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Dear Chess World

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Re: Dear Chess World

#661

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #577
contravariant wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if letting the chess players be the arbiters of this is the best course of action though.

Nobody is claiming they should be. FIDE isn’t banning Hans based on Magnus’s vague suspicions, as indeed they shouldn’t. Magnus is just refusing to invest time and energy (and rating points) to play against someone he doesn’t like, which is absolutely his right. Nobody has the right to force Magnus or anyone else to play against them.

I think you might want to read the rules of chess tournaments. You will quickly realise that in fact Magnus doesn’t have a choice of who he plays against and can’t actually resign for no reason.

Re: Dear Chess World

#662

Post by pseudo0 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #550
nonethewiser wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (or Niemann, if concrete evidence against him emerges) This window seems closed though. Carlsen seems to have no evidence. Where else could the evidence come from? All we have is character attacks. Even if justified, they can't prove that he cheated. All we know for sure is that Carlsen accused him of cheating with no evidence.

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,…

Usain Bolt is another interesting case. Commentators have made a pretty compelling case based on the circumstantial evidence that he was doping, but due to weaknesses in Jamaica's anti-doping program it's likely impossible to prove one way or the other.

https://tomnew.medium.com/usain-bolt-lance-armstrong-and-the...

Re: Dear Chess World

#663

Post by TakeBlaster16 »

flyax wrote: post #600
epolanski wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hans is known to have cheated, his coach is known to have cheated, add low security in the event, Hans beating Magnus (a player two tiers above him) on black pieces (Magnus has lost only 15 games against black in an entire world champion career) and Hans acting suspicious during the game and here we are.

chess.com suggests Hans cheated more than he admits. He did (much?) better in tournaments with zero delay. In a few consecutive tournaments, he made a lot of top engine moves, slightly above Magnus/Kasparov/Fisher at their best. He had a hard time explaining his lines in the interview after the game (with Firouzja I think).

Let the chess speak for itself... because I sure can't explain it!

Re: Dear Chess World

#664

Post by tehnub »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #81
MauranKilom wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasons Carlsen gives for being suspicious are not "the moves played were unusual" but about Niemann's behavior surrounding them.

When Robert Fischer achieved an unprecedented scores in the pretenders matches prior to winning the champion title, I believe that the biggest factor was not the quality of the play of Fischer, but the way he mentally unbalanced and broke his opponents, who absolutely did not give a performance they were capable of.

The unnerving, unbalancing effect Fischer had in the 1971 Candidate's tournament was absolutely due to his play. He put up immense resistance against lines prepared by teams of Soviet GMs (example here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8-90cPf61M), which was the sort of thing that broke their nerve. He was not intimidating or manipulating his opponents outside of the board; if there were any outside-chess forces at play, it was the pressure from Soviet higher-ups embarrassed to lose to a lone American. Also, I don't recall that his opponents played worse than they would have been expected to against an opponent so much stronger than them — maybe after their fifth loss in a six game match, they'd become demoralized.

This is nothing like the Carlsen-Niemann case.

Re: Dear Chess World

#665

Post by School-Cotton »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #661
School-Cotton wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is claiming they should be. FIDE isn’t banning Hans based on Magnus’s vague suspicions, as indeed they shouldn’t. Magnus is just refusing to invest time and energy (and rating points) to play against someone he doesn’t like, which is absolutely his right. Nobody has the right to force Magnus or anyone else to play against them.

I think you might want to read the rules of chess tournaments. You will quickly realise that in fact Magnus doesn’t have a choice of who he plays against and can’t actually resign for no reason.

I agree with you, and I think throwing the game against Hans was poor form. My point was just that he has the right not to enter future tournaments to which Hans is invited.

Re: Dear Chess World

#666

Post by [deleted] »

maegul wrote: post #659
noncoml wrote: post #524

Here is a crazy idea. If you get caught cheating, even once, you should be banned for life. Otherwise we end up in a lose-lose situation. It’s almost impossible for Magnus to prove Niemann cheated on that game. It’s impossible for Niemann to prove he didn’t cheat. But shouldn’t matter. He was caught cheating before, he shouldn’t have been allowed to compete again. I don’t remember Ben Johnson or Lance Armstrong getti…

Fair. However Hans's defence was that 1) he'd never cheated in professional contexts and 2) he was young and stupid. These seem like fair qualifications to your proposition.

[deleted]

Re: Dear Chess World

#667

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

bombcar wrote: post #525
dorkwood wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was younger, I spent many, many hours playing one particular video game. I became a “known cheater” at the game, despite never actually cheating (I’d cheated at other games in my early teens, but had since given up that lifestyle). I can recall several players on discussion boards analysing my statistics and explaining how I was clearly cheating because it was impossible for a human to play like me. Humans, th…

I saw something about a runner being disqualified because they moved 9 hundredths of a second after the gun. Ten hundredths is permitted but nine is not. It’s not impossible to believe someone could be just a sliver faster.

Ten hundredth is what’s impossible plus a generous safety margin. If you are under it’s definitely a false start. If you are just over, it was most likely a false start but you were lucky this time.

Re: Dear Chess World

#668

Post by Consultant32452 »

walrus01 wrote: post #442
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, clever cheating devices have been found in over the board chess competitions The most convincing candidate for such a device I've seen is an Illuminati Thumper Pro hidden in Hans's shoe: https://illuminati-magic.com/products/thumper . If you watch the footage of him getting scanned before his match with Alireza (and, crucially, before Magnus announced he was dropping), there are a couple of subtle things that…

You don't need something that transmits if you're searching for bug-like devices or any general integrated circuits with a nonlinear junction detector: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_junction_detector I am very far removed from anything related to Chess, but if they want to get serious about this they should hire people who specialize in the federal-contracting adjacent field of TSCM (technical surveillance…

No post body was provided.

Re: Dear Chess World

#669

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #174

Magnus isn't trying to be judge, jury and executioner by refusing to play Hans. He has stated before that merely having suspicions (e.g. based on past cheating as in Niemann's case) about your opponent possibly cheating completely ruins one's mentality during a game. He simply wants to avoid going through that, which imo is understandable.

> Magnus isn't trying to be judge, jury and executioner by refusing to play Hans.

Yes, he most definitely is and the rest of your comment doesn’t disprove that in any way.

Magnus isn’t trying to be judge, jury and executioner. He has just decided that the guy is irrevocably a cheater and as a sentence he will never play a game against him again.

Re: Dear Chess World

#670

Post by goatlover »

boole1854 wrote: post #367
usgroup wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well she shows 6+ games where he has 100% correlation with the engine. What are the chances?

Yes, that's the question that I wish she had tried to answer. What are the chances? Without checking for that pattern by other 2600+ GMs, we don't know the answer.

Hikaru, who ranges from high 2700s to 2800s, said only one of his games is at 100%, which was his best game. Hans having multiple 100% is suspicious.
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