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Comment by laweijfmvo | Hacker News Reader

I‘ve been trying to draw parallels to other sports in this regard. Nobody accused Tiger Woods of cheating (at golf) when he redefined the sport. People DID accuse Lance Armstrong, and they were right (although in that case the whole field was cheating). New England Patriots? Kinda cheated. Michael Phelps has never been accused AFAIK.

As a non-chess player, I can’t help but wonder if this is just an entire sport refusing to accept that someone could come along and achieve this, or if it’s really just too good to be true.

Plus Hans did admit to at least some amount of cheating.

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Golf's a game of precision motor control, while insanely long drives might be evidence of cheating, it's hard to imagine a way to make yourself more accurate besides skill, at least without it being obvious on live television.

Biking obviously involves a lot of different things but it's much easier to see how doping is going to help.

Football has so many facets that it's kind of surprising there aren't more cheating scandals, but at the same time it's harder to isolate any one thing and say that's what's giving a team an edge.

Michael Phelps rose to prominence after most of the big doping scandals by which point anti-doping measures were well established. Besides doping, it's tough to cheat at swimming.

With chess, it's trivial to have a computer on your person capable of beating any human alive, it's just communicating with said computer that is a challenge. Given that chess masters are supposed to be extremely good at strategy and making clever moves people won't see coming, I'm sure there have been some ridiculous cheating attempts.

Legitimate curiosity from a non-golf person: how would one cheat at golf?

Mostly things like illegal equipment (besides blatantly breaking rules).

https://golfguidebook.com/best-illegal-golf-clubs/

“Improving your lie” is a common way, meaning altering the environment around the player, swing path, ball, or shot path in a way that yields some advantage.

This would include things like breaking off a twig in your way, removing leaves or grass around the ball, etc.

Steroids for longer drives.

And faster recovery allowing more training volume.

Cheating at golf is very common among recreational players. A common trick is to move your ball onto the edge of the fairway when nobody is looking.

To be clear online chess legitimately has a cheating problem. I think it has gotten better but according to chess.com there have been a number of Grandmasters including some of the top 100 players in the world who have cheated on the site and admitted it. Cheating in over the board chess seems to be much less common but everyone realizes it is possible and if done well would be challenging to catch. I think this has primed the field for people to be suspicious.

I’m a bit skeptical of this figure that chess grandmasters have admitted it. From what I understand, if chess.com accused you of cheating, they tell you “you have 3 days to admit it or be banned”. So in the face of that, of course they’re going to admit to cheating (since admitting it leads to no other repercussions). To me it seems like a way for the anticheat team to farm credibility. This was my impression based on Maxim Dlugy’s statement

https://sites.google.com/view/gmdlugystatement/home

> To be clear online chess legitimately has a cheating problem.

Depending on how strict we want to be, Magnus himself has been caught "cheating" in online chess games before too:

https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/xkn7ln/why_does_nobo...

The comparisons are a bit extreme as Hans hasn’t become the world’s best chess player; not even close. He just beat Magnus once…

> I can’t help but wonder if this is just an entire sport refusing to accept that someone could come along and achieve this

That's what Niemann wants you to believe, but it's not right. Carlsen is rated about 200 Elo points above Niemann. That makes a win in classical an upset, sure, but far from unprecented, and far from proof that he's a threat to Magnus' dominating position in the chess world the last decade. Weaker players have beaten Magnus, even with black.

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