despite that feeling (myself included). I appreciate your response!
We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars. Your account is rate limited because it has done a ton of that.
All is not lost; if you use the site as intended for a while, i.e. posting substantive, thoughtful comments that follow the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), you'd be welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we can take a look and hopefully drop the rate limit.
Wrong. I've stolen things (I'm sure you have too - theft can be really small!) does that mean I should be labeled a thief in perpetuity? Beyond that, does it mean that I should be publicly shamed for it?
If you have a criminal record, you will not be hired into certain jobs. Try getting a job in a cloud vendor such as AWS, Azure or GCP. They do background checks for a reason — you will have access to customer data of banks, the CIA, and other high-risk data. These cloud vendors have controls, and one of the controls is to not hire people who don't pass background checks.
So yes, if you have admitted to cheating in chess in the past, you lose certain privileges, such as competing in world chess championship.
It is not possible to prove unless the Chess Federation subjects players to cavity search. I don't think the Chess Federation wants to set such an extreme precedent. So, the alternative is to exclude people who have admitted to cheating in the past. That's not wrong or immoral. Cheating is immoral. Losing some privileges goes with the territory and should be expected.
Correct, it is not possible to prove. If Magnus had anything - anything - other than "I felt this way" and "he seems too chill" I would suspect something. Those things could be:
- Hans was walking weird (something in his shoe)
- He was making weird movements
- He was distracted, or similar, indicating he's messing with some device
etc... then sure.
Magnus did not say these things, and that is telling.
What I believe happened is Magnus (someone who has presented a lot of anxiety in the past - see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR-4_ouXUV4 but easy to find other examples) was really nervous that Hans may be cheating, and that impacted Magnus's play (he played a very poor game).
"I had the impression that he wasn't tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions, while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do. This game contributed to changing my perspective."
---
Personally I don't think that's strong enough reason to convince me that Niemann is a cheat. However, I would love to see more evidence before I change my position on this issue.
I agree. But at the same time it's absolutely destructive for other players playing a known cheater, spending so much energy on "is he cheating against me now?"
With how Hans responded to Carlsen's unorthodox opening and his history, it made Carlsen unsure and wrecked the rest of his game. And given Hans couldn't even explain his moves later..
The somewhat-concrete evidence is that analyzers have now found many instances where Niemann's moves correlate highly with engine-suggested moves.
I don't know the details as to whether that claim is credible. Is this correlation really any more for Niemann than any other grandmaster of similar strength? Are the analyzers cherry-picking data points that fit the narrative? And of course it is possible that Niemann is legitimately that good.
Reddit's /r/chess has loads of viewpoints and speculation, if you want to read more there.
There is a guy named Ken Regan who is one of the leading experts in this question of whether the correlation with engine moves is at a normal or abnormal level. His statement is that he analyzed the last two years of Hans' games and found no evidence of cheating. So, yeah, the people on Reddit are probably cherry picking.
The counter to that is that it looks likely that a clever high-level player could probably use an engine once or twice in a game in a judicious way and not raise statistical alarm bells. But still, Ken's work tries to suss out things like that--e.g. does the player in question make good moves in 'key' positions. Plus, continued use of such techniques over time would leave a statistical trail.
Honestly, Magnus' statement of, "well, he beat me and it didn't look like he was thinking hard" is pretty thin. Magnus knows that Hans has a history of cheating in online games when he was younger and to me it feels like he's just seeing ghosts and deep into confirmation bias territory. Especially since the game in question took place at a high-level tournament with rigorous anti-cheating scanning, etc.
Fabi (for those that don’t know, he’s another one of the best chess players in the world) gave a statement along the lines of, “I know of at least one case where I was certain cheating happened, and Regan’s analysis missed it, so take any of his analysis with a huge grain of salt.”
So here we have a whole bunch of the world’s best chess players and chess.com believing that Niemann repeatedly cheats, in addition to Niemann’s own admission to cheating in the past, and Regan taking the opposite stance.
Fabi also said (during the same interview, I'm sure) that he doesn't think Hans cheated. Your last statement there is really misleading and even dishonest.
No, it is not dishonest. Fabi said don’t trust Regan’s analysis. He also said that he didn’t think Hans cheated in that one game given the moves played (before Magnus gave his reasoning, so perhaps Fabi’s opinion would change). Fabi never said “Hans is not a cheater.” Rather, he argued it’s possible to cheat, and detection methods FIDE uses are not sufficient. If Hans is cheating, Fabi implied that Regan’s analysis likely wouldn’t catch it.
Magnus, Ian, and Hikaru at the very least have pretty openly (given the legal threats flying around) said/implied they believe Hans cheats, and chess.com has very explicitly said this.
Maybe not all of their comments and beliefs focus on this particular OTB game, but that’s not how you catch a cheater, since it’s rare to find a smoking gun. You look at a pattern of behavior. Hans has cheated in the past, and many top players believe he is cheating in some way, in at least some games, on a continued basis… which is why Magnus refuses to play Hans, and why we’re even having this discussion.
> If Hans is cheating, Fabi implied that Regan’s analysis likely wouldn’t catch it.
He implied that maybe it would not catch it. I don't read it as a "likely", especially given the fact that he said he doesn't think Hans cheated in this case.
Yeah. All nuance is out the window with this drama. Either you're one side or the other. Fabi seems to have been trying to take a nuanced stance, but it is being interpreted as him saying he thinks Hans cheated, which is not true at all.
having a history of cheating in a game that is mostly otherwise honor bound is a very very very bad sign. Don't be fooled by the "when he was younger" bit. Everything that you did you did when you were younger, it has been less time since hans was last caught cheating than the interval between that time and the previous one.
Don't let the statisticians convince you that they know what they're doing either. Statistics, as a discipline, is essentially predicated on the principle that the objects of study do not know that they are being observed. Without this assumption, the domain is now more accurately described as game theory. Statisticians will happily and confidently ignore this and draw very wrong conclusions as a result.
> Statistics, as a discipline, is essentially predicated on the principle that the objects of study do not know that they are being observed.
There is no such "principle" in statistics. Statistics is based on statistical methodology, i.e. formulas, models, and techniques that are used in statistical analysis of raw research data, which is collected, organized, analyzed, interpreted and presented. The Hawthorne effect, "a type of reactivity in which individuals modify an aspect of their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed,"[1] arose from analysis of a statistical study.
> Without this assumption, the domain is now more accurately described as game theory.
Game theory is utilized for decision-making in strategic environments where rational agents interact with each other. Statistics, on the other hand, is employed for reasoning in non-adversarial settings where the samples are assumed to be generated by some stationary and non-reactive source.
> Statisticians will happily and confidently ignore this and draw very wrong conclusions as a result.
Contradiction. You've already claimed that statistics is "essentially predicated on the principle that the objects of study do not know that they are being observed." Yet now you're claiming experts "confidently" ignore their discipline's "essentially predicated" principle.
There is a difference between a subject that changes with observation and a subject that changes adversarially with your statistical methods. A qualitative difference.
Statistical methods may include observation during the gathering of data. Whether or not change is measurably different from adversarial change depends on the variables chosen. It is clear that two distinct disciplines can approach the same problem with varying results without invalidating the entire other discipline. There is a difference between sound argument and a straw man employing equivocation. A qualitative difference.
Sorry for the late reply, I had to collect my thoughts a bit and I'm quite busy.
First, I have not invalidated the discipline, I have said not to trust statisticians who are clearly acting outside the bounds of the fundamental assumptions of statistics, and that statistical methods DO NOT function on adversaries. Consider the following two scenarios:
1) Alice and Bob are sending messages to each other in a lanugage I don't understand, and I, using statistical methods, wish to find out what they are saying.
2) Alice and Bob are sending messages to each other and don't want me to gain any information about this messages. I, using statistical methods, wish to find out what they are saying.
In scenario 1, I am likely to succeed. In scenario 2, the consensus is that I'm fucked. In just about every way. I can't tell what they're saying, I can't tell that any message that I have discerned is meant to mislead me, or doesn't carry some additional message hidden in the entropy of the message that was meant to mislead me. I can't tell if the communication is just noise meant to distract me, and if we want to talk practically, I can't even tell if they can communicate. Basically the only inference that I can draw is that they can't communicate faster than the speed of light.
Here's another example: Gerrymandering. The scenario is that one party has a clear advantage in terms of number of representatives vs proportion of population. We must establish whether that number was arrived at fairly, or by cheating. We assume that the party in charge of drawing the borders knows what tests we can perform, because that is always the assumption that you give to an adversary.
The adversary has a very simple (though potentially computationally expensive) algorithm to run. Check all possible border configurations for both advantage and your cheat detection. Pick the one which maximizes advantage which does not pass the cheat threshold, or just whatever your utility is.
Statistics needs the assumption of good faith in order to operate. Anyone who uses statistical methods when that assumption that cannot be made is at best a bad statistician.
> statistical methods DO NOT function on adversaries.
I think this is the essence of your argument. This can be defeated with counter-example. Test cheaters are adversarial to any detection of their cheating, yet statistical analysis can expose the cheater without much issue.
i believe that we are on the same page about this claim, but it does not salvage statistics. Originally i claimed that what happens is it becomes game theory. That was a bit of a simplification, but it is illustrated by your example.
In this case, statistical methods cannot positively identify no cheating, and the extent to which they can identify instances of cheating, it is because the observed party was not acting adversarially.
The algorithm i presented anove for gerrymandering is very general.
> i believe that we are on the same page about this claim,
I don't see how that is possible
> but it does not salvage statistics.
Statistics does not need salvaging.
> Originally i claimed that what happens is it becomes game theory. That was a bit of a simplification, but it is illustrated by your example.
My cheating statistics example is a counter-example that defeats your argument.
> In this case, statistical methods cannot positively identify no cheating,
That is the entire point of cheating statistical analysis, to determine if cheating occurred. If cheating is not statistically identified, then the analysis shows "positively" that cheating hasn't occurred.
> and the extent to which they can identify instances of cheating, it is because the observed party was not acting adversarially.
Statistical analysis of cheating does not involve direct observation, and any cheater is adversarial by definition.
> The algorithm i presented anove for gerrymandering is very general.
On the contrary, it is not only specific, it does not support your argument. Politicians are not statisticians, and the depth of statistical analysis is notably shallow and has a single factor, party affiliation.
Statistics is a very old and complex discipline. It is technically a branch of mathematics. In advancing the argument that a biased statistician can produce incorrect results, or that statistics can not accurately study adversarial subjects, the underlying fallacy to these arguments is hasty generalization. As laymen, we can not invalidate an entire discipline or even speculate the limits of such a discipline based on such very specific and synthetic circumstances.
Nobody knows how he was cheating. Without a strip search there's no way to be sure.
It is known that it's not technologically impossible. There are ways to do it, some of them rather outlandish but not infeasible.
Unfortunately, that's as far as it can go. Either you start doing something really extreme to ensure that players can't cheat (that aforementioned strip search, making them play in a Faraday cage, etc), you'll never really know.
Even worse than that, the cheating may not have gone on during the match. It could have been as simple as old-fashioned spying: studying what preparations Carlsen had made, and learning their weaknesses before the match even starts.
You can't really prevent that. The best you can hope for is for a chess expert to opine that this move seems like an unlikely thing for a human to play without the assistance of a computer. Carlsen is just such an expert, but obviously his opinion alone is much too biased.
> Even worse than that, the cheating may not have gone on during the match. It could have been as simple as old-fashioned spying: studying what preparations Carlsen had made, and learning their weaknesses before the match even starts.
If your opponent is playing white and someone from their team tells you "He's going to open with X move", so that's the only one you have to prepare against, that goes a long way to eliminating white's advantage.
I'm actually curious what the Chess.com statement would be - they seem to have some bombshell that's coming soon. Also curious how Hans' will react to all of this.
These situations are never great.. there's no "best way to handle things" when the drama reaches a certain level.
Carlsen specifically mentions that there are Niemann details he can't or won't reveal. Niemann could release him from that confidence, but I think Carlsen's reputation is strong enough that doubting this doesn't seem reasonable.
Personally, I think shading Carlsen, in isolation, seems misguided to me.
> there's no "best way to handle things" when the drama reaches a certain level.
I agree, but that's mostly where my frustration with Carlsen is rooted. He had the choice with how to handle this - he went out of his way to choose the dramatic route.
He better have some conclusive evidence to back up the hurricane-sized shitstorm he's whipped up here. If it turns out the entire chess community got manipulated by a single rockstar and his badly-hurt ego, it would be hard to take the sport seriously again at a professional level.
Carlsen has an impeccable reputation for being principled and magnanimous in defeat, and always complimentary and respectful of his opponents after a loss, acknowledging their deserved win and well played game. Frankly, i'm shocked more people aren't being supportive of this single decision of his, that stands alone in his long and rather glorious career.
A few isolated shows of emotion in two decades is hardly a fair representation for people to judge a man overall. People who have watched this man grow up from a young child in the public eye, know he is a good person.
And even if you're not inclined to believe that, nobody has shown a clip where he has disrespected or accused an opponent of impropriety. This latest incident stands alone as a unique one time event.
I was just refuting the claim that Magnus is some perfect icon. He isn't. He doesn't seem like a bad guy. But he isn't a saint either. He can make mistakes.
He’s literally as close as you get though. His opponent once got disconnected in an online tournament, and magnums resigned the next game bc he didn’t want his opponent to be unfairly penalized.
Being extremely competitive is not being a sore loser, and he is playful and spirited in trash-talk. But he ultimately always shows respect towards his opponent, even when he's extremely disappointed in himself.
Being upset at a loss, which you'll see in a few videos, is much different than disrespecting the person who beat him.
Well, he is just a person. Under high level of stress, we all make bad decisions that lead to more drama. I can easily think of several worse ways he could have handled this -- at least he didn't go into any weird public rants.
This is probably naive question, but if the main concern here is remote assistance (at least that is my impression without following this too closely), why not just flood the room with wide spectrum EM jamming? I mean, let Niemann have his bluetooth buttplug if nothing can communicate with it.
At this time, and with the different claims (use of sex toys as a cheating device, "I can't name specifics" wink wink), and with the pacing this comes up (every 7-10 days), I get the distinct impression that this is more about character assassination than honesty in chess tournaments.
This is easy to check/prove. Make them pass an x-ray machine and play alone in a Faraday cage. No external signal will pass while the cage still can send video through cables. This can be deployed automatically by organizers in next public event and is quite cheap, no more than a few thousand dollars.
Carlson should just challenge Niemann to a 30 game over the board televised match in their shorts (no shoes, no shirt) at Madison Square Garden. With the revenue generated from ticket sales and advertising, they could both retire and international chess can put this episode behind them.
Everyone in the audience has to be in their shorts, and the players need to be surrounded by one-way mirrors otherwise someone in the audience could use a computer and signal the players.
I can think of at least one way to cheat that would not be detectable by any of the screening methods I've seen suggested so far, but that only works if the cheaters can get reasonably private access to the venue before the match to hide some equipment. (I'm not going to go into details).
Playing a match in a big venue like MSG that holds numerous other events would make doing this easier. There are concerts there for example that involve bands setting up a lot of equipment. Get some of your chess team members to take temporary jobs on the crews setting up some of those shows and you might have a good chance of sneaking your chess cheating equipment in.
I think what you want to do with this kind of match is play each game in a different venue, and the players do not find out where the venue is until it is time for them to be taken there (on transportation arranged by the organizers) for the game. The player's teams are not told where the venue was until after the game.
If a player is going to cheat then it has to be done via something entirely contained on/in the player.
Maybe even have some of the games played on the move. E.g., the players are driven to an airport, board a chartered jet, and play their game in flight while the jet just flies around over a wide area.
> Get some of your chess team members to take temporary jobs on the crews setting up some of those shows
Bands travel with their own crew, so they'd have to get hired on as a roadie (which is not unskilled labor) where ever the tour was put together. Not so simple, because once you see the date at MSG, it's way too late to get on that crew, and if they do get on a crew, how would they know they're going to play MSG before the manager does?
I'm not certain, but I assume MSG is a union shop, so a local hire to work there would require joining the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (ISTSG), and being a productive member for years before having enough seniority to be able to choose where they want to work.
Promoters and event organizers hire temps (you'll notice young people wearing black shirts with "SECURITY," emblazoned on them at shows, the only unskilled labor available), but the first time they'd get to be on location is during the event, and they have to work.
While your plan sounds simple enough, the reality is it would not be possible even with years of preparation. You can volunteer in public theater or go to work for an event provider to further understand why, but I'll just tell you. There is too much competition from all the individuals that have made a career out of it as well as the exponentially larger group competing to land their career. How many chess team members have a degree in theater arts, film/video production, recording arts or communications? How many of these graduates do you think are able to make a career out of their degrees? It is insanely competitive. My understanding is to, say, get into set design at a venue in New York City, you'd need a Masters degree in set design and a metric shitton of luck.
Carlson already has enough $ to retire, and he certainly would have nothing to gain from such a "spectacle for the masses". His place as #1 in the world (and arguably, history) is not threatened by Hans.
Fischer refused to play Karpov in 1975 and lost his World Champion title by default. Granted, Niemann is not Karpov, and no one is Fischer, and the situation was entirely different, but this is known as counter-example. The salient point is that if Carlson has a serious challenge to his title, he couldn't refuse to play and still keep his title.
There are hidden headphones which can be inserted in the ear and contact ear drum directly. Totally invisible. And this is a mainstream cheap tech today, students use them at exams.
Also in the public setting he wouldn't even need any device on him, he'll simply have an accomplice showing signs.
I don't particularly mind Carlsen's actions (leaving the Sinquefield cup and resigning a game against Niemann in the Julius Baer Cup).
I also watched Niemann's games in the Julius Baer Cup, and he certainly has an uncanny ability to switch on some form of an afterburner against people like Aronian, Ivanchuk, Pragg and Duda. Perhaps he is that talented, but I can understand that the top players do not feel at ease.
On the other hand I'm not too happy about chess.com turning into some form of credit rating agency for top chess players. If I were above 2500, I wouldn't play there. Too much to lose if their proprietary algorithms misfire.
As a European, I'd certainly issue a GDPR information request for my cheating score, followed by a deletion request for all personal data.
In my opinion, it's more probable that Magnus is not just a chess player anymore. He is a chess tycoon that has a huge stake in chess business and a huge fanbase. And he is using that power frivolously.
Given the low information bandwidth -- single-digit bits per second, transmitted in bursts with an extremely low duty cycle -- it's impossible to detect such signals in the general case. One way to conceal conventionally-modulated pulse signals would be to superimpose them against legitimate signals like local FM broadcast stations, for instance. Another strategy would be to use spreading codes to randomize the timing of very brief pulses, rendering them completely indistinguishable from static.
The best way to catch this type of activity would be by detecting the presence of the equipment itself, such as with a nonlinear junction detector. This is a piece of gear that generates a small number of strong, spectrally-pure RF signals and listens for distortion products that indicate the presence of semiconductors nearby that are acting as mixers (which they will, whether they're designed to or not.) You can find anything from a hidden bug to a rusty rivet on a gutter that way. Even so, an NLJ sweep is no guarantee of success. The active devices in the transmitter and receiver could be biased into hard conduction or cutoff except when being used, for instance.
People have joked about "anal beads," but the fact is that a buttplug would be a near-flawless platform for such a communication system. You have the fine muscle control needed to transmit your opponent's moves to an accomplice via any number of pressure or motion transducers, and obviously you have the ability to perceive electrical or mechanical impulses received in return. If X-rays are ruled out for safety and if cavity searches are ruled out for modesty, detecting something like this would be a challenge for the highest-level government TSCM teams.
With modern digital signals, which can be encrypted, and be pretty low power. And with there being lots of radio signals from unknown sources in any populated area. I doubt you'd be able to distinguish the signal from the noise. Unless the entire thing takes place in a fariday cage.
Saying he needs legal permission to say more seems ridiculous. Hans' reputation is in the gutter and Magnus has accused him of cheating. That's likely enough grounds for legal action and why would the most powerful chess play in the world be afraid about facing some kid in court?
I'm not very interested in chess, but I think I came up with the perfect option for cheating. You swallow a tablet with a radio receiver and a vibration motor, having studied the Morse code before this. You can even play naked, as Hans suggested. Happy discovery.
You might have a stockfish, buttfish, or whatever hidden somewhere on your body. But how the game position is transmitted to the said device is a hard problem and just handwaved away as a triviality.
Perhaps an interesting piece of this is that high-level play is becoming so close to computer play that cheating is increasingly difficult to uncover. I feel that something in the sport has become lost from all this.
As an outsider, this debate has been entertaining for me. This is happening in online tournaments with money at stake. Is it just me, or are you basically just begging for some sort of shenanigans to occur?
maybe humans just need to invent a new game that computers aren't good at. Arimaa was cool but then got beat by computers soon after gloating how it's resistant to alpha-beta pruning etc.
I’m a Magnus fanboy. He’s been and continues to be a great champion. He’s up there in the pantheon with Kasparov, Anand and Fischer. We’re lucky to have him. That kinda settles this for me.
Do they do any tests for substances? How about nootropics which are known to boost brainpower, are these banned just doping in athletics? Would nootropics be considered cheating??
I like the idea but only if the opponent knows so it’s not thought of as an unfair advantage. They both can have a drink. Now im thinking of a drunk chess competition but it would be more than measuring alcohol tolerance than actual play ability.
For one thing, the fact that Carlsen is making this statement now and not weeks earlier is embarrassing.
For another, the evidence he presents is disappointingly weak. I can understand being suspicious of online games. Fair enough. But the evidence for cheating offline is:
1) Rapid progress in OTB chess. This rapid progress is still much less rapid than many other players and involved Hans quite clearly spending nearly 2 years only focused on chess during and after the pandemic.
2) Him competing as black in a way only a handful of players could. I’d argue there is almost no one who stands even a 10% chance of beating Magnus as black OTB. But, if all the GMs playing Magnus had a 0.1% chance, then there’s a 1/2000 chance he loses, and the loss is not likely to be to one of the top players simply because there are far more non top players.
3) Lack of nervousness. Well, it’s hard to see how Magnus would be beat by someone who was nervous. On 1 hand, Hans had nothing to lose and be nervous about. On the other hand Magnus had a ton of pressure on a quest for 2900.
At the end of the day, Hans didn’t play a brilliancy to beat Magnus. He simply played normal decent moves. The game itself presented no evidence of cheating.
With regards to his recent rating increase, Hans' rating increase is not completely unprecedented but it's still very rare. The issue isn't that he's a mid-2600s player, or even that he's increased by 200 points in two years, it's the shape of the ratings graph and the unusual staircase progress he's made at the GM level.
It took Hans about five years to go from 2300 to 2500 rating, and most of that was pre-pandemic. Increasing your rating gets exponentially more difficult as your rating increases, which is why there are so few players who ever make it to the 2700 level or even the 2600 level. Most players at this level who spend multiple years in a rating lull never significantly increase their playing ability (there are countless examples, but look at someone like MVL for a typical example). There are only a small number of cases of people who reach Hans' level who have staircase looking ratings progress graphs at the 2500+ level.
Hans' recent rating increase is far from proof that he's cheating, but it is definitely extremely unusual.
What's missing in that analysis is the sheer number of games Niemann has played recently, it's simply an enormous amount of OTB games - outside the norm. Furthermore, there's some consensus that a lot of the younger players are underrated as a result of the pandemic when a lack of rated OTB tournaments prevented a normal rating increase, and Hans' rapid improvement would partially be explained by his official rating quickly equalizing with his actual ability.
>I can understand being suspicious of online games. Fair enough. But the evidence for cheating offline is...
How can people act like the evidence of online cheating doesn't affect the likelihood that he cheated OTB? This is the exact same person playing both games.
But what is the circumstantial evidence here ? The argument essentially boils down to: "this guy cheated in the past, so I don't trust that he won't cheat in the future". This is fair: he should decide whom he wants to play with, but no proof was actually presented.
i agree that past cheating probably makes it more likely that someone would cheat in the future but i also see a relevant difference in the ease and risk of cheating online vs OTB, so i don't see them as perfect equivalents
Interesting how in the 90s the concern was GM's where helping the machines (Kasparaov vs Deep Blue), and today the concern is the machines are helping the GMs.
I am limited in what I can say without explicit permission from Niemann
What? I'd like him to explicitly state what rule/law/agreement prevents him from saying more. He explicitly accused him of cheating. I can't imagine what would prevent him from providing details.
Magnus owns 20% of Chess.com.
Chess.com put out a statement basically saying 'we have sent Hans evidence that he cheated more than the two times he admitted to'
Chess.com / Magnus is waiting for Niemann to respond.
FIDE already put out a statement saying they know nothing about this incident and want Carlsen to put forward initial evidence for them to start an investigation. Carlsen's statement shows that he has no evidence beyond his feelings over the board and Hans' history of cheating online.
Alphazero plays very differently than a human, and you can analyze if the player is playing the same moves as it, just as well as you can with another engine. Less importantly, modern stockfish also uses neural networks.
Nobody has access to alphazero as far as I know. Regardless, it is an interesting point. The TCEC has a ton of oddball engines, many probably open source, that are virtually unknown but are still far stronger than any human. Could make sense to choose one of those if you don't want to be caught.
I am disappointed with Magnus. He is misusing the weight of his reputation even if cheating is a big deal in chess.
The first mistake was still choosing to play when he had reservations once Hans was invited. The second mistake was quitting the tournament and messing up the standings once he lost. The third mistake was making an insinuation through a tweet. The fourth mistake was resigning in two moves his next game with Hans.
Even though Hans is suspicious and untrustworthy, Magnus is taking on himself the authority to be judge, jury and executioner. If he is concerned about cheating being an issue, proactively bring up the issue, don't do it re-actively.
Yeah, the tone I'm getting from reading this basically boils down to "I was uncomfortable with how he played so I quit". Isn't that part of the metagaming in chess? Poker has always been about unnerving your opponent through stoicism or deception. I don't see why chess can't have the same layer of subtlety, and if it really concerns him then he should be able to wear a visor to block everything but the game board. Otherwise, just take your loss and stand your ground.
I think the statement is a little bit more nuanced than that:
"His over the board progress has been unusual, and throughout our game in the Sinquefield Cup I had the impression that he wasn't tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions, while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do."
This isn't just "I got weird vibes" or something, this is the professional analysis of someone who has spent a lifetime analysing particular board states, the overall flow of the game, and the psychology of his opponents. He may have his hands tied in terms of what exactly he can say at this time, but the telegraph here is that he suspects cheating because of specific, observable factors in how the prior game(s) went down.
And those factors may ultimately be too subtle to be judged by anyone other than a jury of other top-tier professional chess players, but ultimately that doesn't matter, if it's enough to trigger a more thorough investigation then concrete evidence will emerge one way or the other and show Carlsen to be right or wrong on his hunch.
If he didn't want to play against him, he shouldn't have already done it weeks ago and then proceed to agree to a rematch, which he doesn't cancel until the last minute. I find it very hard to believe that Magnus only found out about Hans' history after the first move... unless he had someone assisting him in realtime.
Withdrawing attendance is also an option, which Carlsen himself says is a possibility he acknowledged.
If he wants to follow through on this, we better see some damning evidence. If this entire hubbub was for nothing, the chess community as a whole is going to have egg on their face.
>Poker has always been about unnerving your opponent through stoicism or deception
As much as TV would make you think so that's mostly a myth. It was probably more so the case in the past but now it's at most a very minor part of the game, and most (typically all) of your edge comes from better card playing.
A huge river bluff is viewed in the lens of 'I've represented a range which includes strong hands, and I make money if I get a fold X% of the time while increasing the call chance by Y% when I do have a good hand in this spot' and not 'I'm going to unnerve him by throwing money to make a bad decision'.
Basketball, hockey, and football players are expected to perform under the roar of tens of thousands of fans AND those that hate them.
Tennis players and Chess players are expected to be granted absolute silence.
Is that an inconsistency? I don't think so. It's part of the expectation of the sport. Sport is in general a weird type of impure competition. Sponsorships, TV contracts, etc, all contribute to mixed priorities.
So no, I don't think it's appropriate to equate Poker and Chess in this regard. Their best practices can be evaluated on their own measures.
I want more of this metagaming in chess. That's one of the things I find interesting about Hans. His interviews suggest he's taking a sort of meta game approach. He suggested once a move of his against Alireza was a bluff because Alireza doesn't like attacking chess.
This is extremely common in high level chess. Every chess player will study their opponents history and recent play patterns and practice against that.
Hans claimed he studied against Magnus' opening because Magnus had played it a few months ago. It turns out Magnus has never used that opening in a recorded game. The dialog has now changed to "well by move 20 the board state became identical to a previous Magnus game" but Hans didn't say he spotted the similarities at move 20, he said he studied that specific opening.
So what? What does that matter? 20 moves of prep is not unusual. Also opening/midgame/endgame is not defined by # of moves. This was still very much in the opening, and it was still very much "known theory" as in games have been played in that same line.
The fact that Magnus fully understand all the implications of such a statement and still went forward with this speaks to how sure he is of his intuition. He will forever tarnish his reputation if ultimately it's proven that he was simply flat out wrong. He is basically saying that Hans is playing impossibly well and that he does not exhibit the same behavioral patterns as any other player. And that he also has access to some other incriminating info that he can't yet share.
Magnus basically cannot be proven wrong - but time will tell. If Hans continues to perform well in OTB tournaments, and he's not caught cheating, eventually I think the suspicion will die down.
The issue is that will he get that chance at all?
Also, Hans has won some great games in short time controls.
If he can't provide the evidence, he should stay quiet or tell people to stop bothering Niemann until he is able to. I mean, his intuition is obviously very good, but in the end a serious league can't go by the intuition of the best player and secret info.
In what sense is he trying to be judge, jury, and executioner? It seems to me that he is resigning games and not trying to get those results changed. Do you mean the fact that he is arguably using his position in the chess world to influence organizing bodies to change their rules? That might be the case, but I don’t think that’s bad or wrong in principle.
> I am disappointed with Magnus. He is misusing the weight of his reputation even if cheating is a big deal in chess.
I think the unspoken truth but also the thing both chess.com and Magnus are hinting at is that Niemann has cheated a lot more than he lets on, perhaps his entire stream was built on cheating, who knows. But chess.com can't just start sharing information like that, and they are walking a fine line just with their public statement where they affirmatively assert that Niemann is underplaying the reality of his cheating. Magnus probably has insider information from chess.com but is bound by NDA and this is also why he's now challenging Niemann to give him permission to speak on the matter.
>- MAGNUS has NOT seen chesscom cheat detection algorithms
>- MAGNUS was NOT given or told a list of “cheaters”
>- and he is and has completely acted 100% on his own knowledge (not sure where he got it!) and desires to this time
>I will also address a comment made to this post about Ben’s (Perp Chess) podcast and say that, yes, some top players (not Magnus!) have been invited at times, under NDA, to see what we do… and by extension, they also saw some reports of confessed cheaters (there were many more cheaters - but we only share those who confessed in writing, and only privately under the NDA). Magnus and the team from C24 are not on that list.
Yeah, I think Magnus is making a mistake conflating two things. It is totally fine to think that Nieman should have been punished more for online cheating, but combining it with his accusation of cheating at the Sinquefield Cup come off as sour grapes. Watching the Crypto Cup there was obviously no love lost between the two of them but they played each other, it's not until Magnus losses to Hans (which based on their rating had about a 5% chance of happening) that this refusal to play happens.
They are pretty accurate, though of course when you are dealing with the person at the very top it's going to be hard to say how accurate it is. I think broadly though most experts agree that Hans beating Magnus was an unlikely but possible ting to happen. For comparison a 1400 rated player, which is someone who plays and studies a decent amount of chess but isn't devoted, would have a 0.0000014% chance of beating Magnus.
I think as the skill differential becomes greater you have a better chance of identifying where the "master" screwed up allowing the neophyte to win. But it sounds like Hans and Carlsen are too close in skill (at least in this game) to identify a flaw in Carlsen's play that was able to be exploited.
And perhaps Hans went in expecting to lose and played loose and free and surprised himself with a win.
I doubt they are very predictive in those rating bands. Based on a quick Google, since 2011, Magnus has lost a total of 20 games as white, mostly against much higher rated opponents than Hans. It had been almost 2 years since he lost as white, against Levon.
The fact that cheating is now on the agenda in chess is so lame.
My chess.com rating is only 864 and after making a move that won me the game my opponent said they were going to report me because "I played an unusual tactic."
It's taking all the fun out of the game.
Edit - to clarify that cheating being on the agenda is a sad state of affairs, not that Carlson calling it out is sad.
My read is that people believe it's very possible (even likely) he cheated, but are also frustrated that Magnus has brought a lot of other players into this without making (prior to this) any actual statement. Even with this statement, he hasn't formally accused him or presented any proof.
I'd say the vibe of the community seems to be a general distaste for drama, rather than taking a particular side.
I'm not a strong enough player/analyst to have a meaningful opinion on whether or not Niemann cheated. It's possible he cheated.
I'm taken aback at the manner in which these accusations have been made. I guess that Magnus felt that the only way he could force FIDE and tournament organizers into action was with a big, public, shocking act.
It feels like a black eye for chess no matter the outcome. Either Niemann is proven guilty and professional chess has to grapple with that hit to its integrity, or the situation isn't resolved and the question of Niemann's (and pro chess') integrity is left open indefinitely.
I don't know to what extent Magnus has pushed for anti-cheating measures or increased scrutiny of Niemann behind closed doors, but I'll be very disappointed if it turns out that this public spectacle could've been avoided.
Chess and FIDE are already the source of massive amounts of drama. This story got some mainstream traction but this is not going to impact the sport. On the contrary there are probably future champions who just turned to the game because of the latest nonsense.
Maybe in future the players have to play in an isolated (no spectators) but monitored environment (cameras), naked (minimum clothing provided if absolutely necessary). Then it's only prisoner wallets to consider, which full body scanners can sort out.
You'd need a full blown X-ray to catch implants. I don't think technical countermeasures are the solution; even this is technically and logistically feasible highest levels of play, it wouldn't be something you could practically apply to the mid/low levels of play.
Inexpensive technical countermeasures like the metal detecting wands are reasonable enough, but probably not enough to stop the reputational harm that cheating scandals do to the entire sport.
They often have that. But if you have an accomplice placed with the spectators that person could just discreetly signal stuff. Like scratching the nose or so. At least for the WC matches they also often sat behind one-way glass.
It is possible to have a device in your shoe that will not trip metal detectors that can feed moves from the outside.
It doesn't even have to be that complex, for a super GM even just a simple signal that indicates "this position has a crushing move, spend extra time thinking on this move" is enough to significantly improve their performance
Unless you catch the method of cheating directly, it's basically impossible to definitively determine if someone was cheating from a small number of games, they could just have gotten lucky or have been especially prepared in a given line like Niemann claims to have been
If that's a big concern, why would you even allow audiences to spectate in real-time? If the integrity of the game takes precedent over the spectacle of the match, why do we care about anything but the results?
This reductive approach to looking at cheating will just end with both of these shmucks sitting naked in an empty room, surrounded by an audience of a single referee who's job is to stop them from physically attacking one another. If he wants to accuse someone of cheating, he should do it - otherwise, dragging someone in public and refusing to make public statements doesn't reflect well on his professional integrity.
The extent that anti-cheating measures in Contract Bridge have gone to is hilariously insane. The players are effectively in telephone booths and cannot say or do anything except mark a bid indicator or slide a card, and at regulated intervals, too.
Then by all means, I'd encourage Carlsen to start the XFL of chess tournaments! The XCL?
Whatever the case is, I don't think a public crusade is the right option. If he had conclusive evidence of him cheating during the match, he wouldn't have made such a protracted statement on it weeks afterwards.
Yeah, some of it seems like regret that he didn't withdraw from the tournament before the match, and some of it doubling down.
Still could be correct, however. I suspect that Carlsen has certain knowledge of Hans cheating at games later than 16 but not the one he lost that hasn't been revealed yet.
Honestly, at the level these guys are at, compared to the engines, chess is an imperfect knowledge game also.
In Magnus' statement he specifically spoke of how he felt, Hans felt. This shows how much information beyond the 64 squares that chess players take in.
I'd argue the opportunities are larger in chess, because "what to do" is much more concretely correct.
Bridge has its own problems... and people will cheat as long as there are physical devices. (Fantunes / Fisher-Schwartz) Imagine if they used any simple encryption algorithm, they'd be fishy, but impossible to catch at that time.
BBO is the future for bridge IMHO.
Chess, will become an in person game with nobody else but the arbiter, players, and cameras in the room.
Makes me wonder if they ever point nonlinear junction detectors[0] at people that aren't supposed to have electronics on them in these kinds of events. I think it would be pretty hard to cheat then. Or would something like The Thing[1] escape that?
- "Such a technique was used in the 1980s construction of the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Thousands of diodes were mixed into the building's structural concrete making detection and removal of the true listening devices nearly impossible."
There are a lot of possibilities, mainly if the cheater has help from someone outside who has information about the game. It's enough to transmit a signal in critical position that something is there.In past, player refused to take off his shoes. Other one has friends who sit in particular order. From other discussions
* a hair of defined length placed in a bowl or glass of water and vibrations at the resonant frequency of that hair would produce visible ripples around the hair.
* distant noise such as car horns honking, bass from a passing vehicle blasting dubstep, construction noise, etc.
* laser beam through the window visible only with particular contact lenses
* a bone-induction speaker or thumper (vibrating device) embedded in them or replacing a tooth
* thumpers that can be put inside the soles of shoes that would not be detectable with a regular metal detector
My impression is that the technology is there. If the incentives are high enough, someone can find the way.
I am seriously aghast at how so many people defend (or even fully support) this type of behavior. This is disgusting.
I want to emphasize, that it is disgusting regardless of Carlsen being right or wrong in his suspicions, it isn't really important, and I would stand by it even after Niemann being proven guilty. This really should be simple: either a player is caught cheating and then he is banned (or awarded a prize, or whatever this particular federation does with cheaters). Public statement must be given by federation and/or organizers, after which players may be allowed to speak up. Or a player isn't caught, and then you keep your fucking opinion to yourself (except of informing the arbiters, of course), however great champion you may be. In fact, the greater you are, the more responsibility you have, and even if you are borderline sure the opponent has cheated (but have no legal proof) — you really should be mindful of possibility that your are mistaken, and of what consequences your (however "legally non-binding") allegations may bear, given how prominent you are.
I.e., this is an issue that must be dealt by organizers — not players, not reddit users and surely not youtube bloggers.
Otherwise, what happens is that somebody totally innocent (and I'm not talking about Niemann — the point is, that it really could have been ANYBODY) can be publicly executed on a whim of a great King of Chess. Seriously, just think about it. A person's whole carrier may be ruined, he may be driven to a suicide, just because… Magnus has suspicions? Does it sit well with you?
Also, all of this is far beyond the question of if a suspect has cheated in the past. I mean, I think it's fair to say that refusing to play somebody who the federation/organizers do not ban, can (and should) be considered ill sportsmanship and be frowned upon — but this is just my personal opinion and means nothing. This said, I guess it should be acceptable that one may publicly refuse to play a person who is known to have cheated in the past (or for any other reason — and the criteria of refusal being potentially arbitrary is why I find this problematic). But then you kinda should make this statement before you play them, or at least make a note to yourself to do it after the tournament has finished, instead of throwing a tantrum just after you lose a game to that person (a game that you played really poorly, according to many respectable experts in the field, by the way… which isn't the point of course).
But, obviously, one cannot (and shouldn't) be expected to make the best and most moral decision all of the time. Which is why this should be handled (and even enforced) by the arbiters/event organizers/federation. And it would be too kind to say that it wasn't — it was literally the opposite of that! They were throwing fuel to the fire all way along! This is obscene.
Maybe. But that's why I wrote that last paragraph. I.e., regarding Carlsen — I would never defend this type of behavior, but I understand him. First off, I believe that he truly believes what he says, and… well, somebody else already mentioned Fischer (like 20 times in one thread, probably). What he does is not ok, but the fact he is inclined to do so is ok, people do get in fights and behave poorly, what else is new. This is exactly why there are federations with their rules and event organizers with their protocols, to keep things civil even when it becomes really heated up. And their fault is 1000 times worse than Carlsen's.
(Honestly, I didn't expect them to do well, because we all know what FIDE and chess community in general are, but there still are degrees to how bad one could manage the situation, and they did it awfully bad.)
Obviously there's more information that isn't being disclosed, and until the definitive information comes to light we're all going to be left in the dark.
Nonetheless, addressing this statement, it basically reveals that Magnus couldn't trust Hans before the tournament and especially the game they played in which Magnus lost as white.
Essentially, there isn't a game where Magnus loses to Hans and doesn't see cheating. He'd probably suspect cheating even if he won so long as there was some "unusually good play" from Hans.
So, excluding cheating as a possibility, the probability of Magnus strongly suspecting cheating given that he loses to Hans, however unlikely, looks like about 100%.
I haven't been following this closely (so please correct any details), but Hans's defence of how well he played in the game seems consistent with him playing unusually well and Magnus's observations. IE, Hans claims that he happened to prepare the opening Magnus played because he was trying to think of ways Magnus would play unpredictable openings, which is something, AFAIK, Magnus tends to do. It also seems plausible that Hans would prepare much more for the game against Magnus than anyone else. That combined with some luck and having a good day all seems consistent with not only winning unexpectedly but a relatively unusual demeanour.
And on the demeanour points Magnus makes, can we take a moment to imagine being him in the game: already suspecting cheating, running into someone who seems prepared for your "unusual/unexpected opening" and then being down as white ... what would you see on the other side of the board? How could you not read into any tick or gesture? Moreover, how focused are you? Would this not be the set of circumstances where you're going to play unusually badly? My vague understanding is that Magnus did indeed make some blunders in the game. The question for me is how well did Magnus play relative to his own level?
Overall, on the general point of cheating, Magnus is probably very much on point. His unilateral action on this seems on par with World Champions thinking they're as big as the game itself, for better or worse. On the specific point of whether Hans cheated in this game, I think that "innocent until proven guilty" is the only thing that will keep things together because if Magnus is wrong and Hans is bullied out of the game because of this then it will only contribute to the ugliness of a cheating crisis not remove it, IMO. That a cheating accusation is as ugly as this has been already is already a black mark against all those involved in managing the sport. Should it turn out that Hans did cheat, for instance, it's not a good look that the undisputed world champion had to or felt he had to forfeit a tournament and a game in another tournament to make his point.
Otherwise for the sport of Chess, it'd be a sad sport indeed if exciting and unexpected moments like Magnus's loss to Hans can't exist in it and the difference between "great" and "cheater" is whether you get help from a computer before or during the game.
At the 2022 Sinquefield Cup, I made the unprecedented professional decision to withdraw from the tournament after my round three game against Hans Niemann. A week later during the Champions Chess Tour, I resigned against Hans Niemann after playing only one move.
I know that my actions have frustrated many in the chess community. I'm frustrated. I want to play chess. I want to continue to play chess at the highest level in the best events. I believe that cheating in chess is a big deal and an existential threat to the game. I also believe that chess organizers and all those who care about the sanctity of the game we love should seriously consider increasing security measures and methods of cheat detection for over the board chess. When Niemann was invited last minute to the 2022 Sinquefield Cup, I strongly considered withdrawing prior to the event. I ultimately chose to play.
I believe that Niemann has cheated more - and more recently - than he has publicly admitted. His over the board progress has been unusual, and throughout our game in the Sinquefield Cup
I had the impression that he wasn't tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions, while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do. This
game contributed to changing my perspective.
We must do something about cheating, and for my part going forward, I don't want to play against people that have cheated repeatedly in the past, because I don't know what they are capable of doing in the future.
There is more that I would like to say. Unfortunately, at this time I am limited in what I can say without explicit permission from Niemann to speak openly. So far I have only been able to speak with my actions, and those actions have stated clearly that I am not willing to play chess with Niemann. I hope that the truth on this matter comes out, whatever it may be.
"I'm not saying Hans Niemann cheated in this very specific instance against me. I'm just saying he's a professional cheater, and that fact may or may not be related to my withdrawal in a game against him after just one move."
Carlsen is all but accusing Niemann of having cheated against him. Why can't he go the extra step? Is this something his lawyers have advised him to do? (I don't have a dog in this fight)
Yes. Niemann has admitted to cheating in the past, and has apparently been banned from some past events for cheating. So Carlsen can safely relate to the public that he believes Niemann to be a "cheater". But to say for a fact that Niemann cheated in a specific match, he'd be communicating a statement of fact. If that statement is false, or could colorably be argued as false, then Niemann can take him to court for defamation, and even if Carlsen prevailed, it would still be painful and expensive.
Remember that statements of opinions, including opinions that are analyses of previously disclosed facts, are protected from defamation claims. Defamation can only consist of a damaging false statement of fact, or the allegation that you're aware of specific undisclosed facts like that to support your opinion.
You could call out Lord St. Buggering-Little-Boys, complete with films, DNA evidence, and witness testimony, and still lose (and be on the hook for legal fees).
You're allowed to make "very strong implications". The other word for that is "opinion". You're in trouble if you say "I've been given secret information that shows Neimann cheated at the Cup", but if all you're saying is "based on these factors, which by implication you yourself could evaluate, I believe he's cheating", you're offering an opinion based on disclosed facts, and that defamation claim won't survive dismissal.
(I'm not a lawyer, I just nerd out on this stuff, happy to be corrected).
In a carefully worded statement like this (clearly it has been reviewed by legal council) you will say things that cannot be charged as defamation in the appropriate courts.
It's also a gambit to get Hans to say something like "sure, Carlsen, say whatever you want" which could be used as a defense in a defamation case.
There's even a hint that Carlsen has evidence of cheating that has yet to be revealed (but not this game).
If you're 49% sure someone cheated against you / would cheat against you, that's probably enough to make you never want to play against them, but also not enough to prevail in a court case.
I don’t like this. You can’t just imply someone is cheating without proof or some indication of proof. I understand we need to crack down on cheating but this is not the way.
I’m glad Magnus has now acknowledged he is on a personal crusade against a teenager with absolutely no proof to bake him except his own feelings. I think we can safely assume this is the moment people will remember as him losing the plot.
I now wait to see if FIDE will do what they should and sanction him but I am not sure I have faith.
I'm not sure I have ever understood the Magnus hype. This whole thing... It makes me certain he did not deserve it. Unless he's proven right somehow... But generally as a sportsman it's not up to you to play referee. Maybe they should take bullying in chess just as seriously as cheating.
Isn't it time to just abandon chess as a competitive sport? It's (mostly) a solved game for f* sake, move on. I will probably be downvoted to oblivion, but I'm absolutely serious and would love constructive commentary.
What's the big appeal of chess? We (as humans) can't beat computers. It's probably useful for further research, but I see absolutely no value in (human) competitions.
Isn't this like saying we should abandon professional road cycling as a sport, because motorcycles have been invented and exist and are a faster method of two wheeled transportation?
Or we should abandon rowing as a sport because we now have 9hp Honda outboard motors?
Well, cycling is plagued with lots of similar problems (doping, people hiding electric motors in their bikes etc.), so yeah, I would argue the same there. On the other hand the very act of cycling improves health, so it's much more suitable as a sport for humans. Chess may have some arguable benefits, but it's very hard to detect so.
Of course, everything depends on "the market" - if people want to watch human chess tournaments (or cycling tournaments), they will... but I suspect with time it will either have to become a hilarious, anti-cheat porn or it will die out. I'm rooting for the latter :-D. I'm sure we can invent much better competitive games that are not that prone to these problems.
> I'm sure we can invent much better competitive games that are not that prone to these problems.
I rather doubt that. Go was thought to be much harder to solve, but AI has caught up there, and with techniques that will probably generalise to any similar games.
Well, if you want to replace Chess you'll need something that scratches the same itch, which will probably involve some level of similarity. It's hard to even define the terms of a question like "is cycling better than chess?" - maybe, but even if you have a compelling argument for why, you're unlikely to convince people to switch from one to another.
Well very many people think it's fun to watch sports or other competitions regardless of if a robot could do it better. I don't think anybody cares about if its "solved" or not, it's just fun to see humans interact in a controlled dramatic way I guess.
Chess also has the added bonus of providing a lot of interesting puzzles for those interested, they can sit and analyze lines with engines after the games as well or watch Agadmator on YouTube analyze it. It's fun!
I'd love to watch robot football (the European variety) where robots beat humans. If they can do that, it's probably singularity time (or robot apocalypse).
I agree that puzzles are fun, but cheating will be a problem for the competitive part. And I think it will degrade the appeal to watch/follow.
The best players in the world can still go toe to toe against three of these things, unless they choose to intentionally avoid high flying shots. In which case this bot wins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2ZtowNHhrQ
A car can go faster than Usain Bolt yet I'm still going to watch him. If you were familiar with chess culture, you would already be aware of the appeal of human chess champions. If anything, the sport has grown enormously in the last few years. What ismprobably going to decline is the relative focus on OTB Classical.
Chess is far from solved, either. AlphaZero's play has actually led to the emergence of additional theory.
> It's (mostly) a solved game for f* sake, move on.
This is completely incorrect. We have fully solved chess with 7 pieces, and 8-piece tablebases are in progress. The initial chess position has 64 pieces, and solving gets exponentially harder as more pieces are added.
> We (as humans) can't beat computers.
We can't beat cars at races either yet competitive foot races still exist.
I took "solved" as in "the computers can whip our asses sixteen ways to Sunday".
But the competition in chess was never about the computers, it's about the players. And that's true for many sports, otherwise we'd only ever watch the Olympics.
Also, clever cheating devices have been found in over the board chess competitions. So, this is possible. Moreover, one needn't carry a device on themselves. A cheater may have accomplices providing hints, if they carry a device.
It will be interesting to see how chess tournaments, as well as FIDE, chess.com, and other major chess institutions react to this situation. The potential for cheating has now been brought to the absolute forefront of chess discussion. And Carlsen's actions have been questioned by FIDE in recent interviews, with FIDE staff condemning "vigilantism" of a kind.
Some set of resolutions seems necessary--perhaps standards for security in major chess tournaments, perhaps an alliance to share cheating or reliability data amongst major chess operations, perhaps a standard term in major chess tournament agreements that no previously identified cheaters (online or otherwise) will be allowed to play, and perhaps sanctions in some form against Carlsen (or Niemann, if concrete evidence against him emerges).