Titled Tuesday Cheating
dorianquelle.github.io
dorianquelle.github.io
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!).
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.
I didn't realise this. Appreciate the correction.
> 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 headphones to avoid audio feedback.
Do chess streamers need audio from the computer?
I suspect it could be even more, but I wonder if anyone has tested this at different levels? It would be cool to have a graph that shows eval-bar at 1600 ELO equals 70 points, eval-bar at 2800 ELO equals 200 points, etc.
Do I think it's possible to cheat at his level, it would be an art to cheat in rapid and not get in trouble at the rate he plays. But sure, I'll bite, why not.
You can see that Hikaru has the ability to calculate and anticipate standard play far above his opponents, he calls out their moves before they make them. He clearly calculates both, he calculates the human line for him and his opponents.
You can also see the tilt in chess vs say LoL in almost real time. You can begin to spot fatigue in an hour-long video, multi-hour stretch, you can see Hikaru get tried and change the way he plays, slow down, go for positions that are easier to play because he knows himself very well.
Hikaru taking 2900s to town on chess.com simply looks like he is playing above the field at that pace. In a real tournament, with 90+ minutes, 2500-2600s give both Magnus and Hikaru trouble because there is so much more time to calculate. I think the reason why Hikaru is so strong, pattern recognition at this speed, instinct, and time spent playing, not strength necessarily in classical chess. (e.g. he has never been world champ)
He seems very amused by the accusation in that video.
Regarding his video to me this sounds like if you were to ask Djokovic to play 46 tennis matches versus players ranked between 5 and 400 in the world, could he win 45 out of 46 matches and draw one game (not possible in tennis but hey)?
I mean: Djokovic literally won 41 matches in a row, including several matches against opponent from the top 5.
From the opponents' list, it looks like there was no Magnus Carlsen and not any top 5 players in the world?
Is it that surprising that a world champion crushes competition like that?
I don't know but I'm not that suprised.
P.S: I'm making a tennis analogy because Hikaru likes and plays tennis
Not quite, it's more like watching Djokovic's match record until he gets a really good streak and then calling that particular run out as unlikely. It being specifically 46 matches is just because that's the particular length of data that Kramnik cherry picked to do his analysis on.
We should ask Marc Esserman.
The weird thing is, Kramnik actually cheated himself, when he became world champion. He accepted a match for the title with Kasparov, though he lost the match for the challenger against Shirov.
This accusation against Hikaru is not funny anymore. Noobs in the Lichess chat start calling Hikaru a cheater. This is not ok. Being a cheater is a stigma in the chess community.
Kramnik should apologize, or get declared as a persona non grata for a while in the chess community.
> 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...
The "statistics" he is using make zero sense and whenever someone tried to counter him with actual mathematics he would just delete the comments.
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.
> 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.
I have no idea why he’s doing this!
Like the author, I also use regression, but extended to non-title players. More information: https://www.chessmonitor.com/blog/2023-elo-calculation
That said, there are also some unique features like "Openings" which allows you to quickly identify your best/worst openings.
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.
Offline, he is #4 is slow chess and #1 in Blitz.
He's not facing strong challenges on Titled Tuesday, and (like all top players) he is so good that there simply aren't enough players and data to make the empirical Elo scale work for assessing his win probabilities.
The stronger he is, the more his name is listed as the winner, the more viewers he has.
I host a copy of his book and I still struggle every time to not type 'ELO' instead.
ELO is just as accurate as Elo when referring to the rating system.
Saved you the work of the digging I had to do as someone that's not in the loop
Like ... an iPhone with a camera that views the monitor, recognized the board and suggests the best move?
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.
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....")
Not even to that extent.
They just need to be told which single move mid-game to think harder on, and they'll often find it.
So all they need is a metaphoric tap on the shoulder.
That's right! I think Carlsen even said something to that effect.
"This is a critical move." is all he might need to know....
The above is a best guess and the first time I'd come across that keyboard layout.
So what he's saying is the chess.com anti cheat techniques are effective (for now), at least with respect to this specific tournament.
...in titled Tuesday, i.e. when there is a real-life name and chess career on the line.
People can get enjoyment from doing (and watching) people doing things, even if machines can do it better.
Amateur running seems to make more sense.
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
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.
While that is undoubtedly true, I suspect no one becomes a professional chess player for the ladies.
They do it because they like, they're good at it, and they (if good enough) can make a living with it.
You are seriously suggesting that people go pro in X/Y/Z mostly because they want to impress girls? Oo
...although a novice can beat a civil engineer at bridge design games. :-)
See Real Civil Engineer's YouTube channel [1], where a real civil engineer plays various engineering and puzzle games, including a lot of Poly Bridge 2 and 3. In Poly Bridge after finishing a level he generally looks at the leaderboard to see how the people that beat him did. There's usually a bunch that used cheesy methods, but there are also often several where they actually just did a better design. Especially on levels where hydraulics are used to move parts of the bridge.
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.
Running ability is useful in real life outside of races.
Very high chess skill is never useful in any environment outside of the artificially restricted game environment.
All life comes down to is fulfillment. And chess, for many, is one of the most absurdly fulfilling and satisfying things that there is. And what makes the game so special is that as you become better at it, it becomes even more fulfilling and satisfying. And there's no real limit to how much you can improve. And the cost of it is practically $0. And so all a pro is, is somebody who takes their fulfillment of the game to an arguably natural extreme.
Any novice can beat you when in a car.
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EDIT: With all due respect, your comments sounds exactly that silly.
Cheating in chess is maybe something closer to steroids in athletics. If you take an average Joe and gear him up with all the steroids in the world, he's not suddenly going to just hulk out and become a world class athlete, contrary to what many think. But if you take a world class athlete and gear him up, he is going to be able to use that gain a substantial and unfair advantage over his clean peers.
Maybe for Title Tuesday IDK, but not for most competitive chess.
I think the solution is human augmentation to stay relevant.
Or we just have silly things like weight classes for each achievement.