I hope you revise your policy of keeping all known instances of cheating amongst titled players on chess.com private. Further, as part of this report also reveal who the other professional players who confessed to cheating are.
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 report was great, and answers a lot of questions everyone had. I'm especially glad to see you applied your tools to OTB games.
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!
If the rate of increase is highly unusual, then the rate itself is the relevant datum, and the interval over which it occurred is not being cherry-picked, even though it may appear to be. In other activities, more than one cheater has been caught out by presenting data that contains a brief period which was physically impossible, and the fact that the averaged data had no such problem did not, of course, make the concern go away.
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.
I'd be curious to know about the cheating rate on chess.com. I'd expect at lot of people to cheat occasionally, e.g. kids with too much time on their hand, people trying to "fix" their ranking, or getting a bit of help when they play against their friend and so on...
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.
Since chess.com ranks similar players against each other, and I'm not planning on tournament play at all, I actually wouldn't care in the slightest if I played someone who was consistently cheating. That would mean I'm playing a hybrid human/computer instead of a pure human, but I'd still be playing someone with a consistent ranking and it would still in some sense be a fair fight.
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.
This is actually what lichess does - if it flags you as a cheater, you are silently paired against other cheaters.
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.
I think it is an interesting question. Aside from consent, playing against an anonymous cheater is indistinguishable from playing against a better player. Presumably people are elo matched so it should not matter
It is definitely not indistinguishable, both because "someone with this rating shouldn't be winning like this" and because engine moves look very different than human moves, especially at lower ratings.
At top levels it gets closer -- often human play is compared to engine play and people will discuss which moves were 'engine-like' vs 'human', and a significant achievement would be to play the engine moves on every turn. Although it should be said that engine moves are not always necessarily the best moves positionally, nor the moves with the highest win % versus a human (because you can 'trick' a human, whereas the engine can't trick itself so it will never prefer a move like that)... but they are always the best moves tactically.
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.
Thanks for breaking down how this would actually work in practice. As an amateur player, I don't think I personally would be able to tell the difference between playing a much better player and a good bot, or a bad player and a bad bot.
Cause they shared Dlugy's private emails last week? Cause they leaked this report to the WSJ before putting it on their site? Cause Rensch worded the non-denial denial specifically like that?
Like I had mentioned previously, why would they reveal their entire hand?
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.
Yes if there are legal avenues this takes it will involve Dlugy and the Chess Max Academy. The problem is unless there is a caught in the act smoking gun it's all lot of statistics and inuendio that's very hard for anyone to prove in either direction. I'd feel more comfortable if Chess.com ran the exact same report they are releasing now on 50 other top players to see how close to a hundred anomalies they get. Still its a fascinating story with deep implications far beyond the world of chess.
Be brave, be honest to yourself and stop this trush talkings!!! Everybody know that i am very good blitz player, i can win anyone in the world in single game!
Regium spent a total of $2,000 on ads with Chess.com before it was discovered. We have earmarked that money for later this year to be given away to a charity of choice by the winner of the “Best Swindle” prize. More details coming later this year. But again, it wasn’t that much money, and we aren’t keeping it. :)
- Chess.com
Are you able to identify who these people actually are, based on the payment details for the ads? It just seems amazing to me they can get away with nothing more than a Kickstarter ban.
Hello HN! Erik from Chess.com here. Happy to answer any questions. If you are interested, when you are done reading the interview above, you can learn more about how we run our company here: https://www.chess.com/blog/erik/how-chess-com-s-100-person-v...
Keep in mind, this was a “Rapid” event with quicker than normal time controls. It was meant to be an exciting event for fans and to test the engines at quicker speeds that humans can both follow and enjoy. It certainly produced exciting games (in my opinion)!
