There is so much more to our report than what was focused on in the WSJ article. The full report will be shared shortly…
I attribute part of the reason why this scandal has reached as far as it has is that Niemann was able to retain his reputation and enter professional OTB tournaments up until the Sinquefield Cup.
Nobody knew about any of this until it was alluded to vaguely, and then implicitly after Magnus was defeated OTB
The only disappointing thing was the focus on how fast Hans' rating soared after he hit 2500, and how much it rose between ages 11 and 19.25. These thresholds were very cherry-picked to make Hans look bad, which you didn't need to do. For example, Hans's rating lingered at 2450 for two years and then popped. If you charted ratings rise starting at 2450, Hans would be on the other side of the chart!
To be clear, as there is no equivalent to a physical impossibility here, I am not claiming that the rate of rating increase is conclusive; I am saying it seems to be a legitimate concern regardless of how reasonable the broader averages are.
And also... who cares? there are no stake, just playing against random people, who cares if they cheat as long as you have fun playing. It's less fun for the cheater, but doesn't impact non-cheater.
I would be upset if someone was inconsistently cheating, and so I'm playing someone nominally at 1400 but for this game they're actually playing 2100.
Of course for true tournament play, the rules are the rules, whatever they may be, and they must be followed for it to have any meaning.
They have almost the entirety of the lichess system source code publicly available, but from what I can gather they have a private set of weights on inputs - I assume to prevent cheaters from fully reverse-engineering the system.
How true is that at the top levels of play?
What do you think the success rate is for online players telling an engine from a human? 1% 99%
In middling ratings, if I was allowed to look at the engine (in a Lichess replay for instance) I'd guess I can tell a player using the engine with 99+% accuracy. People _always_ lose on tactics (or misplayed opening lines, misplayed endgames, etc). Engines never do. At high ratings I assume this goes down, especially if the players are playing 'boring' draw-ish lines, in which the best moves are fairly obvious most of the time.
So who did chess.com share those with?
Ie, their secret sauce.
It makes sense to show the relevant part of their upcoming case and who knows what kind of agreement they had with Dlugy and with lawyers before deciding to reveal that snippet.
Like in poker. Just because they showed one card, doesn't mean they are now obligated to show their hand.