International chess federation sanctions Kramnik
fide.com
fide.com
Daniel Naroditsky was one of the most influential figures in chess: arguably the best chess educator on the internet; one of the most talented commentators out there; and an absolute demon at speed chess, who could go toe to toe with the best to ever do it. It's hard to come across someone as passionate, knowledgeable and generous about something as Daniel was about chess. And most importantly he appeared to be such a kind soul.
I find it hard to enjoy and engage with chess after his passing. He was the main reason to keep coming back for me. I wholeheartedly recommend every video in his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DanielNaroditskyGM.
Then he started attacking Daniel, Hikaru and some other players online. This all led to pretty tragic consequences.
Kramnik still believes that he's in the right.
The only good thing out of this is numerous funny videos by chess players trying to figure out intricacies of statistics and math.
He was one of the world's best bullet and blitz players, it was obvious he was never cheating. Kramnik was apparently one of his heroes. It was despicable behavior
But to become grandmaster you have to dedicate a lot of your life to chess. It's not that these people couldn't know general knowledge or do higher math, they are simply not exposed to it. They are not smart in the sense of a universal genius, because that would require immersing yourself in all the things - the opposite of what a chess grandmaster does
From that point of view, you should really consider them to be as knowledgeable about these things as high school dropouts. It was hilarious following the whole cheating thing and seeing them try to interpret these statistical results and coming to really stupid conclusions.
You could say it’s difficult to see them this way due to the cultural and historical perspectives on chess but this is the reality of top grandmasters at this time.
Source?
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1uk3wa3/world_no_2s_...
Getting better at chess, the Rubik's Cube, etc. is a skill. The more you practice and the more passionate you are, the better you get at it. This is just like learning to play the piano or learning to swim. There is natural aptitude as well but its not as simple as being super smart and being able to strategize well using intelligence. That's just the narrative that seems to make sense. Being good at chess isn't evidence that someone is smart in general.
The first study of it I found (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...) notes that, while there is some correlation, "Full-scale IQ explained < 1% of the variance in chess skill."
> The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.
The nature of the questions and why they are expected to know the answers matters a lot here.
probable cardiac arrhythmia tied to systemic sarcoidosis, with methamphetamine/kratom as contributing factors.
Kramnik responded with “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about”. OK Vlad. You know more about stats than a professor of math stats at uw. Sure…
Kramnik’s behaviour throughout has been despicable. I’m pretty sure it’s grounded in the fact that he is bitter about how chess has changed and he has got older and more stuck in his ways and the modern generation of players (I’m thinking people like Danya, Jospem[1] and Lazavik[2]) play/played a brand of chess that is entirely based on deep engine analysis and is totally alien to guys like him with an old-school Russian chess background. So they must be cheating (as far as Kramnik is concerned). The way he hounded Daniel Naroditsky in particular really disgusted me and I say that as someone who used to be a fan of Kramnik’s chess.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mart%C3%ADnez_Alc%C3...
Chief chess.com officer IM Danny Rensch, among others, explained how Kramnik’s theories about how unlikely various streak lengths were were completely wrong with easy to understand detail.
Kramnik: “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about”.
Even if 2/10000 is true that’s nowhere near accurate enough to make aggressive accusations that create anxiety at levels people need to medicate with potentially fatal consequences.
Do you have a link to independent validations? The ones I found, like an upcoming nber paper confirm the companies claims.
the text in above is all ai generated. i uploaded a picture of two kittens to gemini and asked it to guess their age. then asked gemini to change the language to of someone who is born in deep Appalachia but has Japanese parents. then asked it to change the bullets to paragraphs written by someone who is talking fro life experience rather than grounded in published science. pangram gave it 100% human generated. go ahead, try it. it boggles me how people believe these ai detectors.
if it makes you feel good the original response from gemini gets 100% AI detection and for that I think pangram should get the credit but in practical terms the empty pots in my yard are more useful than pangram at this point.
> Even if 2/10000 is true that’s nowhere near accurate enough to make aggressive accusations that create anxiety at levels people need to medicate with potentially fatal consequences.
False positives and false negatives are different problems that have different impacts.
Does your single example prove that Pangram doesn't work, or that it doesn't work on short snippets of text? Try to get a detection error on a longer run of text. I'd be curious to see the results, particularly if you can get a false positive.
But here's a bigger problem - Imagine a teacher grading 50 students - 40 of them use AI to write their answers and 10 write honestly. All 40 of them use the hack that I used and get 100% human from pangram and the other 10 also get 100 human from pangram. what is the product really adding to the workflow? Nothing, zero or zilch!!! - but then you come along and say hey at least those 10 honest students also got 100% from pangram. This whole argument of false positives being very very low works if your false negatives are tight which they are not.
'To my knowledge' - okay. In my experience, they're all horrible. I have fooled them both ways - ai generated content that they say is purely human and human generated content that they say is partially AI or just AI.
This is a case of a Kramnik being a crank whom most people did not take seriously, but he still had an impact on the victims.
Fro Kramnik this is a mild penalty.
Some parts of the chess community are very ridiculous.
As a side note because I don’t want anybody to get the wrong idea: Kratom is an opioid and it is not an anxiety treatment. Some people with anxiety try to self-medicate with opioids because they can provide a temporary feeling of well being and euphoria, but they leave the person in worse condition when the effects wear off. This is what leads to the addiction and following dose escalation.
So without passing any judgment on anyone in this story, I would warn anyone else reading this that Kratom is decidedly a very bad way to try to cope with an anxiety condition and the false and fleeting feelings of calm that come from opioids will only bring more problems on top of a difficult mental health situation.
You cannot overdose on plain leaf kratom
At the same time, FIDE also needs to look back at the behavior of some of the most powerful people in the sport in the whole Hans saga. What Hans was put through was ridiculous even if all the allegations were true, given how many actions were simply the result of the most powerful player in the sport throwing his weight around.
I’m not a fan of Hans but I absolutely admire how he managed to continue and grow his career despite the top 2 biggest individuals in the sport, and a whole other set of powerbrokers (for example, the wealthiest tournament in the Sinquefeld cup) teaming up to destroy his career.
So it casts doubt on what Magnus said somewhat
(Of course, on Rogan, I think, Magnus defended the allegations. And of course he's world's strongest player for a reason. Other young players have beaten himm before such as Esipenko and he never said anything like that)
Kramnik ((ab)using his status as a former world champion) accused several other top level players to the point that one of them committed suicide.
Niemann allegedly cheated (In my personal opinion as a decently rated but certainly not elite chess player, he probably did cheat in this particular game, though proof was never given and probably never will) at a high level chess tournament and was ostracized by the chess community for a while. He has since rejoined and continues to play at a high level.
There is no evidence of suicide, and he had multiple drugs in his system when he died.
> he probably did cheat in this particular game
This is a fringe opinion at this point in time, even though it was obvious he did not cheat on day 1.
Polyintoxication is nasty because after the fact, you can't tell if someone underestimated the effects of the drugs or knew about them and used it to guarantee death.
Hans Niemann cheated in online matches when he was younger though
I have no idea why this continues to be a popular opinion among laypeople. Even at the time actual cheating experts using computer analysis determined it to be likely fair play. His accuracy was rather pedestrian, Magnus just had on off day and played terribly. There is no proposed mechanism for how he could even HAVE cheated. He has continued to perform at a similar level under much tighter security enforcement. The primary accusation seems to be that he's poor at explaining the reasoning behind his moves, but anyone who's ever watched a Hans stream can tell you that the man simply cannot speak.
What happened to Hans is FAR worse than anything Kramnik did. But maybe you think it's ok because you find him to be an asshole?
Pretty much every player has done something like that.
But again, he was blacklisted before any of even these marginal allegations were proven. And the actual allegations Magnus accused him of and that followed him for years has absolutely no evidence other than Magnus not accepting that Hans could beat him in a highly controlled over the table game.
Also, he continued to be punished in ways that are outside the actual punishment that was given to him that are not official but are being done through winks and nods between Carlsen and Hikaru and tournament organizers who don’t want to upset them.
And then he admitted that he cheated as a 16 year old in "random games" to boost his online rating. I can't find any instance of him providing a number of how many games he admits to cheating in, but the chess.com report alleged over 100, including when he was 17.
Kramnik engaged in a dedicated bullying and a smear campaign against Danya for a prolonged period, without substantive evidence, and never let up. When Danya explicitly stated in multiple interviews that Kramnik was seriously affecting his mental health, Kramnik persisted in his harassment. When Danya's mental health ultimately led to his death, Kramnik tried to put the blame on everyone but himself, including Danya, his friends and family, even the entire chess community. According to Kramnik, it seems like he is the only one who's completely blameless. It's good that he's being punished, but I think the punishment is too mild. In my opinion he should be stripped of all his titles, including his world titles.
The sad fact is that Kramnik is a pathetic narcissist, who because he's a shadow of his former strength, and a slow old man, gets easily beaten in online blitz, and then accuses people of cheating to protect his wounded ego, because he wants to pretend he hasn't declined.
Now onto my probably crazy conspiracy theory: Russian players like Danil, Nepo and Kramnik have accused American and Indian players baselessly of cheating multiple times over the past few years. They have went to podcasts and implied that their opponents have cheated. Idk if it's some lost national pride in chess or something but accusing others does more harm than good. We've seen how it hurt Hans when he was accused by Magnus of cheating without any evidence. Multiple top level tournaments stopped calling him due to magnus throwing a tantrum cuz he lost.
Doesn’t seem that hard from seeing all the comments here. I make an effort to keep away from chess forums online because of this stuff; most of these people are literally children, like under 14, but you can’t tell online lol.
Not according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Naroditsky ? (Still a tragedy, though; any death is.)
However, it certainly put him into a state of mind of neglect, not caring anymore and not taking care of himself and most importantly, no way out. The words "I cannot play chess anymore without doubt of being accused of cheating, no matter what I do" are haunting to me. At that point he had multiple cameras targeting all screens he had and everything he could see, and it wasn't enough to Kramnik.
At such a point, it feels like arguing semantics.
I wonder how this is enforced.
Just to be clear – this is an event where he has been doing so repeatedly, accusing people of cheating without evidence in-and-of itself isn't forbidden - since cheating in chess is difficult to verify, it's the manner and fashion to which Kramnik has done this that has led to his suspension
Toxicology reports later showed that Naroditsky did die due to the combination of an abnormal heartbeat, sarcoidosis and drugs, specifically methamphetamines and kratom.
Now if you want to speculate that he took those drugs due to the harassment that's a possibility, but claiming he died due to suicide is entirely unsubstatiated and uncalled for.
Kramnik never let off the accelerator.
Drug overdoses are so often a method of suicide it is almost laughable to use that as an argument to defend assholery. Some people are psychopaths and Kramnit screams like one. Zero empathy remorse or event the slightest drop of compassion.