Magnus' evidence of "it didn't seem like he was thinking very hard during critical junctures" is the nail in the coffin for me.

If he has a history of stealing cars AND his new car is hot wired? Possible it's legal? Sure. Let's not twist our hands about a grand theft auto charge, however.

I don’t think you can call the opinion of the famous player who lost about how hard he thought his opponent was thinking during the game evidence without twisting the meaning of the word past the breaking point.

> the opinion of the famous player

This is a hilariously inaccurate description of magnus. He is widely regarded as the greatest chess player to have ever lived. His opinion on what it takes to play high level chess is worth taking extremely seriously. It's not like he has a history of temper tantrums or petulant behavior; he's an upstanding custodian of the mantle of world champion.

Not only is that a logical fallacy (appeal to authority) but magnus lost to him and is claiming cheating which is clearly a huge conflict of interest. His opinion should be heavily scrutinized.

> Not only is that a logical fallacy (appeal to authority)

You know appeal to authorities are not always logical fallacies right? It can be, but it's not a "haha you quoted someone therefore you are wrong". Heavily invested and repeatedly successful individuals can be great sources for information on heuristic endevours.

> magnus lost to him and is claiming cheating which is clearly a huge conflict of interest

Except it is verifiable that he talked about leaving the tournament before even playing him. Therefore his suspicions and problems are older than the result. Also you might be overestimating how much chess players care about losing at that level. They play constantly against each other and most have pretty equal head to heads. Magnus usually is a bit ahead like 5 victories to 3 and then like 15 draws against most of them. Losing once against Hans is not gonna make someone cause all of this.

> His opinion should be heavily scrutinized.

By FIDE sure, not by people online whose knowledge of chess comes from the first Harry potter movie.

> Not only is that a logical fallacy (appeal to authority)

Most things that are called that are not.

This would be a fallacy:

1. World’s best player (to have ever lived)

2. Therefore his opinion is correct

This on the other hand is not a fallacy:

1. Ditto

2. Therefore one should take his opinions on this matter extremely seriously

It’s not fallacious since it doesn’t pretend or present itself as a derived fact.

It’s not an appeal to authority it’s an appeal to expertise.

Well we’ve seen pilots with thousands of flight hours crash into the side of mountain or straight up commit suicide in the air.

Humans are mentally fragile.

Which pilots were the best pilots in the world? At a certain point, expertise does matter.

We're not talking commodity expertise, this person is literally the best to have ever done his craft. And has show the ability to "legitly" lose to others.

Appeal to authority is erroneously invoked so often that it should just be retired as a concept.

You’re not addressing the content of the argument and instead trying to dismiss it because of a phrase I used.

Just because magnus is a world class expert at chess does not necessarily mean he is good at detecting a cheater. Furthermore I would argue that taking an experts “gut feeling” as evidence is a terrible argument.

>You’re not addressing the content of the argument and instead trying to dismiss it because of a phrase I used.

The phrase you used has a well-known meaning. If that wasn't what you meant, then you shouldn't have used it.

Magnus may not be great at spotting a cheater, but his expertise in this game suggests that he could be, and adding that fact to an existing body of evidence isn't even close to committing an appeal to authority fallacy. To bring up that fallacy here is just lazy thinking.

> Magnus may not be great at spotting a cheater, but his expertise in this game suggests that he could be, and adding that fact to an existing body of evidence isn't even close to committing an appeal to authority fallacy.

OP:

> He is widely regarded as the greatest chess player to have ever lived. His opinion on what it takes to play high level chess is worth taking extremely seriously.

- A: Magnus is a great chess player

- B: Magnus claims cheating because "gut"

- C: Therefore Hans cheated

The argument rests solely on the fact that since he's an expert his word should be taken "seriously," heavily implying that Hans cheated.

> To bring up that fallacy here is just lazy thinking.

I disagree and you're not going to convince me otherwise with statements like this one.

You are intentionally misrepresenting the argument, to the point of being outright dishonest. The main piece of evidence in this comment thread is that Hans cheated in the past, not Magnus's expertise. So your letter A should be about Hans admitting to cheating, and somewhere further down--maybe C or D--would mention Magnus's expertise, if you were trying to debate in good faith (which you're not).

As for his "gut" feeling being part of the argument, you're not quoting anyone here; you are again intentionally misrepresenting what others are saying.

If you're going to analyze an argument someone else is making, be honest about it or there is really no point in discussing anything with you.

> So your letter A should be about Hans admitting to cheating

you're not quoting anyone here; you are again intentionally misrepresenting what others are saying.

If you're going to analyze an argument someone else is making, be honest about it or there is really no point in discussing anything with you.

> not like he has a history of temper tantrums or petulant behavior;

He absolutely does. People forget because he so rarely loses a classical game. But he almost always shows petulant behavior when he loses an important classical game.

> It's not like he has a history of temper tantrums or petulant behavior

Is this a joke? He literally does have a history of being a sore loser.

> He is widely regarded as the greatest chess player to have ever lived.

By whom exactly? He has a large fan club on the internet and uses modern social network very well but I don’t think there is a wide consensus that he is better than Kasparov at his prime. I personally don’t believe him to be better than neither Fischer nor Botvinnik but that’s only me and is impossible to verify anyway.

And no, his opinion against his own opponent after suffering an embarrassing defeat poorly playing with white doesn’t hold much credibility.

His peers, lol?

Well he does have the highest ELO of all time, no?

It seems like ELO skill ratings fall apart when comparing players of two different eras, since ELO Ratings involve the skill level of your opponents too.

Maybe a better metric would be running both players games through a computer to see the "%best move" metric?

> Maybe a better metric would be running both players games through a computer to see the "%best move" metric?

Due to computers being common place now, Magnus would absolutely destroy that metric compared to older eras. Chess has changed a ton in the past 10-20 years due to computers, being able to analyse lines. And now Magnus is known for playing "Ai Lines" which is the kind of stuff the new ML models do which tends to be pretty bonkers and un-human but gets long term results.

Is he the Champion of all time in cheating. I doubt that.

I lost all respect I had for him. If you don't have foolproof evidence, you take your loss like a professional.

It's not inaccurate because Carlsen is famous.

I don't think you can casually dismiss the ability of one of the greatest chess players to ever live to identify when his opponents are engaged, concentrating and thinking hard, and when they are not, without twisting common sense past its breaking point either.

> calling how hard he thought his opponent was thinking during the game evidence

we can't accept Magnus's testimony on this point, but we can understand that Magnus can consider it himself to be evidence, and he's simply telling us that's what he's doing.

I also think Magnus believes he has additional information about the extent of Hans's cheating, and that's what he can't share without Hans's permission, probably Hans's logs of his online activity that chess.com has, or something like that.

> Magnus' evidence of "it didn't seem like he was thinking very hard during critical junctures" is the nail in the coffin for me.

But is it hotwired? That's speculation from someone who just lost a race to them.

My issue with this is that it's all circumstantial evidence. If you suspect someone of cheating but can't show it, then enact some anti-cheating provisions and move on. We can't have a rule of law based on just the suspicions of interested parties.

Of course we can rule out people by past cheating. Technology changes, it makes it easier to cheat but harder to hide cheating history (as most of the games between people at this time are online). Rules have to adapt to technology.

You can punish people for past cheating. But you can't say "he cheated before, therefore he's cheating now and that's why he won." I've seen that sentiment a bit too often.

I'm not sure if letting the chess players be the arbiters of this is the best course of action though.

Nobody is claiming they should be. FIDE isn’t banning Hans based on Magnus’s vague suspicions, as indeed they shouldn’t.

Magnus is just refusing to invest time and energy (and rating points) to play against someone he doesn’t like, which is absolutely his right. Nobody has the right to force Magnus or anyone else to play against them.

I think you might want to read the rules of chess tournaments. You will quickly realise that in fact Magnus doesn’t have a choice of who he plays against and can’t actually resign for no reason.

Can you please explain what you are insinuating?

Magnus just recently quit a tournament and resigned a game in another one, storngy suggesting that you are mistaken.

I am not insinuating anything. I am stating that tournaments have rules which include a format – determining which player another player encounters – and sportsman behaviours and terms of play. Most were put in place to avoid players throwing games to get more rest and avoid collusion.

For exemple, Carlsen had to play at least one move for the game not to be forfeited and I’m fairly sure he is running afoul a sportsman behaviour rules by resigning on move one but the tournament isn’t pressing because he is Magnus.

You have the choice of which tournaments to play in though.

What rule is there against resigning?

I'm not sure about the specifics of chess, but in most other kinds of competitions there are either explicit rules against or implicit agreements not to resign too early, i.e. throwing the match. If you resign when you are not actually losing, you are advantaging your opponent over all other players in the tournament (this matters a lot for tournaments with round-based elimination).

That reason makes sense, and there are certainly rules in tournaments against early draws, but I'd never heard of a rule against resigning early. My understanding of Magnus playing one move was that you couldn't resign until the game started, so he just started the game and resigned immediately, but maybe that's mistaken.

I guess it hasn't come up much since the personal loss of losing a game is usually pretty great at a high level. Maybe we'll see such rules after Magnus' resignation.

I agree with you, and I think throwing the game against Hans was poor form. My point was just that he has the right not to enter future tournaments to which Hans is invited.

> Magnus is just refusing to invest ... (and rating points)

I think resigning on move 2 might just be investing rating points to avoid investing time and energy... not avoiding investing them.

I’m confident Magnus doesn’t care about his rating on chess24.com.

Was this tournament also FIDE rated? I genuinely don’t know and can’t find that information via google.

It was not FIDE rated, no online tournament has been

found the car analogy

Yep. Car analogies are the Rolls Royces of analogies.

That's not a complete analogy tho. Everyone knows Hans cheated in the past. But Magnus is going beyond that and saying that Hans cheated in the over-the-board game against him.

Coming back to your analogy. So now imagine this person suddenly has a new shiny car but he also has the Title and registration for that car. Not only that, someone reported him to the cops and the cops said that the car is not stolen. He also has income tax returns that show that he has a legit source of income. Would it be natural for a reasonable person to assume that theft is the most likely explanation?

I don’t understand your analogy. There’s no evidence that Hans didn’t cheat in the game against Magnus. This isn’t Hans’s fault, as it’s hard to imagine what such evidence could even be possible, but the fact remains that there’s nothing comparable to having the title, etc. to a car.

He has been caught of cheating online. Where you just open a new window and follow engine moves. Or you have a friend sitting beside you giving engine moves.

In his over-the-board match, he didn't have a laptop. He didn't have a friend giving him moves. He didn't have any communication device. He was mostly looking at the board or into the distance while he was playing. He was scanned with a metal detector. So we know he definitely didn't use any of his earlier methods of cheating if he even did cheat. Carlsen's statement confirms that his preparation wasn't leaked or hacked. I count these as evidence of him not cheating with his usual MO.

But in your analogy, it's completely possible for the guy to have used his usual MO to steal the new shiny car.

Now of course I'm not saying he didn't cheat. It's possible he used some other sophisticated method of cheating. But it would not be natural for a reasonable person to assume that theft using his usual MO is the most likely explanation.

There is a video explaining how Hans played ten 100% games (his moves matching 100% moves of what an engine would do) in the last three years and a lot of >90%:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfPzUgzrOcQ

For reference, Magnus at his best does a 70% match with engines, and between 70-75% is historically enough to earn you the World Championship. This guy is consistently over 80%, come on.

Reminds me of Lance Armstrong: a mediocre 90's cyclist that suddenly becomes the best in history, in such dominant fashion that I think everybody suspected something, but without proof you cannot do nothing about it.

And here's Hikaru's video examining the Yosha's evidence by comparing it to games he and other GMs have played. There's definitely something going on with Hans having so many >90% games, when the other higher rated players struggle to 80%.

https://youtu.be/qjtbXxA8Fcc

Exactly. And Nakamura takes in that video the position that 100% is the perfect game. It's not. 100% means you made exactly the same moves an engine would made, but engines sometimes have two best moves with only a minimal preference for one of them. Those decisions are the ones that made Nakamura best games "mere" 80'ish%, in less important moves he did the second bests according to the engine.

If you are a top player and cheat, you would only require a couple of decisions here an there in complex positions, and the games would be still at roughly 75%. But if you don't fully understand the line, or you're not in the zone, and the engine suggest something crazy (but winner) you need all the following moves.

Yet Magnus decided to play him. Only after losing he decided not to. Which means it's not simply about his past.

>Would it be natural for a reasonable person to assume that theft is the most likely explanation?

Based off of their previous behavior of stealing cars? Yes it would absolutely be the most likely explanation. Under such a circumstance, it would simply mean that their skill at stealing cars has improved to now include forging documents, and possibly bribing police.

Given their passed behavior, the objective is no longer for you to prove guilt, but for them to prove innocence. It is illogical to continually approach accusations of theft, or cheating, under a neutral assumption when a pattern emerges.

If you own ten chickens and come out one morning to nine, and a pile of feathers next to a fox, you have your culprit. Should you wander around demanding to see feathers each time another chicken goes missing before you blame the fox sleeping at your doorstep? The fox is there. There are fewer chickens. The easiest answer is the most likely.

There is enough certainty for the alternative to be inconsequential.

Please don't make blatantly false statements.