Carlsen resigns on move 2

[JustinHorton]

That's one of the areas where people are going to need to be very careful going forward with the interface between online and OTB. It was easy to look at the population statistics for 4NCL online (the paper I linked above) and see that they're entirely abnormal and that some people were definitely cheating.

Pinning down individuals to the sort of level of 'beyond reasonable doubt' that you'd want for serious naming, OTB bans etc is much harder. I would strongly suspect that the 4NCL etc were DQ'ing people using rather more lenient criteria, which is entirely fine/sensible from their perspective, but you do have to accept that nothing was proven against anyone.

It's one thing having photographic evidence of a guy using the chess program on his mobile phone. It's quite another having to rely on the word of a private organisation, their confidential data, and a system which they are not going to explain in public.

[Matt Mackenzie]

One point I don't understand is why quite a few people seem to think cheating online is less serious than OTB. Cheating is cheating....

In a moral sense this is, of course, absolutely correct.

But practically speaking, it is both easier to cheat in online chess - which in itself, surely increases the temptation to do so - and generally speaking (and the emphasis is very much on *generally* here) it is still a branch of the game regarded less "seriously" than OTB (especially "classical") play.

[JustinHorton]

Chess24 report including this sentence.

“Anything that happens in this conversation will remain confidential”, Chess.com wrote in the correspondence they include as "Exhibit C".

[Matt Bridgeman]

One point I don't understand is why quite a few people seem to think cheating online is less serious than OTB. Cheating is cheating....

In a moral sense this is, of course, absolutely correct.

But practically speaking, it is both easier to cheat in online chess - which in itself, surely increases the temptation to do so - and generally speaking (and the emphasis is very much on *generally* here) it is still a branch of the game regarded less "seriously" than OTB (especially "classical") play.

A number of the UK online events were longplays, the online 4NCL Congresses quickly shedded most of their titled players after it became obvious the cheats were multiplying like rats. The online team events thinned out over time too, although it took longer. With the online longplay events people were committing their whole weekends to play, or in the case of say the international junior team event the Glorney Cup, most of the evenings of a week. It’s not nothing when people with no moral compass start flicking on their engines to win games they shouldn’t be.

[Matt Mackenzie]

Never said it was "nothing", though I do take the point that quite a lot of online play is also quite serious.

[Mike Gunn]

On a side note, I wonder how long it will be before we hear about some sort of sanction for our home grown OTB cheat - the lad who came within a round of stealing the British Under 16 Championship at the beginning of August?

I asked what action would be taken when I was at the British and was told that the board would decide.

[Gerard Killoran]

I think this needs some explanation.

The chessdotcom report claims this:

Final H. Niemann Report.pdf 1.png

Final H. Niemann Report.pdf 2.png

But Benjamin Bok's own video...

https://youtu.be/DzqFHypAjdE?t=810

...shows that a lot more than six games played in the match with Niemann losing several of them. The report implies that Niemann cheated in every game of the match, when perhaps they found six games where he 'likely' cheated. Have they been cherry-picking data to reinforce their argument?

Bok takes the report at face value and then looks at the games which he thought showed Niemann to be 'pretty impressive'. Bok seems puzzled that there was nothing strange about them either at the time, or on second viewing. In the first, Niemann wins despite employing a 'dubious' sacrifice not recommeded by the engine, but is the sort of thing that pays off in a 3min game. In the second Bok praises 17. a4, which is the first move what any medium to strong player would look at with opposite side castling having taken place. By the end, Bok appears even more confused, having accepted the reports' accusations of 'likely cheating' but unable to identify which games they referred to.

Just this one line of the report raises questions about its accuracy and attention to detail. I'll take the rest of it with a pinch of salt.

(I shall now make this post 72 pages long by lots of adding irrelevant diagrams, one to a page)

[Geoff Chandler]

and remember I only have to do this once

No you don't, you're trying to put 100 on his Elo

Hi Justin,

You have selected a tiny part of the sentence I posted.

I have an idea that could actually work if one wanted to rig a W.C. final or any other high level tournament
where money was the prime target, the elo points gained would be an insignificant (to me anyway) bonus.
Instead of that a few of my words have have carefully selected so suddenly now I have
to get a player 100 elo points instead.

I posted that yes I could do it in a W.C. final. Before my post was butchered it read;

"With the security as it [is] and I wanted to get a signal to a player today playing in a WC final in a glass sound
proof cage and remember I only have to do this once to tell the player a good move is available.
No mention of 100 elo. (I've underlined what was used.)

It's unfair selecting bits of a sentence trying to sway the conversation away from the direction it was intended.
But never mind something much hotter has appeared. Leave it for now, sorry to interrupt.

[JustinHorton]

Hi Justin,

You have selected a tiny part of the sentence I posted.

Well yes, that's because it was part of a discussion about whether smart cheating over a period is possible, not one about whether a player could get away with it on one occasion. You then finessed a query about how "cued thrice" was going to happen into a reply to a question nobody was asking, but I took that as, ah, "trying to sway the conversation away from the direction it was intended".

(Not that you ever did come up with your hot one-off plan, mind, but given neither of us thinks Anand could put on 100 Elo points in a single game, both of us know it wasn't what we were talking about.)

[JustinHorton]

Rowson: the Chessdotcom report is "marketing".

[Mick Norris]

and again

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-63140246

It has reached the TV now, Outside Source are featuring it soon on the BBC News channel

[Paolo Casaschi]

Rowson: the Chessdotcom report is "marketing".

Agree with Rowson on many counts.
However I also question the effectiveness of the chess.com marketing effort: after all this, I'm less and less likely to spend with chess.com the money that every year I devote to my chess hobby. After all, chess.com being a private entity, the main option to show disappointment on their behaviour is not to do business with them.

[Paul Cooksey]

Rowson: the Chessdotcom report is "marketing".

Agree with Rowson on many counts.
However I also question the effectiveness of the chess.com marketing effort: after all this, I'm less and less likely to spend with chess.com the money that every year I devote to my chess hobby. After all, chess.com being a private entity, the main option to show disappointment on their behaviour is not to do business with them.

I understand this reaction, and I am disappointed in chess.com too. But on the other hand, they are a business not a governing body. It would not fair to judge them for not doing FIDE's job.

[Roland Kensdale]

Another report: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/ ... al-matches

Includes brief quotes from Rowson, Danny King and Nepo.

[Paolo Casaschi]

Rowson: the Chessdotcom report is "marketing".

Agree with Rowson on many counts.
However I also question the effectiveness of the chess.com marketing effort: after all this, I'm less and less likely to spend with chess.com the money that every year I devote to my chess hobby. After all, chess.com being a private entity, the main option to show disappointment on their behaviour is not to do business with them.

I understand this reaction, and I am disappointed in chess.com too. But on the other hand, they are a business not a governing body. It would not fair to judge them for not doing FIDE's job.

Not sure what you mean with “judge them for not doing FIDE’s job”.
What I find disappointing from chess.com is that they changed their assessment of Niemann’s history because of Carlsen claim about their OTB game. Chess.com claims they have the best cheat detection and prevention tools and yet they vetted Niemann for their upcoming event. Then Carlsen complains about their OTB game and only at that point chess.com looks back at games played in 2020 and disqualifies Niemann. Clearly they are fitting Carlsen opinion somehow in their cheating prevention tools and that seems wrong to me. Even from a commercial entity I expect them to treat every player/customer equally without any preferential treatment and without sharing more of their data with some than with the rest.