Elite Chess Players Keep Accusing Each Other of Cheating

Yes using any kind of computer assistance during a game is cheating and that is what Vladimir Kramnik was implying. There has been excellent and balanced discussion on the c-squared podcast by Fabiano Caruana[1] of the whole drama if you want to go deep. Fabiano is one of the strongest players ever and is #2 in the live ratings at the moment. He's also generally capable of level-headed analysis and is able to speak sensibly about this whole thing given noone is accusing him of anything. The summary is that while everyone has deep respect for Kramnik and while many people think cheating is a problem, in this particular case the general consensus is that he's barking up the wrong tree.

Specifically he often seems to be relying on things like how big of a streak of victories a particular player is having (while not considering the strength of the opponents) and timing "tells" that he thinks are suspcious about players taking a long time to make obvious moves.

So in this case, the streak Hikaru had was not statistically unusual given the rating gap between Hikaru and his opponents as far as chess.com's analysis said[2]. Now "farming" lower ranked players for rating is a form of soft cheating so there may or may not be something to be said about that being unfair but that's not what Kramnik was saying.

On the timing, one of the most common ways to tell a computer cheater is a suspiciously regular timing to moves and in particular a player taking a long time when a particular move is obvious or indeed is the only legal move, but in the case of Kramnik, he drew attention to this with Hikaru and with Hans Niemann and in both cases the pauses he highlighted corresponded to them talking to their chat as they were streaming live at the time.

He also (in the case of Hans) drew attention to one really weird move that was not a top engine move and somehow tried to claim it was evidence of cheating even though it was very obviously a mouse slip, and Hans Neimann told his stream it was a mouse slip.

I'm no fan whatsoever of Hans Neimann or Hikaru actually, but I think Kramnik has done more harm than good with this "analysis" and throwing out legal claims etc.

[1] Here and in other episodes https://c2pod.com/episodes/dear-vladimir

[2] https://www.chess.com/blog/CHESScom/regarding-recent-accusat...