Certain British GMs are opinionated

Heck of a scalp!

@elroch you probably wont believe me but i am 99.9% sure i beat nigel short 11-1 in a famous match online on the icc in 2001, the one nigel thought he was playing bobby Fischer in.

i set up the handles guest71 and guest2563 in 2001 when my girlfriend set up a birthday surprise match on my 30th birthday against nigel short

Everybodys opinionated. 

You're right!

(The first bit).

are you familiar with the story i can explain everything about the bongcloud opening played and how I knew the fischer opponent if you dont know the story google it.

No he thinks it is wrong to have a trial by social media .

It is far from merely British GMs. Increasingly, top GMs are agreeing with Carlsen about Niemann's OTB play, many of them in public (and far more in private, reportedly).

One example is world ranked #2, GM Caruana, who has explained why Ken Regan should not be taken as a basis for belief that Niemann is innocent. Another is current world ranked #3 GM Nepomniachtchi.

I've watched several of those interviews and my impression is that Aronian, Caruana and Giri are just being diplomatic because they're good friends of Carlsen's. They all seem to agree that Carlsen may be convinced, but that they themselves haven't seen anything which would indicate OTB cheating on Niemann's part. While they all make references to his previously known online cheating, I don't get the impression that they think he's cheated in OTB chess – but that there will also be a cloud of suspicion hanging over Niemann.

What I find really striking about this though is that Fide's chief anti-cheating officer Dr Kenneth Regan has analyzed Niemann's OTB and online games over the past two years and he makes the very interesting point that not only is Niemann's games perfectly consistent with human play, it also appears that strong opponents losing to him generally seem to underperform in terms of the quality of their play (underestimation?), while Niemann's play is not characterized by overperformance. That's basically exactly what happened in Carlsen v Niemann at the Sinquefield Cup. Carlsen tried too hard and stepped over the line (28.g4 is a blunder) – something which the Norwegian has done before.

Then there are always people who say that they've been incorrectly warned/banned for cheating as a result of Regan's analysis/algorithm for analysis, and that means that it's unreliable. I would say it's the exact opposite: it just goes to show that it's perfectly possible to play games where many moves have a high engine match.

Another striking thing about all this is Chess dot com's role in all this. To my mind, they've behaved rather oddly, and I find the timeline of events surprising. At first they refused to either confirm or deny that Niemann had been banned for cheating (given the high-profile purported victim, a bit strange to my mind). However, this did not stop them from immediately closing Niemann's Chess dot com account after Carlsen withdrew. Then Niemann was interviewed by Ramirez, where he openly admitted to having cheated online in the past aged 12 and 16 and that he got banned for six months (note that with his account closed he couldn't accurately verify any dates or periods). Only then does Chess dot com issue a statement claiming that Niemann has actually cheated more than he has let on, but they're not publishing any logs or data to back up their claim. This to me is peculiar in the extreme – both that they just acted reactively and that they haven't elaborated further. Publishing such logs or data could help identify any potentially suspicious patterns in Niemann's OTB games.

Then there's the conflict of interest angle. Chess dot com – not only a platform for play, but for broadcasts, training, and not least important for chess news – is buying Carlsen-owned Play Magnus Group (owner of Chess24, another big broadcasting, training and news platform), and obviously receives oundles of free publicity for its anti-cheating algorithm the longer this story runs. Basically the tacit message is 'so good that it can even catch world top 50 players' – while obviously Niemann has only admitted to cheating online when he was below E2500.

The involvement of top players with these platforms (Nakamura is doing promotions for Chess dot com, and there's a Nakamura bot on here) struck me as problematic already back when it was announced that Play Magnus Group had bought a large stake in Chess24 (was it end of 2020?), but I seriously didn't think it would be because of a cheating scandal involving the World Champion is an interested party.

It is a technical fact only known to those who have more than superficial knowledge of cheat detection that in one respect Niemann achieved superhuman statistics in that game.

He achieved a type of statistical agreement with engine choices that is rarely achieved in games by world class GMs stronger than Niemann. Doing this in one game proves nothing, but it falsifies your claim above: such play makes it likely that a human player will falter. All Niemann needed to do was to play with engine-like perfection until Carlsen made human slips, and then play near enough perfectly to ensure the win.

i have achieved 96-97% accuracy in my games and they have both been complicated and my opponent has achieved suspiciously similar scores and i am a 1492 fide player who didnt cheat.

I am sure that is so, I have 100% perfect (short) games with CAPS V1 (not seen anything close with CAPS V2). It has no bearing on what I said, which was about different statistics.

I bet Arkell will die a happy man now he's a topic of a thread on chess.com.

i didnt want to mention who it was incase he got annoyed at me

@cap78red rat

There is no such thing as a "rated casual game".  It is either rated, or casual (i.e. unrated).  You do not get banned for using an engine in casual games on LiChess.

It's the same on Chess.com - in unrated games, you can get help, use an engine, whatever. If cap used the engine against the person in a rated game, I can see the automated systems detecting that and auto-banning him. If it had been on Chess.com, if cap's opponent submitted an appeal on cap's behalf to Chess.com support explaining what happened, I would think that Chess.com would unban him, but I have no idea what the Lichess processes or practices would respond.  

https://en.chessbase.com/post/is-hans-niemann-cheating-world-renowned-expert-ken-regan-analyzes

In the interview I queried specific points being brought up online and elsewhere such as a possible difference between games that were broadcast and games that were not.

"What I'm saying, as justifying my not needing to take the time to individually look into tournaments to see which were broadcast and which were not, is that if there is any bias in my data, then it's towards broadcast games (i.e more of it is analyzed due to availability) and yet I show something entirely normal."

I'd be interested in what Regan's algorithm would say if limited to those games that were broadcast: I expect that's the sort of thing that Chess.com did after Carlsen's resignation: that they had already flagged potential cheating but not to the level of certainty required to ban a titled player, but on running some more targeted reports found strong enough evidence of "the amount and seriousness" of Niemann's cheating on Chess.com (more than Niemann has publicly admitted to) and therefore banned him.

As an example - and note I am just pulling numbers out of thin air, because I don't know what the threshholds are - if someone's engine match rate over all of their games was 85%, but it rises to 95% for those broadcast over live relay and drops to 80% for those not broadcast, that's pretty significant.

I wonder if his algorithms can detect hijacked threads

Personally, I recognise that it is significant if someone plays 300 points stronger in a large sample of live relayed games against delayed ones. (And then, applying the scientific principle of testing, we then find he plays over 300 points stronger in the portion of Sinquefield 2022 that was live relayed).

There is no doubt that a professional chess player who has cheated for financial and personal benefit and has been caught twice is likely to try to disguise his cheating, but in order for it to be worth cheating, he can't fully disguise the boost to his results.