[HN Gopher] Titled Tuesday Cheating
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Titled Tuesday Cheating
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 108 points
Date : 2023-11-26 18:42 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dorianquelle.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (dorianquelle.github.io)
| __s wrote:
| Before 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
|
| Lichess discussion: https://lichess.org/forum/general-chess-
| discussion/kramnik-i...
| progbits wrote:
| Kramnik 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 wrote:
| Yes 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| ps256 wrote:
| Kind 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.
| trollied wrote:
| Hikaru talking about the cheating allegation against him:
| 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| trollied wrote:
| > It's just that the lame browser engines aren't set up to
| remember the line from move to move, so they recompute.
|
| I didn't realise this. Appreciate the correction.
| soegaard wrote:
| I agree with your analysis.
|
| > That can be setup trivially somewhere out of view.
|
| And that's the reason headphones are banned in tournaments.
|
| It's a problem for streamers though, since they need
| headphone to avoid audio feedback.
| mda wrote:
| He is not faster than engines.
| johndhi wrote:
| Hmm 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| No, chess cheating is rampant. But it's highly unlikely the
| professionals are doing it.
| kookamamie wrote:
| "Anaylsis"
| Bootvis wrote:
| What's wrong with it?
| scott_w wrote:
| Hikaru 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.
| ThomasCM wrote:
| Shameless 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/
|
| Like the author, I also use regression, but extended to non-title
| players. More information:
| https://www.chessmonitor.com/blog/2023-elo-calculation
| islewis wrote:
| Having 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?
| vb-8448 wrote:
| A month ago also Fabiano Caruana said the same exact thing but
| without making names.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aD1mga-Oj5k
| bongodongobob wrote:
| He's not talking about Hikaru.
| wufufufu wrote:
| Doesn'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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| I'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.
| teo_zero wrote:
| Why do so many chess experts, practitioners and commenters, with
| varying degrees of familiarity with the chess world, misspell
| Elo?
| gwern wrote:
| Because 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 wrote:
| Yeah, 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.
| soegaard wrote:
| And why do they use Elo to refer to rating on chess.com and
| lichess? [They use Glicko/Glicko2].
| ghqst wrote:
| The author has a short paragraph at the end about Glicko.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| What's going on in the picture? Has the illustrator never seen a
| chessboard?
| gurchik wrote:
| The illustrator is DALL-E.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| He should be fired
| abeyer wrote:
| Or asked to generate the rules for this variant where you
| use mix-and-match pieces from several different sets on a
| 7x7 board.
| umvi wrote:
| Controversial 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| What'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 wrote:
| Status-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
| water-your-self wrote:
| Because it is fun.
| chongli wrote:
| Is there no room for enjoyment of the activity? Does every
| endeavour have to be couched in the language of self-
| consciousness?
| erikerikson wrote:
| So too, the appreciation of excellence
| huevosabio wrote:
| I think you dismiss the thrill of being really good at
| something.
|
| We humans get a lot of satisfaction of improving and
| competing in all sorts of activities.
|
| The world is so big that for any activity you'll find a
| good deal of people obsessed with that activity, and making
| it their life's work to perfect it.
| initplus wrote:
| Surely nobody becomes a professional chess player because
| they think it will impress women.
| zem wrote:
| I feel like for most competitive activities like this, who
| you really want to impress is other people who do that same
| activity. (I play competitive scrabble, for which there is
| approximately zero recognition in the "outside world", but
| having your fellow scrabble players recognise your ability
| counts for a lot.)
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| Arguably nothing.
|
| Amateur running seems to make more sense.
| lewhoo wrote:
| > _Any novice can beat you when assisted by an engine._
|
| A novice wouldn't be assisted by the engine but rather be an
| engine-chessboard interface with no real input as far as the
| game goes. I think that's a really weird take. You wouldn't
| claim there's no point in 5000m race when any person with a car
| easily beats you.
| vharuck wrote:
| Like all professional competitions: because there's an
| interested audience with money. And humans still have the
| money, so we demand to see human competitors we empathize with.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| games are fun.
| nebulous1 wrote:
| Regarding 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 wrote:
| Would 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?
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(page generated 2023-11-26 23:00 UTC)