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.