Magnus Carlsen is a majority shareholder in chess.com.
And it’s disingenious to suggest that he’s actively trying to destroy Hans’ career because his ego couldn’t stand losing to him in that OTB game, because it’s an extremely serious allegation from human perspective.
In fact, the article tries to paint Niemann as a liar while the purported facts pretty much match what he admitted to. One cheating in a titled tournament at age 12 and multiple cheats at the beginning of 2020. He said he was 16, so he was barely 17 according to the article. That isn't a lie, that can easily happen in an interview.
If that is all that chess.com has, their behavior is extremely poor. Also, what about all those other cheating titled players who did not have the misfortune to win against multi-million asset Carlsen?
It is time for Europeans to send GDPR requests for cheating scores etc. and terminate their accounts. The risk is too great.
And yes, while cheating online is shabby, hardly anyone took online chess seriously before the big money tournaments started during the pandemic.
And that the whole chess.com affair is a side show that is exploited for streamer content and clicks. The relevant issue is cheating or not cheating in the Sinquefield cup.
1. The driving force behind the original accusations is that Magnus felt his opponent wasn't "exerting" himself enough, compared to other young prodigies.
2. Chess.com's case is that his results are "statistically extraordinary."
3. There is a history of cheating
4. Allegations that he admitted cheating privately (though it's not clear to whom)
1, 2, and 3 could easily be cause for suspicion; however, that's not the same as evidence. The one crucial piece absent from this article is any suggestion of how he cheated.
Without providing a means, I find this piece premature and questionable. That said, I don't know anything about chess, lot alone cheating at the master level. So maybe the "how" is common sense and not difficult?
And of course, there's also this:
> The report also addresses the relationship during the saga between Carlsen and Chess.com, which is buying Carlsen’s “Play Magnus” app for nearly $83 million.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19563768 ("Chessvision.ai – Analyze chess position from websites, images or video", 49 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21162466 ("Show HN: ChessBoss – enhancing physical chessboards with computer vision", 36 comments)
As to how he'd cheat over the board, that's the big question. There are a couple of theories floating around, some more realistic than others, but if we knew for sure than this whole debacle would already be over.
OTB cheating: there are many possible ways. The simplest one being having a script reading the moves from the live broadcast and feeding them to an engine and then sending the info to the player. Hans' strength magically decreased in the Sinquefield cup once broadcast delay was introduced for example.
So you discount a possibility that the controversy and allegations against him had at least some effect in him playing worse in the Sinquefield Cup?
Anyway, there were studies out there that there were no statistical differences in his rating gains in tournaments broadcasted with delays and without it. Study by Kenneth Regan also found no irregularities in his play, so the only 'evidence' of him using computer help are allegations by a company that is in business relationship with Carlsen, and his 'bad' analysis in post game interview. I'm not very impressed.
This might be the solution. But then on-site audience would need to be monitored as well.
There are various ways one might cheat OTB, from taking one's phone the bathroom in the middle of a tournament (some allow this!!), to getting signals from an accomplice who is seeing the game in real time. Signals could be electronic to some device on the player, or visual from an audience member in the room. It's been proposed to introduce a 15-30 min broadcast delay in tournament games as one way to prevent cheating. Some tournaments scan the players for electronic devices - not sure how foolproof this is.
Actually, it isn't! Great chess bots have very different play styles and there are people currently studying them. It's very unlikely someone will come out of nowhere so to speak (as in, not on some amazing rise as a young child) with these types of techniques. I'm nowhere near these levels of chess players but have played competitively for my county as a school-kid and still play a couple hundred games a year so have some idea.
Magnus has estimated it would usually only take one or two computer corrections per game for himself to play perfectly, so we're not talking about every move, just at key points. Apparently even just an indication that there is some key/winning move at a given point, without indicating what it is, is enough for the player to stop and put in the time to find it.
This is two to four orders of magnitude faster than chess players in a classical game. One to two orders of magnitude faster than blitz.
(I don't quite understand what you mean by 'those conversation would never have happened .. ')
It is exactly the opposite of what you claim: there is a massive statistical aberration in his performance of broadcast tournaments vs. non-broadcast. He is 200 Elo higher in the former.
https://talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?p=933597&sid=1fd7...
You're clearly very invested in this case. How can you possibly be getting the polarity of the evidence wrong?
https://twitter.com/NikolaosNtirlis/status/15688492214487818...
> You're clearly very invested in this case
Well, I'm probably into it because I don't believe in presumption of guilt over vague allegations. Also, someone is _wrong_ on the internet, you know.
What is happening is nothing but bullying, Magnus is using his popularity and fanbase to destroy am opponent and his fans are like a mob on a witch hunt who are out for blood, demanding severe punishment. I believe it is unfair and an aberration of sports conduct and my ideas of justice. Just crank up anti-cheating measures to 11 at the next OTB event, and see how Hans will play.
(Oh, haha, 2 out of the 3 tournaments under "no live games" from that tweet are in the small set that the chess.com report says merit investigation.)
This statement came from an experiment I conducted. I just tried playing lichess 3+2 game while running a nearby chess.com/analysis on a second display. ...
... and I was barely keeping up with all the clicks, and in the endgame was unable to keep up. So no, efficient cheating in fast games requires at least a special training, and better some automated software to keep up with the moves and to communicate best moves back to player.
I attribute part of the reason why this scandal has reached as far as it has is that Niemann was able to retain his reputation and enter professional OTB tournaments up until the Sinquefield Cup.
Nobody knew about any of this until it was alluded to vaguely, and then implicitly after Magnus was defeated OTB
The only disappointing thing was the focus on how fast Hans' rating soared after he hit 2500, and how much it rose between ages 11 and 19.25. These thresholds were very cherry-picked to make Hans look bad, which you didn't need to do. For example, Hans's rating lingered at 2450 for two years and then popped. If you charted ratings rise starting at 2450, Hans would be on the other side of the chart!
To be clear, as there is no equivalent to a physical impossibility here, I am not claiming that the rate of rating increase is conclusive; I am saying it seems to be a legitimate concern regardless of how reasonable the broader averages are.
And also... who cares? there are no stake, just playing against random people, who cares if they cheat as long as you have fun playing. It's less fun for the cheater, but doesn't impact non-cheater.
I would be upset if someone was inconsistently cheating, and so I'm playing someone nominally at 1400 but for this game they're actually playing 2100.
Of course for true tournament play, the rules are the rules, whatever they may be, and they must be followed for it to have any meaning.
So who did chess.com share those with?
Ie, their secret sauce.
I basically made the argument that, in any sport, when a player does statistically much, much better than their previous performance would predict, that in and of itself should be considered evidence of cheating - perhaps not conclusive evidence, but definitely evidence warranting further investigation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32990022
> All this talk of "Carlsen accused him of cheating with no evidence" reminds me of the blowback against some athletes in the 70s and 80s who accused rivals of taking PEDs "with no evidence".
> Sometimes the evidence of someone doing monstrously better than can be expected by their history is sufficient IMO. I mean, look at this article about swimmer Shirley Babashoff [1], dubbed "Surly Shirley" at the time by the media, for suggesting the East German women were on PEDs in the 70s. Nowadays we look back on those images of the East German women, looking more manly than any dude I've ever seen, and wonder how we considered with a straight face that they weren't on a boatload of drugs. Similarly, it completely baffles me how any sane person can think that Flo Jo wasn't on PEDs in the runup to the 1988 Olympics - her 100m dash record still stands today.
> I'm not saying Carlsen went about it in the right way, because now Niemann is basically in an indefensible position, but I'm also not willing to quickly dismiss it because Carlsen has "no evidence".
When there is money in the game, there is incentive to cheat.
> The report says dozens of grandmasters have been caught cheating on the website, including four of the top-100 players in the world who confessed.
There are probably smart cheaters already playing who are able to evade detection.
And if it now turns out that he lied in his confession, too, then that's a really bad look w.r.t. his trustworthiness.
The article doesn't say that Niemann's admissions to Chess.com were about cheating in prize-money tournaments, nor the other disputed facts. The spreadsheet of incidents they show us isn't what Niemann admitted to cheating in, but was Chess.com's internal anticheat flagged -- we can tell because they label it as "suspect games" and it uses qualifiers like "likely". The inferences that the cheating was for real money prizes, or at an age older than 16, or on for-profit Twitch streams, are drawn from from this list of suspected games.
We don't currently know what facts Niemann confessed too: it's not public whether the facts Niemann is allegedly lying about overlap with the facts Niemann admitted to in writing in 2020. WSJ may have evidence that's dispositive on this point (i.e. those Slack texts), but they haven't printed it yet.
Computers have “nearly infallible tactical calculation,” the report says, and are capable of beating even the best human every single time. The report says dozens of grandmasters have been caught cheating on the website, including four of the top-100 players in the world who confessed.
That being said, if they have literal screenshots of the discussions between Niemann and chess.com admitting to cheating and appealing the ban, those seem like smoking guns in addition to all this other analysis
this isn't to say that I don't think Niemann cheated. I think he probably did, just that chess.com is getting great publicity from all this and it would be un-shocking for them to want to string it out a bit longer. it would be poor business not to, in fact
Otherwise we will probably just dismiss you as hardly impartial ...
We dont generally place full trust in online job interviews so why lower the bar to "honor system" when it comes to the most cheat-friendly competition in the universe?
Also, there has been history of people cheating in IRL games by taking many bathroom breaks and looking up solutions while on break.
Can the "over the board" cheating potential be reduced with a 5 minute "tape delay" of broadcasting the game? Is that enough time to thwart the influence of an external signal?
Seems to me the only way this person can redeem himself is through over the board play under strict conditions ("Come dressed in shorts, a t-shirt and sandals").
But I don't know if how long they're allowed per move, and if 5 minutes is enough time to thwart external influence.
Why not analyze his recent and over-the-board games?
While it says Niemann’s improvement has been “statistically extraordinary.” Chess.com noted that it hasn’t historically been involved with cheat detection for classical over-the-board chess, and it stopped short of any conclusive statements about whether he has cheated in person. Still, it pointed to several of Niemann’s strongest events, which it believes “merit further investigation based on the data.” FIDE, chess’s world governing body, is conducting its own investigation into the Niemann-Carlsen affair.
It's also why there are occasional surges in cheating (or crime, or whatever) after significant instances - subsequent examination then finds other cases because it's now looking for them, but the reality is the cheating (or whatever) was always there and just not noticed.
Thats all going to change now though, and its totally possible to cheat using a second computer with an engine that will be undetectable.
I suppose new algorithms will be designed or trained to account for the user's performance history.
>The report made no conclusions about Niemann's in-person games. But it also flagged his play from six over-the-board events, saying those merit further investigation.
https://twitter.com/andrewlbeaton/status/1577380477807300626
Hikaru coverage on YouTube [2].
2013 Interview with Max Dlugy: https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-shoe-aistant--ivanov-forfe...
Also, before you ask, "if he is already at GM level, why does he feel the need to cheat?" the answer is that the stronger players and athletes often feel more inclined to cheat because they have such high expectations of themselves. Past cheating scandals in sports have proven this.
The difference between being in a top team and a lower ranked team is measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars. Riders who spent 10-15 years of their childhood training to be a pro were faced with a difficult choice - cheat and realize your dream, or stay clean and walk away from the sport.
Besides, Magnus genuinely has never seemed like the guy to get petty and up and throw a fit, he’s lost plenty of times without doing such.
The way Carlsen described his suspicions reminded me of "connoisseurship" in the art world. Now that's a "skill" that's not as important as it once was but once the science has given its results and there are still no firm conclusions, connoisseurship is all you have.
More than that, Magnus is a very fierce competitor and he doesn't withdraw from tournaments. He's 31 and this is his first withdrawal AFAIK.
People aren't coins, with each toss unaffected by previous landings, but at the same time, not giving evidence shouldn't be considered evidence itself.
There's a rather large contingent of people who use it as a synonym for "proof", thus demonstrating their complete lack of understanding of the very concept even as they think they are looking smart. There's a lot of people who think that it is somehow the responsibility of someone like Carlson to have unambiguous proof that is often physically, legally, or morally impossible for them to have. Not that the Kantian imperative is the be-all, end-all of morality or philosophy, but it's still a useful idea, and if one runs this memeset through that grid it quickly reveals that you can't use this as the bar people must meet. It creates a society where anything that can be hidden, often not even hidden particularly well but just hidden at all since the standard is "proof", will be gotten away with. This is impractical.
(Although there is an extent to which we do indeed live in that society.)
There's another smaller contingent (from what I can see, the former is the dominant group) who thinks that "evidence" doesn't have to be proof per se, but that for something to be "evidence" it must be single-handedly capable of meeting some bar, be it "preponderance of evidence" or whatever is being used. These people are blind to the fact that it is often possible to produce ten pieces of evidence that are individually weak, but together are too improbable to ignore. While this case must certainly be treated with care since it is sensitive to how well done the Bayesian-style analysis of their probabilities is, it is perfectly reasonable to use such evidence to come to conclusions. This contingent will often try to defeat the evidence in detail, decrying each individual one and downplaying it, and completely failing to address the totality, be it either as a method of being disingenuous, or, I am convinced, often just lacking the intellectual firepower necessary to address the totality of evidence holistically.
It's important not to fall into that trap because I think in the real world, this is how many very important questions can be settled... and I don't just mean big philosophical or societal questions, or even news of the day like this, but even little personal things. The signs that your partner is cheating on you often come in like this... you may not catch them in the act, nor even receive some individually huge clue, because there's one or two humans intelligently trying to deceive you. Such situations often end up giving off a lot of little clues, each of them individually explainable-away, but the totality pointing to the truth. Or you can determine some new direction your company may be trying to take by a pattern of little changes long before they announce it publicly. Any number of things in the world where you can carefully assemble a lot of little things to come to some reasonably strong conclusion.
Back on topic, the combination of the fact that Neimann was known to have cheated before and the accusation of the current best player in chess, who was kind of going out on a limb to do so, was quite strong evidence that Niemann did cheat. Neither individually would be enough for me to come to that conclusion strongly on its own, but the combination was compelling. I considered that enough proof for my personal opinion. Proof enough for authority figures to sanction would require a higher standard and I support and applaud them for being more careful.
We shouldn’t have to tolerate this in sports, which are an escape from the real world.
Allowing people back into the sport swings the EV math heavily in favor of cheating if the penalty isn't massive given that the chance of getting caught is so low (as long as you know what you're doing). The only way to make the EV of cheating negative is to make the sanction very, very bad. Losing all of your future earnings from the sport is a good way to do that.
I used to run Magic: the Gathering tournaments, and there was a tremendous amount of "minor" cheating - forgetting the rules when it benefits them, shuffling in suspicious ways, peeking at opponents decks, etc. Many competitive players even openly admitted to doing this. Even if a tournament official could call them on the cheating and disqualify them (which was frowned upon without hard evidence), they would likely not be suspended from sanctioned play at all unless the evidence was overwhelming. Several famous cheaters did it many times and got caught several times. Minor cheating was very common as a result.
The benefits were in the thousands and thousands of scholarship dollars.
I cheat now in my employment. I work three full time jobs remotely and do the bare minimum in each. The risk is getting fired (and if I only get fired from two of the jobs, I am still ahead of honest work). The payoff is decades taken off my working life.
I'm personally a bit frustrated with the ever changing standards for adolescents. They are as responsible or naive as people want them to be for whatever their bias calls for. (not saying you btw, just in general).
If you do something bad when you are 17.9 should we wipe the slate clean once the odometer rolls over to exactly 18.0 where for some reason that age creates a solid barrier where the person emerges like a chrysalis and all their sins are washed clean?
And as a 50 year old, the difference between a 16 year old and a 19 year old are not very big. An unfortunate fact is that if you fuck up pretty big when you're 16 that people aren't going to trust you very much when you're 19. You need to do the time to build up more collateral. I've seen people who were assholes when they were teenagers change, but they didn't wake up on some magic birthday a new person. They were still assholes in their early 20s but their trajectory was such that by the time their early 30s came around they had changed themselves.
Maybe when he's 24 or 30 we can try again.
My guess is that the more decentralized a sport is, the more likely it is for cheating to occur and go unpunished. Chess is unofficially becoming a decentralized sport since the pandemic due to the shift to online playing. Even if some organizations claim to be in power, there is only so much they can do. Banning cheaters permanently may not even be possible.
*Of course this varies a lot by sport, gymnastics careers are obviously very short, a golfer's career may be much longer.
Unless their chess.com scores feed into their FIDE ELO scores or something?
Chess.com isn’t the yahoo chess web app or whatever, there’s more at stake there than “gamerscore”. Some of these 100 games were in online tournaments for cash prizes.
Just because it wasn’t a FIDE run tournament doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter or that no one cares. The chess.com Pro Chess League they suggest he cheated in 12 games of had a $100,000 prize fund.
Still it sounds a bit harsh to me that a child that cheated online can never in his adult life participate in chess tournaments.
If he had cheated as an adult I would have a different opinion.
The penalty for cheating in most major sports is way more lenient than you think. Most leagues will suspend you for a handful of games in the first instance. In the NBA for example you can be caught three times before being suspended for one season.
Especially since there are many others who don’t cheat that can take your place in a competition.
What is this alternate reality you're in, and what is your list of "everything else"? Citations, please.
The first result when you google "Are chess players athletes" says no [1], but I realize that this is more of an opinion piece. I would be curious to hear what more members of the competitive chess community think of the designation as athletes.
Edit: Upon further googling, I have learned that the IOC recognizes chess as a sport. Reading up further on how the matches last for 7+ hours, and how important physical conditioning is, I think it's totally valid to refer to chess players as athletes. In different sports there is wide spectrum of physical and mental demands - and I think chess just falls on the incredibly-demanding-mentally-but-less-demanding-physically end of the spectrum.
[1] https://herculeschess.com/are-chess-players-athletes/
[2] https://olympics.com/ioc/recognised-international-federation...
It's recognised by the International Olympic Committee - https://olympics.com/ioc/recognised-international-federation...
A common definition is: "Sport pertains to any form of competitive physical activity or game that aims to use, maintain, or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport
I don't think it worked for him.
https://github.com/IceWreck/Page-Visibility-User-Script
I made this a while ago.
Or just use another computer.
and yeah you could argue that if you're not into web dev it's not hyper obvious that websites are able to know when you lose focus on them, but I'd argue that it is fairly obvious. there are indications that should make it clear. facebook flashing notifications in their tab title until you click on them, to take a simple example.
I imagine there is one chess cheater reading this that will use your repo soon.
If he accidentally showed a picture of his second computer on the same desk during e.g. a stream it would be akin to guilt admission.
They can really only think in front of them. If I put information into this program, I get information out. They don't think that applications can monitor their own meta-state. Or the state of other applications.
So I'm not terribly surprised that he thought running the engine in another browser window would have been sufficient. He might have even had it open in "incognito mode". And since it's incognito, it can't be detected, right?
Even during the Carlsen-Niemann game it was meta-factors that initially clued Carlsen in. Niemann was playing without any significant effort or tension, in spite of playing in a game where he was outplaying the world champion. And after the game he was unable to explain his own ideas, proposed ideas that were simply losing, referenced games that did not exist, and was generally (relative to the class of player here) clueless. None of that final section is definitive proof of cheating to say the least, but it helps create a probabilistic profile of a player (and a game).
The point of this is that even a computer that played human-like (which I would argue will not happen for the distantly foreseeable future), would be just one factor among many in busting cheaters. I expect this is why Magnus was also initially reluctant to directly accuse him of cheating. He felt he was cheating based on the meta-factors and probably got folks more capable than himself to evaluate the technical factors, and when that also came up as a redflag - yeah, the dude's a cheater.
Ok, but what prevents the helper to communicate the difficulty or the number of minutes to think-pretend as well as the move itself?
Everything that can be measured can and will be gamed. That's why anti-fraud units are so secretive.
You can tell how experienced someone is based off the gun they use (some are stronger than others), whether they use cover or just run out into open spaces and shoot, how they move, whether they use 'gadgets' like grenades, and so on. A lot of novice players don't even use the sprint function to run.
When someone who literally just walks around the map but can laser everyone with headshots (which have a significant damage multiplier)? They're cheating.
Even a strong player can benefit from consulting a computer. Chess games can win fail based on a few moves.
A strong player would only need to consult the computer on a few moves to get a considerable advantage.
Aside from Niemann's case, how is it strategically beneficial to a chess player to provide the "inside scoop" on his plays?
You're presupposing incompetence, but another explanation would be a deliberate strategy to throw off future opponents.
Carlsen was making mistakes. That wasn't his best game at all. Are we sure we aren't talking of this because someone's ego was hurt?
> And after the game he was unable to explain his own ideas, proposed ideas that were simply losing,
That doesn't mean anything at all
> referenced games that did not exist,
That did exist close enough to the period he mentioned. Remembering the position and analysis is necessary, remembering when exactly this position happened and even between whom exactly is utterly useless.
> and was generally (relative to the class of player here) clueless.
He didn't make a clueless impression to me. But I'm not Carlsen's fanboy whos accusations can cloud my own reasoning. If I was, I'd probably believe that Niemann is a proven cheater and would look for facts to confirm that bias.
From what I understand, Niemann got into trouble because people thought that he wasn't able to adequately provide the analysis i.e. the reasoning behind some of his own moves. You'd need a live auxiliary AI to tutor the cheater in how to explain why a particular move was made.
At one point he described one of his own moves as "a weird move" without offering any explanation, sounding more as if he was observing the move rather than being the one who had actually analyzed it and chosen to play it!
That is harder, almost as hard as playing for real, but doable. Much easier to just be a mechanical turk for sharkfish or whatever it's called.
If it's indistinguishable from human play, then there is no advantage to cheating with a chess engine. The point of cheating is that the chess engine is stronger than human play and will give you mistake-free moves that put you in winning positions. If all your moves are equivalent to human moves, then you're playing no better than a human, at whatever level that is, let's assume GM 2700-2900. So what advantage does a human GM get from doing that?
The Sinquefield Cup (the tournament where the drama started) added a 15 minute delay which would be much more noticeable and less forgiving.
Or is it that they only need to cheat at a few points where taking more than 5 min wouldn't be abnormal at all?
Also, if your cheating device allows you to somehow input chess positions, then you wouldn't even require an external signal. Though it would be extremely impressive if somebody could pull that off.
If blitz type game where players have <5 minutes to decide a move, then yes, delayed broadcast might be effective. Other game types allow for >5 minutes per move so tape delay would be ineffective since cheater could just stall.
Cheating type also matters. There's external help (friend in the audience communicating 1 or more bits of information via auditory, optical, radio, or some other signal), and there's also internal help (raspberry pi zero + battery and pressure sensor embedded in your shoe or something). There are so many ways to cheat that it's hard to enumerate all of them let alone prevent all of them.
Given sufficient notoriety and money involved, it would be possible to just hire someone to essentially run a training model of alpha zero against moves specifically selected to be likely to be made by Magnus, and then all you really need is memorization of key scenarios (which for a good chess person should be no problem) to identify the right move to make.
They have almost the entirety of the lichess system source code publicly available, but from what I can gather they have a private set of weights on inputs - I assume to prevent cheaters from fully reverse-engineering the system.
It makes sense that Magnus would take a stand on it, even if he risks losing face by doing so.
I wouldn't consider poker players or tetris players athletes.
But also their games are subject to the most scrutiny and study and they themselves will spend a lot of time publicly talking about and analyzing their own games, those "cheat" moves would stand out as ones which were hard to see and had bad explanations after a while.
A strong chess player would have to weigh the risk of losing all their progress and reputation if caught cheating.
After this current situation, I expect the penalties for being caught cheating will be severe. Whether the cheater is banned from all future events or not, nobody will want to support them, nobody will want to associate with them, and they will essentially be cast out of the entire chess world.
There was a video game speedrun cheating incident where the cheater was caught splicing. But their splices were perfect. No audio artifacts, no video artifacts, for a long time no evidence at all because the cheater perfectly conformed to all known cheat detection.
Then one day it was discovered that the loading animation was dependent on a frame counter that persisted across all game states. If the run wasn't spliced, the loading animation's current sprite should have matched a perfectly predictable pattern.
It didn't. But this counter/consistency wasn't discovered until much after the run was achieved, so the cheater had no way of avoiding detection.
This is basically what happened with Hans. Hans knew all the traditional methods for detecting chess cheating successfully evaded them.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-30/chess-cheating-expert...
but new techniques for cheat detection were developed in direct response to accusations against Hans, and Hans had not perfectly emulated a prodigy human with his cheating. He did things that only an assisted player would be capable of.
They have been selectively releasing information about him and his one time coach for a few weeks now. While in the past they have never, not once, released any of their cheating information. Why now?
If they dont release the report they are talking about then this article is nothing.
Even now, they haven't released this publicly yet.
> “I cheated on random games on Chess.com. I was confronted. I confessed. And this is the single biggest mistake of my life. And I am completely ashamed. I am telling the world because I don’t want misrepresentations and I don’t want rumours. I have never cheated in an over-the-board game. And other than when I was 12 years old I have never cheated in a tournament with prize money.”
This report identifies 3 separate tournaments with prize money in 2020 alone (2 SCC Grand Prix, and the Pro Chess League) that he appears to have cheated in, blatantly contradicting what he previously said.
50 year olds may be set in their ways because they don't see any need to change and what they've got going works for them, but you can change at any age.
Everybody ages in a monotonic way. :-)
As for the difference between a 16-year-old and 19 not being big, that probably just depends. At 19, I was absolutely mortified at things I did in high school.
This is a super on-point and sharp critique based on the assertion that Michael Jordan's first retirement from the NBA to go play Minor League baseball was an under-the-table suspension for gambling on NBA games (dude has a legit problem) while playing in the NBA Championships. This happened right after a three-peat (3 Championships in a row).
And in one fell marketing miracle, the status quo and marketability of both the NBA and Michael Jordan was protected. One and a half years later, MJ "un-retired" to light up the league for another 3 straight championships.
Honestly, it does seem next to impossible to stop a dedicated cheater if any feedback makes it out of the room in a reasonable amount of time.
It makes sense to show the relevant part of their upcoming case and who knows what kind of agreement they had with Dlugy and with lawyers before deciding to reveal that snippet.
Like in poker. Just because they showed one card, doesn't mean they are now obligated to show their hand.
I'd argue that an online tournament is bogus if anybody can cheat by using a computer.
They may be able to detect consistent cheating over many games, but still, one can assume that cheating is pervasive in online platforms.
Screenshots are easy enough to fake perfectly that if I didn't trust a party to give an honest summary of the discussion and (as in the current stake) thousands of dollars or more is at stake, then I wouldn't trust screenshots either.
Also, he allegedly cheated for money at 12yo. Yeah, right, that's definitely a grave unforgivable sin that should ruin his whole career. /s
For him, that was 2 years ago.
I don’t care one way or the other, but I’d assume the worst.
But Niemann is a proven cheater. He admitted to it himself.
The only thing up for debate is how much he’s cheated.
But once something is leaked to the WSJ, people believe it and downvote based on "authority". Which is why the leak occurred just before the US championships for maximum impact.
How true is that at the top levels of play?
What do you think the success rate is for online players telling an engine from a human? 1% 99%
1. He admitted to cheating twice, so it's not a question of an innocent man being punished by mistake.
2. As noted already, it's not a game, it's a professional sport that people at his level make their living doing, and every cheater in this scenario is stealing money from someone who has earned it.
You're right that that's not "basically done," but once they're retired, HoF is all they have to look forward to. Being officially in disgrace is pretty done.
You might want to remove Schilling from your list, btw. He hasn't been accused of any cheating; instead, he did other embarrassing things.
If you're not someone who'd be considered HoF material anyway, then the consequences are probably manageable.
He may have to take a long break.
What's your opinion of the National Sex Offender Registry?
People are on it for simply peeing in public. And teenage minors in a relationship sending nudes to each other due to a lack of "Romeo and Juliet" laws.
Not much is black & white.
Not to take away from the point you are making, but this is simply not a good example of an uncontroversial case of scarlet lettering.
What we are talking about here is a minor who admitted to using a chess engine in a meaningless online match 2 times. Like all the grandmasters don't play with chess engines just to see how they work.
12 is horrible if you have a track record of blatant cheating and only getting worse for years till they permanently banned you.
Knew another guy who did a few years in prison for "just a bag of weed", again that was true in a technical sense, he was on parole for a strong arm robbery and had the bag in plain view when he got pulled over.
I'm not saying nobody is ever innocent, but everyone I talk to claims to be and it never holds up.
When chatting with a customer support it's quite apparent the csr is involved in many chats at once; wouldn't it be quite taxing for them to have to monitor not just the responses but every keystroke of the people they interact with?
also probably because people who commit murders and do the time are not always in a permanent urge to do more of that, unlike.
Also, Hans (initially) didn't want chess.com to be able to publish the communications, so he might've avoided using gmail in favor of some method that is guaranteed not to leave a verifiable record.
If you are going to be snarky, at least be correct.
In middling ratings, if I was allowed to look at the engine (in a Lichess replay for instance) I'd guess I can tell a player using the engine with 99+% accuracy. People _always_ lose on tactics (or misplayed opening lines, misplayed endgames, etc). Engines never do. At high ratings I assume this goes down, especially if the players are playing 'boring' draw-ish lines, in which the best moves are fairly obvious most of the time.
Also, I don't know why alleged cheating when playing on some site should affect OTB tournament games. They are even governed by different bodies! Just have really thorough anti-cheating measures in place, and see how strong he plays.
The report includes strong evidence he was recently and repeatedly cheating in games for prize money which shows a serious lack of ethics.
Anyway, I don’t see any significant difference in OTB vs online cheating. It’s at most slightly easier to cheat online, but the OTB prize pools are significant.
This statement is so far removed from reality that I am not sure that it would be productive to continue the discussion.
The hard part of cheating isn’t inputting and receiving moves, and in fact documented chess cheating goes back to the late 1800’s.
Please, tell us how exactly did Niemann cheat in that OTB game with Carlsen, and circumvented the measures taken by the tournament organizers?
these are things I’ve noticed without any experience of autorepair beyond “here’s how internal combustion engines work”
See what I mean? It's a bar that most people don't cross.
also knowing how an internal combustion engine works is not equivalent to knowing that html code goes in angle braces. it’s more equivalent to knowing that you need to use a certain type of wrench when working on a certain type of car (I don’t know if this is actually true because I don’t know how to fix cars, but it’s more equivalent)
Agreed, and I would guess that is the extent of what people do with that observation. They see it, and have no clue why or how or what that means. Is it only certain browsers that do it, or does it depend on if it's a phone or laptop? Maybe it's a AT&T service feature on phones now? Or maybe just iPhones do it. Maybe it's only on previously visited sites? Or maybe it's a virus or a scam of some sort.
People with no frame of reference see things very differently. It's a magic box.
In general I feel that if enough people are doing the "wrong" thing, then punishing most of the population is probably an even worse move. Failing individuals, marking their transcript, or kicking them out of college may seem acceptable when you have the perspective that only individuals cheat. But when you hypothetically punish over half the student body by taking their money and kicking them out...
In a collage setting having a high number of cheaters reduces the value of a degree as people get used to graduates being incompetent. That also hurts non cheaters.
Why?
The opposite also applies though, if you have a large amount of cheaters in each graduating cohort you devalue the degrees and trash the reputation of the institution. Which hurts all of the students, including the cheaters.
I always wonder what the expected value on this strategy is. I'm a naive sucker, so I have worked my ass off at my job, and I have had 250% salary growth in 5 years at it. Maybe that's standard if you're job hopping. Do you ever get raises? Do these jobs actually pay over 33% of the best job you could get? Would it be more stressful to juggle this kind of thing than the level of stress at a normal job you're invested in?
I applaud you but can never tell if I should join you...
I earn 300K CAD between the jobs plus a pension. Let's call it 230K USD. I have three years of experience. I live in a low cost city in Canada as all my jobs are remote. I suppose it depends on whether you view this as a pro or a con, but my earnings are virtually all cash (some 20K in stock in total), so I am not taking a beating with the current markets. I work about 5-6 hours a day, mostly by being willing to volunteer for stuff that others hate or consider useless careerwise internally (I will happily be the support dev for example, despite that meaning I show far fewer achievements come review time).
Being support dev (monitor Sentry and resolve all the bugs) works because I never join teams with core production responsibilities, so support is never urgent. Say that you are with Netflix. You want to be on the analytics team, not the streaming team. But other devs still hate it, so nobody will question taking a day to answer a question as everyone else doesn't even want to think about it. I went to the extreme and stretched out a config issue for three weeks. My manager and the other members of my team wrote me letters of praise and the skip manager had a meeting to praise me over handling it. Niche knowledge can be quite powerful. Debugging is also a skill in itself. I have also survived several layoffs, so plenty of opportunities to get rid of me.
Pick your teams very strategically. The equivalent of the streaming team at my Job 1 has a horrendous work schedule and 3AM on-call. I have never worked a job with on-call.
Also, choose to work on tools for work, a.k.a things that nobody will complain about over the weekend.
> Do you ever get raises?
I don't generally stick around at any org long enough to get raises, as the job hops have led to huge increases. I was earning 65K two years ago and that was two jobs ago. But I am told that I will be getting at least 8% this year at Job 1. Job 2 has a union ratchet, so performance hardly matters. Job 3, probably not, as they are stingy in every other way (but you can disappear for days and have it not be a big deal).
I personally view raises as kind of a scam. Another dev on one of my teams is brilliant and highly productive, far more so than I am. She didn't get a raise with her promo. I am getting a raise for existing at Job 1. Be friendly, be funny, and you can get away with a lot.
> Do these jobs actually pay over 33% of the best job you could get?
Given the sacrifices I am willing/unwilling to make, yes. If I were willing to make other sacrifices like relocating or working harder, no. I also cannot leetcode that well. If you work for Google, you are beating this strategy.
> Would it be more stressful to juggle this kind of thing than the level of stress at a normal job you're invested in?
I find it less stressful as you just stop caring about all the little games. You stop caring about whether your standup report is meaningful or shows sufficient work. You stop caring about showing initiative. You stop caring about going the extra mile, or about leaving a bug unfixed over the weekend. You find yourself awash in so much cash that losing your job for years wouldn't matter. You don't worry about delivering, as deadlines are meaningless.
Obviously don't blow high profile things, but as long as you deliver the bigger noticeable stuff to a decent standard (and bugs are one area to do that), all is well.
At least in my case, I can coast to retirement within a year and will have a fully paid off upper middle class house before I am 30. That is also a huge stress reliever, as (contingent on responsible spending and prudent investing) I only need to keep up the high salary for 4-5 years.
I work one job, make a bit more but not a lot, have house and boat payments, and bank most of the rest. Just started collecting SS. I could retire, but with the uncertain US economy, I'm looking to go part-time, or work remote instead. Remote would give me back the ~10hrs/wk of commute time to do other things. But virtually no chance of going remote without a job change.
I had an AWS interview which looked great, sounded great, nice increase, and was mostly remote. I aced the pre-interview(he told me so), thought I aced the interview (8rs over 2 days), but was "not selected", and "no specific feedback". Since, they've invited me to interview for several other positions. I've ignored them as 1) large expenditure of time and energy to prep and perform in the interview, and 2) I think there may have been some age "consideration" on their part. Not sure I'd want to stay long enough to be fully vested in the stock compensation. I can play that from the outside.
Is there any point in suing when there’s no damages?
Do you earn more from the three jobs than one job "honestly"? Perhaps ... but then it becomes complicated because I suspect you have to maintain three lots of "reality" to deal with each employer. Now it may be that you have managed full on parasite and are able to live with that and prosper. I'd keep an eye out over my shoulder if I was you.
Sociopathic behaviour can work for a while, quite a long while but eventually society might lose more than it can afford to easily lose and looks for scapegoats and then deals with it. Then you had better have some remarkable camouflage or discover the joys of summary justice.
You describe one unpleasant aspect of society that we all are aware of: the parasite. I'm warning you that society has fangs beyond the police and the law. We might call it natural justice or whatever but please do not fall afoul of it.
There is of course way more to your story and my response but please do be careful.
Is this actually the case or it is apocryphal? A quick google tells me that thefts make up 47% of all total reported crimes in Saudia Arabia in 2002 [1]. That seems like the opposite of "aren't very many", especially when compared to Canada, whose number appear to be 28% in 2020 [2]. (Just the numbers I could find - I'm sure there's reporting issues at play here.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Saudi_Arabia#Theft
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Canada#Crime_statisti...