New evidence cheating scandal

Fair enough, but it should also be noted that these blue great moves did not follow any significant mistakes. The graph remained basically a flat line. You can look at the evaluation graph from the game review link I posted above. But yes Point well taken, good moves don't increase the eval very much. 

Well that's certainly not my opinion. The only way that I view the earlier stuff as somewhat forgivable is that it was done when he was a very young kid. Not that he's not still very young but you know what I mean. I don't consider a 12 or 16 year old immune to the temptations of cheating. And I'm pretty sure that people can change quite a bit from their early years. Not to say they all do but they can. I'm just willing to give the benefit of the doubt until someone proves to me otherwise.

That is not exactly how the ELO system works.  A 200 point gap means that in a match, the higher rated player would be expected to score 75% of the points.  The breakdown is roughly 56% win, 39% draw, 5% loss.  In other words, assuming his rating (2688) was accurate, he would be expected to win 1 in every 20 games with Magnus.

Thanks for the clarification.  I still can't  fathom how sitting across the board from one another cheating could happen in professional tournaments at that level.

How to physically do it, or how someone could live with themselves for doing it?

There are ways to do the former.  For someone of master strength, simply telling them there is a tactic in the position or that it is a critical move would be enough to give him a significant advantage.  So something as low tech as a small vibrating device that is remotely activated would be enough communication to provide that (the key there would be the timing - which is what the  broadcast delay is meant to prevent).  [Note: I am not saying he did this, but just providing an example of how it could be done].

Regarding the latter: imposter syndrome would set in for most non-psychopaths.  Eventually, he would either confess or get more brazen with it to (subconsciously) get caught (that is effectively what happened with Igors Rausis).  For psychopaths, they literally do not care.

I'm not saying Hans is another Bobby Fischer but Fischer literally destroyed the whole Soviet chess oligarchy single handedly.  He won 20 games in a row against world class players.  Should we question whether Bobby cheated or not?  Its almost proven the Soviets had their thumb on the World Championship scales for many years before Bobby showed up.  

Hans seems to be almost a hermit similar to Bobby Fischer from some of the things I've heard.  Considering the rise Fischer had, why is it not possible for someone similar to come up?  It just seems unfair to accuse someone of something without any evidence that I can see. Most of the evidence seems to be about his demeanor.  

Did Fischer ever get caught and admit to cheating at multiple different times in his career?

i mean he obviously cheated using *n*l beads 

Bryan-HallWS  1 
#65
premio53 wrote:I'm not saying Hans is another Bobby Fischer but Fischer literally destroyed the whole Soviet chess oligarchy single handedly.  He won 20 games in a row against world class players.  Should we question whether Bobby cheated or not?  Its almost proven the Soviets had their thumb on the World Championship scales for many years before Bobby showed up.  

Hans seems to be almost a hermit similar to Bobby Fischer from some of the things I've heard.  Considering the rise Fischer had, why is it not possible for someone similar to come up?  It just seems unfair to accuse someone of something without any evidence that I can see. Most of the evidence seems to be about his demeanor.  
"Did Fischer ever get caught and admit to cheating at multiple different times in his career?"

I could ask you this one question.  "Have you ever told a lie before?"  If you are honest, you will admit you have multiple times, just as I have.  What about stealing?  Have you ever stolen anything?  Once again, I plead guilty.  The point is we have all done things we shouldn't have because we are all human.  If we judge people on their past mistakes, where does that leave us?  I have prejudged things in the past and lived to regret it.  I just hate to see a young man mercilessly attacked for cheating because he won a game against the top player.  

Fischer was known, in the chess world, as a fast-rising talent.

By the time he was 15, he'd become the youngest ever player to qualify for the Candidates. His trajectory was rather fast, upward, and continuous.

Niemann, by contrast, spent 5 years struggling at the 2300-2500 range. When he reached 2500, though, he skyrocketed toward 2700 in a little over a year. (He only reached GM last year.)

That doesn't mean he cheated ... but it certainly makes his progress unusual. He hasn't improved at a steady, upward climb through the years, (which is the kind of progress that tends to attract quick attention).

Rather, his progress stuttered and stalled here and there, almost erratically.

At one point, he dropped 200 Elo points in a month. Then he shot up 400 Elo points a few months later. Then he dropped another 200 Elo in a few months. Then he shot up 300 Elo points a few months after that.

His progress has been all over the map- not the kind of steady, upward Elo path that leads people to say, "Here's a future star in the making!"

Rather he kind of leapt up all of a sudden. Almost out of nowhere.

Let's stay focused on the question:

You made a very direct comparison between Fischer and Neimann. So I asked a simple direct comparison as a follow up to Fischer and Neimann.

The problem is the repetitive comment "there's no evidence" which simply isn't true. I'm not convinced that he cheated, but to say there is no evidence is incorrect. There's actually proof that he has cheated. Changing the setting from online to OTB doesn't wipe the slate. If it did, couldn't we wipe the slate for:

Cheating as an IM, but NEVER as a GM! 

Cheating to gain rating points but NEVER to get money!

Cheating on Saturday but NEVER on Sunday! 

It's all just silly. 

Let's be honest about this as well. He's not being attacked mercilessly just because he won a game against the top player. He's being attacked because he is a known cheater, has admitted to cheating, makes arrogant comments, is disrespectful in general, and got caught lying about his cheating. 

If any other player in that tournament had beaten Magnus, we wouldn't see the same fallout. Their reputations are clean (as far as I know). Neimann on the other hand, has quite a few personal and professional strikes against him. 

Agreed, but it can demonstrate the likelihood.  For example, someone who blunders every other move and somehow ends up winning is obviously not a cheater (unless they are bribing their opponents).  However, someone who never makes a blunder in games against the best players in the world for multiple games in a row might be up to something.  Combine that with a rating gain that is out of the ordinary, odd commentary in post-game analysis, a history of cheating online, and it does not look good.  That does not mean he has been cheating OTB, but it is a rather strange set of circumstances.

The most entertaining idea is simply that he made a Faustian bargain to be the best player in the world and didn't read the fine print saying "everyone will think you cheated".

I personally think that Hans is innocent. But, at least give the man a chance to show that he didn’t cheat. Suspicion doesn’t mean guilty. If that was true court cases wouldn’t be needed, the person defending would already have lost. 

@Bryan-HallWS if you mean the video and post 18 yes I watched it. Even the author wasn't willing to go out on a limb with accusations. I will continue to wait and see.

@DamageInkk I did look at that data also. I'm taking a lot of the stuff with a grain of salt because I think much of the data is being Cherry Picked.

Without addressing every issue, one of the things he showed was how Hans had higher performance in televised events. It would only stand to reason that televised events pay more money and have higher rated players. Therefore, you would have a far greater chance of having a higher performance rating when playing higher rated players. Correct me if I'm wrong but you can't get a GM Norm in a tournament with 2000 rated players? In other words, your performance rating correlates to the strength of your opposition. Now maybe if his data showed the average rating of the players in the tournament it would mean more but I didn't see that data.

Just for clarification, the data you are talking about as not talking about televised events, but events with DGT boards (i.e. games that you can watch live using apps like Follow Chess).

Regarding the GM norms:  you can get a norm in open tournaments with lower rated players, but you still must meet the performance criteria (>2600 TPR) and beat a certain number of IMs/GMs, etc.  In other words, you cannot get a norm if you played 8 rounds against 2000-rated players and 1-round against a 2600 and went 9/9, despite the fact that your TPR would be 3000.  Hans' last GM norm was in Charlotte (if I recall correctly) at a tournament designed specifically to allow several players an opportunity to earn a norm (i.e. 10-player round robin that has all the requirements met and if you perform, you can earn a norm).

Regarding the average ratings of the opponents, you can actually see that a couple ways.  First, you can pull up the crosstables (for example, the first one here where he withdrew after losing to a 1900-rated player:  http://www.uschess.org/msa/XtblPlr.php?201903311472-002-15041466) or look at the TPR for each event combined with his score (as that gives you an idea of the level of the competition).

You seem to be confused between the meaning of evidence and proof. You said "where's the evidence" it's right there. It's not proof, there wont be proof. 

"Live broadcast" means electronic chess boards immediately transmitting the players' moves, which is published by chess.com (on the Events page), chess24, lichess, and other major chess websites.  So moves of the games are publicly known as the game is in progress.

No, performance rating is not expected to correlate with the strength of your opposition.  The Elo model predicts your performance to remain true to your strength regardless of the strength of your opponents.  Winning percentage correlates with opponent strength.  Against weaker opponents you're expected to win more.  Against stronger opponents you're expected to win less.

Perhaps all of this doubt should be removed ongoing by measures such as delaying all "live" public broadcasting of moves. A standard time such as 15 minutes does not seem the way to go, as often in classical players will take longer than that to move, and if cheating could wait to receive a signal. It would perhaps be better to delay a certain number of moves, such as always keeping the broadcast 2 moves behind the play. Live audiences could also be told that they will be videoed so that any communication by gesture etc could be analysed retrospectively, and told not to use phones etc to transmit moves to those outside.

I do realize you're talking about dgt boards and the ability they have to immediately send data to the internet. I know they're not televised as in on TV but there is streaming coverage and the more the organizers put in efforts like that, the more likely the event will be attended by top players.

And those dgt boards are quite expensive, so anywhere that they would have a train load of them for a tournament clearly would be a place that would draw a lot of top talent. At $1200-$1,500 a pop including the pieces, it would have to be a pretty high level tournament to have such Hardware.

For those who seem to think a player's progress must be consistent, let's not forget Boris Spassky had a several year slump in his progress. If I recall correctly it was in the 2300 range and went on for some years.

I'm not ready to say beyond a shadow of a doubt that he wasn't cheating. I'm simply saying I haven't seen anything yet to make me believe he was. Every single unusual thing anyone has pointed out about his progress through his career has been replicated by someone else, and done better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Spassky

That article talks rather at length about his stagnation in progress. Regardless of the number system they were using it was during his days as an IM. So I guess I wasn't far off.