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> It seems to me as though they're inserting themselves into this unnecessarily with their analysis too. They spend a great deal of time explaining their rationale in a few places and then toss in a "In our view, no conclusions should be made from this data." at the end of it. If no conclusions should be drawn, don't bother sharing the data; it's useless. By sharing it in this manner, they are attempting to pretend it's reliable and effectively make the accusation with an out to claim they didn't.

I agree. Inline with your comments, the report has to me a bit of the vibe of an PR department scrambling to get ahead of the story. The poorly and inconsistently formatted graphs indicates they were pulled out of various documents written by various people at different times. And the spray and prey arguments that don't go any where make it seem like they're desperate to appear as objective and unbiased as possible ... which indicates that they are very biased in their urge/need to respond to the "Magnus refuses to play with Hans" situation.

If their cheating detection is so good, wouldn't it be reasonable for chess.com to say to Magnus that you don't have to worry about cheating in our tournaments so you'll play whoever you're paired with and you can leave it up to us to ban people because we know what we're talking about. Why ban Hans now, right after Magnus's ultimatum?

>I think the thing I'd like to have clarified: Why does chess.com care about the results of an OTB game?

They run money tournaments and hope to have top GMs join and advertise their service by playing, streaming, and commentating the tournaments. You really don't see why they would prefer not to have an OTB cheat invited to these events?

Not to say that Hans has been proven to be a cheat, but it does explain why they have to care about cheating in any event, anywhere.

> You really don't see why they would prefer not to have an OTB cheat invited to these events?

No, I definitely see why they would rescind his invitation. I mention so in my post you're quoting from.

My question is specifically about the "analysis" they performed of the over-the-board game that started all of this off.

This is my general take on it. As I posted on Twitter:

As one example, chess.com thinks it’s suspicious that Hans became a grandmaster at 17 instead of a younger age (page 15 of the report), but keep in mind that the legendary Joseph Henry Blackburne didn’t learn to even how to play chess until he was 17. More recently, world champion #15 Vishy Anand did not become a grandmaster until he was 18.

Point being, it argues like a polemic, not a fact-finding report. They themselves admit this. On page 19: “Chess.com is unaware of any concrete evidence proving that Hans is cheating over the board or has ever cheated over the board”.

My personal hurdle, which has not changed in the last month, is real evidence of online cheating on or after June 20, 2021 (Hans’s 18th birthday), or real evidence of over the board cheating. Understating the extent of his online cheating in his September 6 speech is not evidence of recent cheating. I don’t like it, but it might not even be deliberate lying, but a combination of a foggy memory and nerves.

Regardless, while apparently guilty of online cheating when he was 17 or younger, and possibly guilty of understating the extent of his juvenile delinquency, I see no need to ban him from playing over the board chess with the evidence we have on the table. To ban someone as an adult for something done while a juvenile is generally considered immoral, and to ban someone without solid evidence is also considered immoral. This is a line I draw in the sand and will hold to.

> This is a line I draw in the sand and will hold to.

Would you play him for money at a game where you are both equally skilled and it's easy to cheat?

> To ban someone as an adult for something done while a juvenile is generally considered immoral

I don't think it's so clear, especially when the time elapsed is short.

If you cheated I'm a game we played yesterday and today is your 18th birthday I'm still not going to trust you today.

This is something I don't understand, why should FIDE accept any evidence from Chess.com, a completely separate corporate entity? That Hans cheated on chess.com is a fact at this point, but I don't see why that means he should be banned from real OTB tournaments or even from competitor online chess websites like Lichess.