10 ms·
Titled Tuesday Cheating
- stas_sl 3y agoI'm not sure I fully understand why MAE is that big there (~0.35). Is it a difference between theoretical (based on rating difference of players) expected score and actual score averaged over many games? If score is in range 0-1, then MAE=0.35 seems a huge to me. I get it, that there is some deviation from theoretical prediction, but if I understood correctly it happens for larger ratings difference, but I guess more games should be played between players of similar strength.
- __s 3y agoBefore anyone gets into how much cheating there is, notice the conclusion > I am convinced that there is no evidence that cheating increased after the chess boom in 2020, compared to the offline baseline. I am also convinced that there is no evidence of pervasive and consistent computer assisted cheating in titled tuesday tournaments. However, re "Since then, a former World Champion published an hour long video, and accused Hikaru Nakamura of cheating." see https://www.chess.com/blog/VladimirKramnik/informational https://www.chess.com/blog/VladimirKramnik/informational Lichess discussion: https://lichess.org/forum/general-chess-discussion/kramnik-implies-hikaru-is-cheating https://lichess.org/forum/general-chess-discussion/kramnik-i...
- progbits 3y agoKramnik has gone off the deep end. The "statistics" he is using make zero sense and whenever someone tried to counter him with actual mathematics he would just delete the comments.
- chongli 3y agoYes and furthermore anyone who attempts to offer a rebuttal to his argument has their post summarily deleted. A number of working statisticians have shown his arguments to be baseless yet he continues to stick his fingers in his ears and cry “Nya Nya Nya!” I have no idea why he’s doing this!
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoI respect Kramnik a lot both as a player and as a commenter on current top chess. I thought his research on chess with the castling rules removed was fascinating, for instance. I honestly watched his entire Youtube rant, and by the time it got to his actual data, I was so mentally drained from trying to understand the long, poorly structured 45 minute rant that preceded it, I was unable to even parse his figures and tables. I think his focus on games that can vs can't lead to higher earnings is interesting. But his inability to communicate his ideas clearly and in good faith doesn't paint a picture of someone who understands what he's doing.
- hilux 3y agoYour second paragraph made me LOL - thanks! Similar experience here, listening to the C-Squared interview. > I think his focus on games that can vs can't lead to higher earnings is interesting. The root problem, or least one of them, is that he is cherry-picking his results. He may not even understand that he is doing it. (Caruana also pointed this out in the C-Squared interview.) Rather than defining some search universe with reasonable parameters, and applying some standard filter across all of that space, Kramnik first notices some "interesting" result and expands out from there. This is a recipe for self-delusion and/or fraud.
- ps256 3y agoKind of embarrassing that he doesn't have the self-awareness especially after the false accusations that he cheated during his WC match and that whole scandal years ago.
- sesm 3y agoHis statistics are simple and make a lot of sense: when playing decisive games for money online some players have high performance increase, while others have high performance decrease. Anyone who attacks him chooses to ignore this statistics, including the author of this blogpost.
- trollied 3y agoHikaru talking about the cheating allegation against him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm2R--_fBj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm2R--_fBj0 I'll add that he live streamed the tournament he was accused of cheating in. If you've ever watched how fast he moves and quite often pre-moves & talks through his strategy as he goes, it'd be very surprising to see that he cheated (and I don't even know how he'd go about doing so - he's faster than the engines!).
- hibikir 3y agoI don't think he was cheating, if just because he was playing a series of players far, far lower than his standard level, and he proves that level in tournaments that have far superior anti-cheating requirements. However, could he be cheating, if he wanted to, in ways undetectable by the livestreaming? Absolutely! At the GM level, just having the evaluation visible somewhere is more than sufficient to gain 100 points of ELO: You know when your opponent blunders, and if you are winning. That can be setup trivially somewhere out of view. He doesn't need to be told one move, ever. See, for instance, Carlsen-Caruana WCC, game 6. Ended in a draw. But there was a mate in 30 once, that neither player saw. The moment Fabiano was told of the mate in 30, after the game, he started blurting out the right line... because if there's mate in 30, there was only one way it could possibly go, but it was too hard to calculate. Mate in 30 says 'yes, the really crazy line that you saw works out!' The same can happen in blitz. As for Hikaru being faster than the engine... it's a crazy claim that he wouldn't believe himself. At any and all time controls, the engine wins, all the time. The calculations from the previous move already included every move your opponent does... It's just that the lame browser engines aren't set up to remember the line from move to move, so they recompute. See what happens with any engine in the cloud, using aggressive parallelism, the kind a super GM uses to study. There's minimal cheat prevention in titled Tuesday. Even when streaming, cheating is trivially easy to do, by anyone. But this is a place where Kramnik is overplaying his hand. There's probably many players making money in titled tuesday by cheating, as their performance is so very far from over-the-board performance, it's highly suspicious. But the top dozen super-GMs, for which Titled Tuesday money is unimportant? The statistical differences vs their regular play would have to be far bigger than what Kramnik shows for them.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- johndhi 3y agoHmm it's a little odd - he says there isn't persistent cheating, but that's in a world where chess.com bans people all the time for cheating. So what he's saying is the chess.com anti cheat techniques are effective (for now), at least with respect to this specific tournament.
- MauranKilom 3y ago> he says there isn't persistent cheating ...in titled Tuesday, i.e. when there is a real-life name and chess career on the line.
- bongodongobob 3y agoNo, chess cheating is rampant. But it's highly unlikely the professionals are doing it.
- kookamamie 3y ago[flagged]
- Bootvis 3y agoWhat's wrong with it?
- scott_w 3y agoHikaru has done multiple videos on why it’s total nonsense, pointing to statisticians from multiple universities that detail the problems in his thinking. In short, he tries to pretend Elo doesn’t exist and there’s no way a top 10 GM could repeatedly defeat FMs and IMs rated 400 points lower.
- sebzim4500 3y agoOk but that's not what was posted. The OP looks reasonable to me.
- scott_w 3y agoFair enough, I think I've been confusing the content of this post with the discourse that led to it.
- kookamamie 3y agoThe somewhat obvious typo of "analysis" repeating in the article?
- ThomasCM 3y agoShameless plug: f you're looking for a similar way to compare your online rating with the FIDE rating, take a look at my project: https://www.chessmonitor.com/ https://www.chessmonitor.com/ Like the author, I also use regression, but extended to non-title players. More information: https://www.chessmonitor.com/blog/2023-elo-calculation https://www.chessmonitor.com/blog/2023-elo-calculation
- islewis 3y agoHaving a quick look at ChessMonitor, it looks like much of the analysis tools mirror what can be found on Lichess (unsure about Chess.com). Is the value providing the aggregate analysis between Lichess and Chess.com? Or is there functionality past what can be found on the respective sites?
- ThomasCM 3y agoChess.com Insights are similar to what my project is doing. However, Lichess has nothing similar. They do have something called "Chess Insights" but it's not really comparable IMHO. That said, there are also some unique features like "Openings" which allows you to quickly identify your best/worst openings.
- vichu 3y agoWhere have I seen this UI before? :)
- vb-8448 3y agoA month ago also Fabiano Caruana said the same exact thing but without making names. [0] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aD1mga-Oj5k https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aD1mga-Oj5k
- bongodongobob 3y agoHe's not talking about Hikaru.
- sesm 3y ago> without making names
- wufufufu 3y agoDoesn’t make much sense for Hikaru to cheat. He competes over the board where it’s much harder to cheat, and he makes most of his money through streaming, not through competition results.
- fairity 3y agoThe size of his streaming audience is largely predicated on his perceived skill though. So, he may hypothetically feel pressure to cheat in order to impress his audience.
- jaxr 3y agoI'm not sure that translates very linearly. Most of the chess YouTube "stars" are not even GMs. Most of the viewers are hardly good players, so what you can learn from an IM is astronomical. Charisma and good at teaching are much better skills than a 1000 ELO difference imo. To your point, beating Magnus might drag a lot of people to his stream.
- drexlspivey 3y agoThat’s right, the most popular content creator on Youtube is an IM and the most popular game analysis channel is by an amateur
- TylerE 3y agoThat’s nothing new. Many of the books supposedly by GMs are ghostwritten by non-titled players.
- paulddraper 3y ago> Most of the chess YouTube "stars" are not even GMs. But they have tutorials, put tons of effort into entertaining content, etc. Hikaru doesn't. People watch Hiraku because they want to watch a top 5 player.
- 3y ago
- teo_zero 3y agoWhy do so many chess experts, practitioners and commenters, with varying degrees of familiarity with the chess world, misspell Elo?
- gwern 3y agoBecause it is so often capitalized, lowercasing it looks like a mistake, it looks exactly like an acronym, Elo was not nearly as famous for anything else, 'ELO' exists as a real acronym for many other things (eg. Electric Light Orchestra), and you can even easily define pseudo-definitions for it as a backronym - 'expected logistic odds', just off the top of my head. I host a copy of his book and I still struggle every time to not type 'ELO' instead.
- teo_zero 3y agoYeah, I think we've been flooded by three-letter acronyms for so long that we see them everywhere. It doesn't happen with four letters: you wouldn't write VOLT or WATT.
- lupire 3y agoSpecifically a 2 syllable 3 letter word that doesn't fit a common English pattern (as it's not an English name).
- soegaard 3y agoAnd why do they use Elo to refer to rating on chess.com and lichess? [They use Glicko/Glicko2].
- Tao3300 3y agoWhat's going on in the picture? Has the illustrator never seen a chessboard?
- umvi 3y agoControversial opinion, but what is the point of becoming a pro chess player in a world of computers? Any novice can beat you when assisted by an engine. The same can't be said of other professions. A novice can't design a better bridge than a civil engineer just by using cots software.
- jackmott 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- michaelt 3y agoWhat's the point of being a professional runner, when motorbikes exist? People can get enjoyment from doing (and watching) people doing things, even if machines can do it better.
- paulsutter 3y agoStatus-seeking is the reason folks focus on professional running, or professional chess, or any of these very hardcore, very difficult endeavors that have no practical purpose. Someone once commented that men make extraordinary efforts to impress women, yet in general have very little understanding of what women actually like. This explains jacked-up trucks, professional chess, professional running, etc EDIT: I'm talking about professional-level running or chess, not the hobbies of running or chess
- sebzim4500 3y ago[flagged]
- chongli 3y agoIs there no room for enjoyment of the activity? Does every endeavour have to be couched in the language of self-consciousness?
- nebulous1 3y agoRegarding the list of noteworthy upsets, it's worth noting that, while I didnt go through all of the games, the top three results were all due to the stronger player making easy to spot blunders and the lower rated (but still strong) player converting.
- marcyb5st 3y agoWould it be possible to get some probability of cheating per player based on how often they play the best moves according to engines in online and live matches?
- ps256 3y agoYou need something more sophisticated, otherwise it's easy to confuse high skill and/or well memorised lines with cheating. And a good cheater will be smart enough to either use engine assistance only in difficult spots and/or frequently pick the second/third best moves from the engine.
- paulddraper 3y agoI think the parent's idea is that over-the-board is harder to cheat; therefore you could look at the difference between OTB and online play.
- 83457 3y agoBut otb is more stressful.
- marcyb5st 3y agoCorrect. My idea is actually that with some grace number of moves that players can play by the book (i.e. openings). After that, run the analysis I mentioned. I agree that playing OTB is more stressful and that is difficult to model in such an approach. I was hoping to at least get some signal to filter out the mostly obvious cheaters and so focus on the remainder that should be less obvious.
- busyant 3y ago> based on how often they play the best moves according to engines in online and live matches One thing that Magnus mentioned about a year ago (I think in relation to his oblique insinuation that Hans Niemann cheated) is that you don't have to cheat throughout the game. He posited that if he checked an engine only once per game (at some critical juncture), he would be unbeatable (by any other non-cheating super GM). If you cheat like that, it would be considerably more difficult to detect. Caruana recently suggested that ~50% of players had cheated in cash online tournaments. He wasn't particularly clear about what he meant by "50%" but I suspect he thinks that many lesser GMs have done what Magnus suggested: they occasionally "dip their toe" into the cheating realm by checking at some critical point against a more formidable opponent. They don't even need to do this every game. And, human nature being what it is, I bet they can convince themselves that it's not really cheating (e.g., "I was just double checking my favorite move....")
- RockRobotRock 3y agoHe's talking about Vladimir Kramnik and this video BTW: https://youtu.be/_jk_r8FeREM https://youtu.be/_jk_r8FeREM Saved you the work of the digging I had to do as someone that's not in the loop
- hilux 3y agoInteresting. He concludes that cheating in Titled Tuesday must be virtually non-existent. Many elite GMs (even those more level-headed than Kramnik) would strongly disagree.
- tobias_irmer 3y agoWhere exactly is "Zürich, Switherland"?
- defrost 3y agoMost probably in Germany, Austria or Switzerland where the QWERTZ keyboard is widely used and the Z and Y are swapped (leading to an easy one key slip between the H and the Z).
- KingOfCoders 3y agoNice find though I personally always slip left or right, not up or down.
- defrost 3y agoIt struck me as an interesting puzzle; was this a curious locale spelling variation, a typo, a speech to text artifact, etc? The above is a best guess and the first time I'd come across that keyboard layout.
- Santosh83 3y agoOn a related note, isn't this one place where so-called Trusted execution and Web integrity would legitimately be of use? With a completely trusted path of execution coupled with browser integrity, a cheater would theoretically be forced to use an entirely separate device or source for moves, like a second screen, handheld, beads, whatever... which would need to be input moves in realtime and thus making it quite a bit harder and needed outside assistance.
- KingOfCoders 3y ago"entirely separate device" Like ... an iPhone with a camera that views the monitor, recognized the board and suggests the best move?
- toxik 3y agoIt's the old philosophical impossibility of DRM to ever succeed. As long as the consumer is able to see the media, or the player able to play the game, it can be recorded given enough time and resources, same for cheating.
- makach 3y agoI am pretty sure everyone is cheating against me online; every time I get a player it is obviously a 2600+ player speed running online crushing my dream to reach a rating above 500.
- sesm 3y agoThis article is smoke and mirrors. A lot of shiny graphs, but he chooses to completely ignore the main statistical result of Kramnik: when playing Titled Tuesday games which decide your cash prize, some players have unusually high performance increase, while others have performance decrease, including young world blitz champion Alireza Firouzja who grew up playing online. This statistics is reproducible from open data, the most difficult part is to separate the games that decide players money prizes, for that you'll have to look up the tournament table after each round manually.