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The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

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Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#61

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

maegul wrote: post #14
bombcar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect something like “everyone cheats online” is kind of what we have here, and they’re a bit worried about upsetting the whole applecart.

Which gets to my point about the bias of chess.com. Surely they have an interest in making this look like one awful offender, a bad apple essentially, and not that they’re profits come from a broken sport.

For anyone unaware, chess.com recently bought out the Play Magnus Group for about $80 million. They most definitely are not a neutral party in this financially. I personally interpret this sort of situation as creating an additional burden to acknowledge and demonstrate the conflict of interest isn't a material factor.

I don't know if Hans cheated beyond his admissions. Online seems plausible if not likely to me. OTB seems much less plausible. But this report being leaked to the WSJ, then goes up on the blog, immediately ahead of Neiman's next big event? That definitely an intentional PR campaign, and that comes across as scummy to me. I'd say doubly scummy consider the report itself establishes how prevalent cheating on chess.com is among GMs, yet nothing like this sort of public disclosure has happened in other cases. It's hard to interpret this as anything but selective enforcement based on Carlson's reaction to a specific player and game.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#62

Post by matai_kolila »

maegul wrote: post #5

So page 9 from the last paragraph is interesting. Chess.com basically indicate that apart from Hans, a number of highly rated players (including higher than Hans) have been caught and admitted to cheating. I haven't gone over the report thoroughly, but it's clearly focused on Hans's conduct and not so much on the state of play regarding online cheating, which is, even by Magnus's statement, the chief focus of all of…

Rampant online cheating? Hm:

> At the outset, we want to make clear that while these events highlight a critical topic in chess—cheating the vast majority of chess games do not involve any cheating. We estimate that fewer than 0.14% of players on Chess.com ever cheat, and that our events are by and large free from cheating. We firmly believe that cheating in chess is rare, preventable, and much less pervasive than is currently being portrayed in the media

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#64

Post by LgWoodenBadger »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #42
crystaln wrote: post #20

Seems to be happening in the poker world as well. https://twitter.com/dexerto/status/1575867098328289280

For anyone not following this I'll save you some time with the TL;DR: Hustler Casino livestreams a regular game with High Stakes Poker. A new player who is also a wealthy model wife type made a call against a pro that sucked out where her decision making was baffling. Off camera but on mic the pro demanded his money back. Then it blew up into a giant drama of accused cheating. Here's my read on what happened: this wo…

From personal experience, there’s nothing “good” poker players hate more than losing to a “bad” poker player who “shouldn’t have even been in the band.”

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#65

Post by a-dub »

jfghi wrote: post #55
a-dub wrote: post #24

doing the statistical analysis and all is pretty cool, but honestly, can't they just challenge him to play at his rating in a secure environment? his learning curve is a little steeper than the others... that doesn't convince me the otb games were fraudulent.

That would be interesting. Have a chess bunker somewhere with 100s of games against a variety of opponents. I think at first there would be some nerves but over time the statistics would become clear. Perhaps there could be a 10 game burn-in.

i don't know how chess ratings work, but i suspect it could be done with a secured and monitored computer in a secure facility where some small number of games could produce a rating with decent confidence interval on it?

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#66

Post by bsder »

lysp wrote: post #19

> The conventional wisdom is that if you are not a GM by age 14, it is unlikely that you can reach the top levels of chess. > While that statement may seem discouraging, it has been borne out in modern chess. > Greats like Fischer, Kasparov, Carlsen, and almost all of the modern GMs who have been established as top five players, were notable GMs by age 15 at the latest Wow.

> > The conventional wisdom is that if you are not a GM by age 14, it is unlikely that you can reach the top levels of chess.

This is confusing correlation and causation.

One thing that people don't realize is the sheer amount of money required to become a "GM". You have to get a certain number of "norms" from FIDE and the requirements list is a PITA: https://chessgoals.com/how-to-get-a-grandmaster-norm/

If you don't have a lot of money and a lot of free time to go to a lot of chess tournaments around the world, you are not getting a "GM" title in this day and age. This favors children (few time constraints) with rich parents (lots of coaching along with the ability to travel).

The problem is that if you aren't a "chess prodigy" by 15 it generally isn't worth continuing to pursue--what does sinking the resources into being a "GM" get you at the end? If you're one of the "Chess Gods", you have entry into the tournaments anyway, and, if you're not, it doesn't really matter.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#67

Post by hirundo » 

  The best humans play at an Elo rating of 2800. “Stockfish,” the most powerful chess engine, has an estimated rating of more than 3500.
This may be the most terrifying statement I've read all year. From parity to ovewhelming dominance in two decades. And it may just be approaching the base of the S curve. I for one welcome ...

There used to be this fantasy that the best player would be a human augmented by a computer, optimally blending their respective gifts into the best moves. Ha. Nowadays it would be like a baby in a crib helping a heavyweight champ.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#68

Post by chucksmash »

paxys wrote: post #7
maegul wrote: post #5

So page 9 from the last paragraph is interesting. Chess.com basically indicate that apart from Hans, a number of highly rated players (including higher than Hans) have been caught and admitted to cheating. I haven't gone over the report thoroughly, but it's clearly focused on Hans's conduct and not so much on the state of play regarding online cheating, which is, even by Magnus's statement, the chief focus of all of…

Yup that part stood out to me as well. There are dozens of "Anonymous Confessed GM"s on the cheating list, most of them with a rating much higher than Neimann's. And this doesn't even mention the players who are flagged by their algorithm but haven't admitted their guilt. Given the very high ELO range of the offenders (2600-2700), it's clear that a lot of the most popular names in chess are involved. Why not name all…

I wouldn't take this to mean that everybody cheats, or everybody at the top cheats, as a sibling comment has stated. Wikipedia cites the number of grandmasters as "almost 2000" so even 100 GM cheaters is still a small amount (modulo the ones no longer living I guess, who likely are not playing on chess.com). Elsewhere in the report chess.com gives a figure for number of players they believe have cheated on the site from total player base of 0.14%.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#69

Post by hibikir »

gbear605 wrote: post #41
msbarnett wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

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.

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.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#70

Post by erdevs »

berkut wrote: post #37
erdevs wrote: post #27

This report provides a detailed background of Hans' potential cheating, and detailed breakdowns of certain aspects of chess.com's cheat-detection methodology, including previously unknown (or little known) methods such as window focus change event monitoring and post-focus-change move analysis.[1] The report also reveals Niemann's engine move correlations alongside over two dozen chess Grandmasters who have admitted…

Does engine correlation actually prove anything though? Some of the 'statistical analysis' that has been posted on twitter regarding it in the last week has been against hundreds of engines, so 'engine correlation' seems to mean "the move made matched against at least one engine that would have made that move" I think?

I don't think engine correlation necessarily proves anything, on its own. It's worth remembering, though, that chess.com's report a) presents more than merely raw engine correlation, and b) its correlations do not seem to match against hundreds of engines.

But even with all the evidence presented, "proof" is a tricky thing. To what standard would we be trying to prove a claim?

Does this report prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Niemann cheated? I'd say no, but others may disagree.

How about to a preponderance of evidence? Perhaps. But even that is hard to say when no one has yet presented a rigorous defense or set of counterpoints.

In any case, my post wasn't meant to say that Niemann cheated per se. I have no idea, and chess.com themselves may not be able to actually prove whether he did. But I found the report interesting, even beyond the current issue surrounding Niemann and speaking to potential cheating in high-level chess more broadly, and if you re-read my post, I tried not to state anything definitive about whether Hans actually cheated or not.

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