If he really is so good, why doesn't he start doing IRL tournaments and rise through the ranks that way?
Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times
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Re: Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times
#112Interesting piece. It highlights how it's hard to differentiate between someone genuinely playing at a level higher, and a cheater. A few things I noted from this article: 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 hist…
FIDE are doing their own investigation, but the chess.com cheat detection algorithm is apparently well regarded, and online cheating is obviously very simple to do. He's admitted cheating online as recently as 3 years ago. If he can reasonably be proved to having cheated online more often and more recently than he has admitted to, then that gives good reason to suspect he'll have cheated OTB too given the chance.
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.
Re: Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might work if there are no spectators live in person. Otherwise you can easily have someone in person relaying the information to a computer, or you have to search everyone, not just the players.
If it happened, I don't think it happened realtime. 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.
That specific scenario is just considered normal good prep - they will even play games against people who "play" their opponent's openings. That's all well known but you can't memorize enough to make a major difference.
Re: Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times
#114The fact that an athlete in a competitive sport was allowed to partake in an event even after admitting to cheating not only once, but twice, is outrageous in itself.
when they were 12.
Re: Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times
#115The fact that an athlete in a competitive sport was allowed to partake in an event even after admitting to cheating not only once, but twice, is outrageous in itself.
There are a few competitive sports where the same pattern occurs. Namely decentralized sports, particularly boxing where it's not rare for some elite athlete to be banned temporarily after testing positive for PEDs. Most bans are for 6-12 months which is a joke. 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 decentral…
> Most bans are for 6-12 months which is a joke.
An athlete's professional career is roughly ten years* with the majority of their earning potential to be an even smaller set of those years. A ban from being paid for 12 months may represent 10% or more of an athlete's career earning potential.
*Of course this varies a lot by sport, gymnastics careers are obviously very short, a golfer's career may be much longer.
Re: Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
The move was pretty obvious.
Then why does Carlsen ask "how?" before playing it? This is a conversation that would never have happened in an OTB tournament.
Likely, because he was thinking of something else. It happens often when playing weaker opponents, you are so concentrated on some genius master plan to defeat an opponent, that when an opponent does something dumb you fail to see it immediately. Of course, my lichess rating is slightly below Carlsen's so I'm probably not the world's best expert on such things.
(I don't quite understand what you mean by 'those conversation would never have happened .. ')
Re: Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
The admissions were from when he was 12 and 16; many so societies generally believe in redemption from childhood transgressions.
12 is fine... 16 is iffy... it was only 3 years ago. 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).
neither ages make him exempt from repercussions. If a 9yo pro chess prodigy had cheated in a profession tournament he absolutely should of gotten temporary bans or fines. But even if a 60 yo chess prodigy used a chess engine in one online stakless match, other than a week chess.com ban I do nto see what sort of punishment would want to give them that would be reasonable.
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.
Re: Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times
#118The next 'move' for cheaters is to use chess computers in a way that passes 'Chess Turing Test' and makes cheating indistinguishable from normal human play under analysis. 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 alr…
Cheat detection isn't done by only by move analysis, but by an extensive profiling of a person and games based on many factors beyond even just the moves. For instance one of the easiest ways to catch a weak player cheating is move times. Such a player will have no idea whether a move is trivial or works only due to an exceptionally precise and lengthy series of counter-intuitive calculations that no human could do w…
> For instance one of the easiest ways to catch a weak player cheating is move times. Such a player will have no idea whether a move is trivial or works only due to an exceptionally precise and lengthy series of counter-intuitive calculations that no human could do without a significant think
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.
Re: Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times
#119Why don't cheaters just use two machines or even just their phone and a laptop? The evidence is often around other processes or browser tabs running on their device (and in this case also focus loss) but an immediate thought must be to simply use multiple devices.
You mostly read about cheaters who get caught.
Yeah, I think fail to consider survivor bias to be relevant in cases like this.
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.