141–150 of 486 posts
One way to settle it: Grudge match... in an isolated room, fully naked, x-ray scans, in a Faraday cage, no coverage until the match is over.
At that point does it even have to be chess?
Given the massive volumes of chess data out there, I bet it would be easy to make a bot that mirrors the win/loss and blunder/best move ratio of an average GM chess player’s trajectory.
Instead of picking the best move all the time, maybe pick a random move out of the top 10 moves. And use a random number generator to determine if you make a blunder. And use an engine that’s appropriate to your current rating.
It looks like Hans might have been picking the best moves from the best engine in those games where he got 100% accuracy, which is a dead giveaway.
If you’re patient enough to sit through hours of slowly progressing your rating through a few wins, lots of draws a few losses, I bet you could do it undetected. And don’t give any interviews!
Hans probably didn’t think about the trail of data he was leaving, or got greedy.
Seems to be happening in the poker world as well. https://twitter.com/dexerto/status/1575867098328289280
If you know they are going to bluff if they miss, it's very profitable and also maddeningly tilt inducing.
I once called $5k cold on the river and won with J high and several over cards on the board in what ended up a $15k+ pot.
Her move esp by a somewhat amateur player is not that outlandish.
I think the thing I'd like to have clarified: Why does chess.com care about the results of an OTB game? I can understand their online tournaments being something they care about and why they might rescind an invitation based on these allegations but there's something very strange about them taking it upon themselves to ban him from the platform as a result of his play against someone whose company they're in the proc…
They run money tournaments and hope to have top GMs join and advertise their service by playing, streaming, and commentating the tournaments. You really don't see why they would prefer not to have an OTB cheat invited to these events?
Not to say that Hans has been proven to be a cheat, but it does explain why they have to care about cheating in any event, anywhere.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
So that story seems reasonable, but at the same time she is a winning player in these games. I know, two sessions has enormous variance, but still the kind of people doing that mistake should not be a winning player in their first two sessions.
She destroyed everyone that day. It wasn't because she was a stronger player in terms of her rationale behind each decision. It happens. You really can't conclude jack from 2 sessions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could have chosen to ban him for life when they caught him cheating. I would have no sympathy for him in that case. But the document paints a different picture. He cheated, and they agreed to re-enable his account if he promised to not cheat again. According to chess.com he kept his promise. So why the sudden new ban? I would agree with you that the initial cheating was enough for lifetime ban. But chess.com dec…
Don't expect an honest report from chess.com, think about how that conversation would go in the event he _was_ cheating and they caught him: Public: "So he's been cheating recently?" Chess.com: "Oh yeah, he cheats all the time. Everyone does, really. Online chess is like 50% cheaters/bots, don't expect any real humans here, this is like 10x worse than Twitter."
“Our investigation has revealed that while there has been some noteworthy online play that has caught our attention as suspicious since August 2020, we are unaware of any evidence that Hans has engaged in online cheating since then.” So he was re-banned for absolutely no reason. He kept his side of the deal, i.e. not cheat again on chess.com platform. Chess.com didn’t keep theirs.
Either way, chess.com kept their side of the deal, their side of the deal was "and we can ban you at any time in the future for any reason or even no reason whatsoever". Frankly that strikes me as a very fair term in a deal for reinstating a admitted cheaters access to your tournaments with large cash prizes...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The exception the proves the rule?
One of the stupidest phrases vert. Almost by definition the exception disproves the rule. There’s literally no logical sense in which the exception can prove the rule unless the rule is not really a rule but more of a suggestion.
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…
> 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…
> 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.