Comment by msbarnett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by msbarnett | Hacker News Reader

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> Second, that it's common amongst the elite of the sport is huge. Either online chess is somewhat dead on arrival as a sport and was never taken seriously by many players (which makes sense to me given how integrated computer engines are in the sport) ... or the chess world needs to go through some sort of cultural revolution here.

Really? My takeaway is that chess.com is doing a better job of detecting cheaters than FIDE, who seem to have been asleep at the wheel with Niemann

> Fourth, the OTB cheating question still seems open and it seems plausible to me that a good chess player would cheat online for followers and income and entrance to tournaments and then use OTB as the real testing ground.

This seems wildly implausible to me. Niemann‘s OTB rise would be indicative of a not just significant but utterly world historic chess mind, head-and-shoulders above Fisher and head-shoulders-and-entire-torso above every other player in history. When led into uncharted territory by the world chess champion, Magnus indicated that Niemann seemed utterly and completely untroubled - and yet he’s, what, running stockfish in another window for $1000 prizes online and getting himself caught dozens of times? Why? Why take the risk against opponents he should beat in his sleep? These should have been sleepwalk games for this Fisher++ genius who’s totally untroubled by a 5 time world chess championship, but he’s for some reason making obviously weaker moves when not switching windows when his unaided moves shouldn’t have been screamingly weaker than the aided ones given his singularly extraordinary chess rise.

It beggars belief. His world historic rise in rating alone is ludicrously over the top. Kid’s an obvious fraud.

They didn’t find any instances of cheating after August 2020. At that point his OTB ELO was only around 2450. It’s only after his last known instance of cheating that he improved into the truly great level.

> They didn’t find any instances of cheating after August 2020

They banned him after August 2020, and only reinstated him after a full confession the next year.

The fact that, after having being caught red handed in online for-prize tournaments and knowing he’s being monitored very closely online going forward, he suddenly starts rising at a world-historic pace (at an age this has never before happened at) at OTB tournaments suggests to me that having lost the ability to reliably cheat in one forum he turned his attention to another.

They reinstated him January of the following year, only five months later.

He was (and still is) banned from prize money tournaments even after that partial re-instatement.

Regardless, there's obviously a huge difference between "no evidence he cheated after August 2020" (wow, guess his heart grew 3 sizes that month) and "no evidence he cheated after a 5 month ban which required him to beg to get his account back, made it very clear to him that they were watching him like a hawk, and they wouldn't let him play in tournaments even after that" (not exactly indicative of an unprompted improvement in his morals).

The Chess.com anti cheat system, as described by the report, is set up to handle blitz and bullet. This makes sense, both because it's most of what is played on the site, and because it's so much easier to detect cheating in that environment: A whole lot of engine recommendations would be bananas if a human played them in blitz, and finding major mistakes is very challenging under such time pressure. Evaluating when to play a secondary or tertiary line under pressure, instead of what the engine says, is also challenging. Along with the metadata of thinking time, or whether someone tabbed out of the screen, it's unsurprising that cheating is pretty detectable.

On the other hand, in OTB classical chess the difficulty is in bypassing the security controls. Players are much closer to engines, and far fewer moves appear to be completely inhuman. Furthermore, with an accomplice that is also quite good at chess, those lines could just be discarded. This makes it much easier to both play very good moves that are not all that suspicious, and take enough time to "sell" the thinking time.

This doesn't mean Hans cheated over the board, just that without very good physical security, any unscrupulous GM could gain 300-400 points virtually undetected, other than from the fact that they are playing much better than they used to. If security is a top priority, at the very least we need to do what the Sinquefield cup did in the last few rounds: No spectators and a 15 minute delay, so that all communication with computers/co-conspirators has to include the player relaying all the moves out before they can get any help.

> If security is a top priority, at the very least we need to do what the Sinquefield cup did in the last few rounds: No spectators and a 15 minute delay, so that all communication with computers/co-conspirators has to include the player relaying all the moves out before they can get any help.

This. And then let's test this Niemann character, as now I'm really curious as to whether -and how- he cheats at OTB.

From page 17 of the report:

> In conclusion, while we cannot definitively prove that Hans’ rise in strength is entirely “natural,” we have also found no indications in the game data to suggest otherwise. While some have suggested that a move-by-move analysis by humans may surface some oddities in move choice or analysis, there is nothing in our statistical investigation to raise any red flags regarding Hans’ OTB play and rise.

That’s specifically in response to the question of whether or not Niemann has played a statistically anomalous number of “near perfect games”, based on analysis of on-board moves. But as they note earlier:

> Hans is consistently above many contemporaries in strength increases, even though he has only recently shown the same caliber of play. Likewise, as set forth in Figures A and B below, Hans had the fastest and biggest increase in his score over time in comparison to his peers and other notable players, when considering all of their known Classical OTB games played from age 11-19.

Which should raise a lot of red flags given the nature of the “peers” (Fischer, Magnus) and its very sudden occurrence after being banned from online tournaments. It’s much harder to detect computer-aided cheating in classical time control moves than in speed chess (where they detected it in his online play) — not least because, as they note, they have no access to time-usage data for the OTB events, which would be critical to any such analysis. Nevertheless they do flag 6 OTB events that their FairPlay team believes merits further analysis by FIDE, in Appendix X.3. Reading between the lines I think that’s about as strong a statement as they can make without fully creating political issues with FIDE, who they’re probably hoping will work more closely with them going forward.

All that said, it makes more sense to look at the anomalous nature of his OTB outcomes rather than searching individual OTB moves trying to find a smoking gun given chess.com’s relative lack of data there, and the political entanglements involved. And as for that

> While we don’t doubt that Hans is a talented player, we note that his results are statistically extraordinary.

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