In my opinion, this sort of ad-hoc stereotyping weakens the rest of the analysis. There are plenty of counterexamples.

Anand, a former world champion, became a GM at age 19 and is still ranked World No. 9 currently (at age 52). Ding Liren (Current No. 2) became a GM at 17. Grischuk (currently No. 17, peak No.3) became a GM at 17. All three have crossed 2800 ELO at some point.

I hope this is not the sort of analysis that chess.com has run in the other 71 pages of the report.

> Anand, a former world champion, became a GM at age 19

At the age of 18: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viswanathan_Anand#Early_chess_...

Also, according 2700chess.com he was #96 in the world with a rating of 2520 on January 1988. That's right after turning 18. Growing up in India (before the chess boom). Before chess engines existed. 6 months later he was #49 in the world. https://2700chess.com/players/anand

A year earlier (at 17), he had won the world junior chess championship (U-20). Not exactly a "strange meteoric rise" for Anand. The "GM at 18".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Junior_Chess_Championshi...

Meanwhile, at the same age of 18 (already during his covid boost), on July of 2021, Hans Niemann was #20 among all juniors (U-20), with a rating of 2571. Close to #300 on the global rating list: https://ratings.fide.com/profile/2093596/top https://ratings.fide.com/profile/2000059

Unlike Anand, no achievements of note until then (ok, he was 9th at U-16 World Youth Chess Championships in 2019). A year later he's a top 40 player, hanging out with the best and beating the (incredibly dominating) world champion with the black pieces. Make it make sense.

Also, take a look at this analysis of correlation between average (and stddev) of move accuracy vs rating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnnJ0Da4Rp0 - explained in the detail

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5nEFaRdwZY - analysis applied to several players

Thanks for the pointer to Milky Chess YT videos. The first one at 13.41 minutes has a clincher argument regarding a flat Centipawn loss at 2300 ELO and 2600 ELO. Don't think, another argument is needed.

This is all pointless comparisons though. Hans made his improvements during Covid times and The Queen's Gambit boom in online chess. Even if it's an extraordinary thing to happen we were in extraordinary times.

> Hans made his improvements during Covid times

None of the similarly rated players at the same age did anything similar during "Covid times and The Queens' Gambit boom".

Watch the videos I linked at the end of my comment and tell me how covid times contribute to that anomaly.

Unless they make a concrete accusation of cheating I'm not really interested. These circumstantial accusations all boil down to "something unusual happened" but the world is full of unusual things happening. Nobody, AFAICT, has come out and said "Hans cheated in X OTB event. He did so by getting Y information by Z method".

IMHO everyone needs to either put up hard evidence or shut up.

> Make it make sense.

Hans Niemann didn't win the game. The incredibly dominating world champion lost it. He bodged the game and then threw a tantrum calling the other, weaker, player a cheater to save face because he couldn't stomach his own incompetence.

The rest is what is called "circumstantial evidence" in the lay press.

Yea generally I wouldn't characterise the report as being a glimmering indication of the scientific quality of the chess.com cheat detection team.

Even the graphs look a lot like copy-paste jobs from excel, which is fine obviously, but not the sort of thing I'd expect competent scientists/data-scientists/developers to be doing, especially for a big public report where some of the formatting issues are just about readability and basic presentation quality. Like Figures F and G (page 14) ... why are they styled so differently? Same question applies to many of the graphs, which isn't to mention label font sizes either.

Beyond that, yea I'd say good amounts of the data and logic are pretty basic and wouldn't be surprising from an amateur on the internet. The main thing chess.com have seems to be their Strength Score algorithm, which IMO is probably developed and maintained by a team different from the one that prepared this report.

Good design skills have zero correlation with good data analysis skills.

Honestly wonder how much of a HN crowd viewpoint that is. I'm not sure there's too much "correlation" between the two. Instead I'd say that if your job involves communication and data, then that necessitates decent visualisations and whatever "design skills" that entails.

Honestly, you don't need "design skills" to make a decent graph ... just the wherewithal to think about what would make a graph clearer/easier to understand the same we expect of ourselves with writing.

That wherewithal is the design skill. Some people have it, some don't. Some are good with data too, some not.

Ok ... then aren't we stretching the term "design skill" too thinly then, to the point of disrespecting the actual skillset?

I suspect there'd be a tendency to presume a design process is more like solving a problem with a clear techniques for arriving at an objectively correct solution, when in reality, it can and often if just the iterative process of assessing-adjusting-repeat. Being better at these things to the point of sometimes reducing the iterative loop to 0 repeats is "design skill". But the essential base-line ingredient, IMO, is being willing to enter the iterative cycle at least to some extent.

I might even go so far as to say it’s negative correlation.

I’ve seen wonderful and factual data analysis presented in the most horrible default templates and hacked together screenshots.

IMHO unless line three of the table on page 5 is a typo it conclusively proves that their analysis is bunk. In every other line they think he cheated 100% of the games. But for line three it's only 12 out of 32. Of the 11 events in that table he had his 2nd highest rating in that event.

That obviously shouldn't be possible. If he only cheated in 1/3 of the games in the event then his performance should have been much worse than events where he cheated 100% of the time.

And I don't understand how they can say this:

>However, while Hans has had a record-setting and remarkable rise in rating and strength, in our view there is a lack of concrete statistical evidence that he cheated in his game with Magnus or in any other over-the-board (“OTB”)—i.e., in-person—games.

So what the hell? They pored over his OTB games, found no evidence of cheating, but then wrote 70 more pages? And even the circumstantial evidence is weak. They base a lot on Hans having unusually late improvements. But it's not like they're an order of magnitude better. He's slightly better than #2. And it's a simple fact that someone is going to have a late career rise that is better than anyone else. It's not evidence of cheating.

IMHO, Magnus or Chess.com need to pony up some hard evidence or STFU.

Don't forget Sam Shankland! He became a GM at the age of 20 and is now one of the top players in the world (Super GM status)

Levon Aronian (former No. 2, current No. 10, achieved the 4th highest Elo rating of all time) only became a grandmaster at age 17.

The trouble I have is, that Hans is 19. Given the accusations and his own confession, he is a life long cheater in contrast to traditional GMs. Hans confessed to have cheated at age 12 and 16.

Since cheating is arguable habit forming, he simply based his career on cheating. Where others put in the mileage, he invested in his cheating expertise.

He cheated as a child during a stressful period that children still need to figure out how to deal with. I think it’s very unreasonable to cancel someone over things they did as a child, much less to cancel them IRL over things they did as a child in an online game.

We have evidence of a sustained period of cheating that he then lied about and obfuscated as a legal adult. This is not just a childish mistake. A teenager, in particular a person capable of being a professional chess player, can fully understand the ramifications of these sorts of actions.

What about the stress of the players he's cheated against?

Except the only reason we know is because chess.com said so. He hasn't exactly come clean about it, he's been lying about this whole time. It's fair to judge him for his childhood cheating if he is still lying about it as an adult.

>... he is a life long cheater in contrast to traditional GMs.

Is this an accurate statement given that, because of this report, we are now aware that a lot of other GMs have cheated as well?

Another explanation is simply that, if you reach early adulthood without deciding to devote your life to becoming good at chess, you are unlikely to do it later. Becoming among the best in the world at anything requires not only natural talent but also focused, almost monomaniacal work, and if you haven't started doing that (for chess) by your mid-teens, it's hard to see why you would start.

If, for some reason, you decided to drop your budding music/engineering/whatever career at age 20 to focus entirely on chess, and you had the natural aptitude to be able to become a GM, perhaps it could happen. But rarely would a person decide to do that, if they had not prior to that point.

Brain plasticity is real. If I dropped everything and devoted my life to studying Chinese I would still never learn to speak it as well as a child who grew up in China.

I think both effects have something to do with it.

Definitely brain plasticity is real, but there are people who learn to speak languages as adults, with native proficiency. I recall hearing on the radio, people in India who (as adults) learned a Midwestern US accent, because they were doing phone support and they could get through each phone call quicker if the old person on the other end of the line wasn't confused by an Indian accent. I am a midwesterner, and I could not detect anything "off" in their midwestern accent, even though I knew they were Indian.

In other words, you can only learn a language natively, if you have some good reason to do so, like say money.

But, your basic point that both effects have something to do with it, is surely correct.

Actually I did something similar - learned to speak French with no perceptible foreign accent at age 17 (unfortunately my abilities have decayed in the intervening years, so I’m sure now I’d sound American, but anyway…)

However, accent is only one part of language. I certainly didn’t have the vocabulary, reading speed, writing elegance, etc. of (educated) native speakers.

Aronian was a late bloomer. No evidence here at all.

How representative is Aronian as an example of skill trajectories in chess?

> How representative is Aronian as an example of skill trajectories in chess?

It doesn't really matter, does it? There's a big difference between telling someone "if you're not a GM by age 14 [but actually I mean 15], then don't bother, it's hopeless" and "a typical top-level player reaches GM by age 14, but it is possible to reach that level even if you are a relatively 'late bloomer'." I'd prefer not to err on the side of telling people not to try.

as a rule it is decidedly uncouth in our society to use population statistics when speaking in terms of ability or potential, as the act of making those statements can bias real world abilities and potentials by setting expectations of limits.

>It doesn't really matter, does it?

It's literally the single most important fact in this context.

If there are lots of people like Aronian, then there's nothing out of the ordinary about the evolution of Hans Neiman as a player. If he's a rare and unusual example, he shouldn't be cited to suggest Hans' skill growth is within the norm.

>I'd prefer not to err on the side of telling people not to try.

This is a non-sequitur.

There's a big difference between "[if you're not a GM by age 14], it is unlikely that you can reach the top levels of chess." and "..then don't bother, it's hopeless". The former statement is perfectly valid, nobody saying that it's hopeless

> nobody saying that it's hopeless

Well, it's a report about cheating which is essentially claiming that if you're not a GM by age 14, then you must be cheating. Which is...kind of the same thing.

It literally does not say that. What do you want them to do? Leave out all the weird or suspicious stuff so that some other commenter will swing by and complain that they didn't analyze it?

The conclusion of their report is repeated several times; no evidence of OTB cheating.

> Leave out all the weird or suspicious stuff so that some other commenter will swing by and complain that they didn't analyze it?

I don't think any serious commenters are going to complain about the absence of stereotypes about "the greats" unbacked by statistical analysis. That is what is bad. The actual analysis of anomalously fast progress at equivalent ages is fine.

The exception the proves the rule?

One of the stupidest phrases vert.

Almost by definition the exception disproves the rule.

There’s literally no logical sense in which the exception can prove the rule unless the rule is not really a rule but more of a suggestion.

Yeah it's pretty much exclusively used incorrectly. The original meaning was that an exception to a rule proves that such a rule exists. For example, "no parking on Sunday" is an exception that implies that parking on any day except Sunday is okay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule

It honestly doesn't bother me as much as when people incorrectly say "begs the question" when they mean "raises the question" but I think we're long past the point of us ever correcting any of these.

One note about parking - normally all actions (incl. parking) are allowed, unless they are explicitly forbidden. Lack of any other rules/guidance implies the parking is allowed.

That’s a fairly generic statement, have you confirmed that rule to be true across every city/state/country across the globe?

Most of the sports starts tend to start very very young. Some more true than others, like how most ice skating Olympic winners are sub 18. More true for classical music as well.

But not all of them have immediate success. Look at someone like Kurt Warner. It took him until his senior year to start at the University of Northern Iowa. Then he plays 3 years for the Iowa Barnstormers in Arena Football and 1 year for Amsterdam in NFL Europe.

Finally he gets on a NFL roster as 3rd string for St Louis. Cleveland skips picking him in the expansion draft. The Rams sign a different starting QB and trade away #2 QB leaving Warner as the backup. The starter gets hurt and with basically no first team practices Warner gets named the starter.

After all that and starting for the first time in the NFL at age 28 he has one of the best statistical seasons ever for QB and wins the MVP and Superbowl. Goes on to win the MVP again and has a 10 year HOF career.

If we apply Chess.com's logic he's the biggest cheater that ever cheated. But obviously he's not because you can't really cheat at QB in the NFL.

> > While that statement may seem discouraging, it has been borne out in modern chess.

Totally unnecessary sentence that just leads to derailment (like in this subthread).

> > The conventional wisdom is that if you are not a GM by age 14, it is unlikely that you can reach the top levels of chess.

This is confusing correlation and causation.

One thing that people don't realize is the sheer amount of money required to become a "GM". You have to get a certain number of "norms" from FIDE and the requirements list is a PITA: https://chessgoals.com/how-to-get-a-grandmaster-norm/

If you don't have a lot of money and a lot of free time to go to a lot of chess tournaments around the world, you are not getting a "GM" title in this day and age. This favors children (few time constraints) with rich parents (lots of coaching along with the ability to travel).

The problem is that if you aren't a "chess prodigy" by 15 it generally isn't worth continuing to pursue--what does sinking the resources into being a "GM" get you at the end? If you're one of the "Chess Gods", you have entry into the tournaments anyway, and, if you're not, it doesn't really matter.

This also ignores a once in a century pandemic.

It’s an absolutely ridiculous basis to make a claim.

> This also ignores a once in a century pandemic.

Hans Niemann was almost 17 years old when the pandemic started. When he turned 15 (June 2018) his rating was 2313, almost 200 points (an immense gulf at that level) below the minimum to become a grandmaster.

A name that basically means “John Nobody” is pretty curious.

That's why I quit playing seriously when I was still an underclassman. It was overwhelmingly obvious that merely being well above average was completely irrelevant, and there was absolutely no practical reason for me to play chess whatsoever. Although it did subsequently get me laid once or twice, which in retrospect still surprises me.

> Although it did subsequently get me laid once or twice, which in retrospect still surprises me.

!

I see what you did there. :)

You even managed a double-entendre in 2 completely different realms. Well done.

Don't leave us hanging!

Imagine how barren a sport/hobby/field is when you feel compelled to point out that you had sex two times during your stint in it.

I didn't know there was a thriving chess groupie scene

> It was overwhelmingly obvious that merely being well above average was completely irrelevant

I find this true for any semi-competitive endeavor that doesn't also have intrinsic extra benefits. You're going to hit the people who want it more than you and are willing to put in the practice time, and they're going to beat you.

Consequently, any competitive thing I do has to also have an extra dimension to it. A competitive sport is generally fine since I'm getting in better shape. I'm happy to do stuff like darts or bowling if it has a high social aspect to it. As long as I can be slightly above average and that's good enough and there is some extra benefit, I'm down with it.

Chess, sadly, generally fulfills none of those criteria.

Wisdom is an obstacle to material success.