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Comment by __s | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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!

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.

Your second paragraph made me LOL - thanks! Similar experience here, listening to the C-Squared interview.

> 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.

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.

His statistics are simple and make a lot of sense: when playing decisive games for money online some players have high performance increase, while others have high performance decrease. Anyone who attacks him chooses to ignore this statistics, including the author of this blogpost.

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