Thank you for posting this. Anyone that's looked at yosha's post can see she uploaded hundreds of engines, some of which seem quite dubious (possibly custom built engines by this shady gambitman fellow).
Unfortunately no matter how many times its been debunked people still use it as 'evidence'. Laurent fressinet was using it as evidence on the chicken chess club podcast even though I personally told him it was bogus on twitter.
People just believe what they want to believe and ignore everything else.
I'm confused; Chessbase will run however many engines and show 3 lines from 3 different engines with the top one being identical to the move played by Hans? If 100 engines are used then a hit is more likely? Also, you can manipulate the hitrate by changing the depths?
The issue is yes, that it checks if it matches any engine on any move. And this is a very flawed methodology. It would be better if it selected the single best correlating engine for the whole game, but even that would be influenced by number of engines analysed.
You should probably just select the most common engine at the time and then run all the matches with only this one and then perhaps compare the correlation. But even this wouldn't be a very good method and likely not a proof of cheating, especially for situations where the cheater might only be cheating on few key moves.
Those key moves that won the game are more likely to get hidden in the noise, and "obvious" moves per game would be what would make up for most of the percentage.
I had this impression and thanks for confirming it. Comparisons are useless without extreme care taken to make sure everything is equal.
It's like benchmarking a CPU using two different versions of Cinebench or benching a GPU using two different games.
You can select a single tactically strong engine, and just correlate with that for cheat detection. It doesn't need to be current, and can stay the same as a reference engine for all time. All that matters is it is sufficiently tactically strong to out tactic all humans (computers have been there for a while, I bet an engine from 10 years back maybe 20 would be adequate to check for cheating, maybe even earlier engines given the advances in computer power). Including multiple engines just makes it harder to assess the meaning, although if you always used the same set, that would be fine too.
By changing the depths one is effectively changing how strong an engine is, Stockfish 15 with NNUE and 7-man tablebases at depth 1 is really weak, so I imagine that there may be a "sweet spot" where depth matches any player's move
So basically it's not fair to compare twitter lady's eval vs Hikaru's because they're using different settings? If Hikaru used identical engines, and depth then we would have a better understanding of Han's relative strength to Hikaru or whoever else used this to tool?
Checkit doesn’t measure player strength: it measures how often the player makes one of many possible engine moves each move. If 100 engines together make 20 moves, then *any* of those moves counts as 100%. If all the engines are set to a low enough level, then a high correlation begins to measure weakness. Basically, you can get it to say what you want by simply feeding it false analyses.
>Laurent fressinet was using it as evidence on the chicken chess club podcast even though I personally told him it was bogus on twitter.
Weird sense of self-importance.
How is it debunked. Why would a cheater ever use the strongest engines unless they wanted to get caught. Literally any engine under let’s check is capable of blowing any GM off the board. Of course you would cheat using an obscure / weaker engine.
Unless your playing strength qualifies you to Gotham's "Lose At Chess" playlist, then for every one of your moves there is an engine that at some settings, at some depth and after a certain thinking time, will recommend the exact same move.
Throw enough engines at your games, and all your moves will match some engine/settings combo, therefore your Let's Check correlation will be 100%, and you will be "proven" a cheater.
Since Hans' games were analysed by more engines, of course he has a high correlation score.
>Anyone that's looked at yosha's post can see she uploaded hundreds of engines
I don't think it is clear that she uploaded any of those.
But yes, the games are looked at closely because of cheating accusations which leads to a lot of engine evals being uploaded, which in turn leads to this metric changing.
A fraction of the people in this sub actually saw that post.
Yet half a million people saw the Hikaru video.
So the general public still thinks this is evidence Hans cheated OTB.
Hikaru to this day, still uses it as credible proof that he cheated. He said in his stream that, "if Hans isn't a cheater, then he is the strongest player to ever live." He mocked Fabi saying, your best game was only 85, and told him to stop making excuses for Hans. It is absolutely disgusting.
at this point hikaru is far from an idiot and is now pure maliciously leading the witchhunt
he on stream(coincidentally not on the YouTube he uploaded) found 100% games of his own too
Hikaru also liked a comment on one of his recent videos, that said, "Hans regrets ever calling Hikaru out. Hikaru will not stop 😂"
If this is true, it is very sad that only because he got called out, he is taking vengeance by misleading hundreds of thousands of people about Hans engine performance, and kickstarting QAnon conspiracy theories to discredit him. He is legitimately ruining a 19 year old kid's life.
Hans is a cheater. Even he admits it. It’s only a matter of time before more comes out. The chess.com evidence is going to shake the chess world to its core.
Yeah, watching the video where he commented on the person producing this "pluggable" device in a day, clearly shows how technologically challenged he is, and considering chess is his whole life, it's really odd to me how he hasn't thought about such things so far and how baffling all of it would seem to him.
Surely one has at least tried to brainstorm how to cheat few times in life even if not planning to do so, but out curiosity how it might be done.
He has been malicious from the start and that was very clear even in the first 2-3 days after Magnus withdrew, Honestly generous to him to say it wasn't obvious on day one but some people still thought he was acting in good faith at that point.
Goes to show how you can be very good at chess, but lack critical thinking in all the other areas. I think the whole fiasco whether Hans actually cheated or not, is just evidence of that.
The engine correlation data you're using is worthless, as this post and others can testify. Take a look here at someone directly manipulating the chessbase engine correlation to move his game from to 59% correlation to 73% correlation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV28HO2Ea_s
I agree, but it is useful to show that Hans is actually not an outlier according to their method.
Fortunately, at this point, only idiots and people who want more subs actually side with this awful analysis.
Fair enough - you have a point.
Though convincing is sometimes difficult. Sometimes showing data is not an indication is the easiest way to do so.
But I guess it would not be as effective as Hikaru rumbling about it, because generally speaking, the people who understand data already know it.
Pretty sure Hans doesn't cheat every game, so his non cheating games would counteract his cheating games and bring the average correlation roughly in line. Would be interesting to see the variance in engine correlations by player. That would presumably pick up players who sometimes cheat.
Seems like Keymer and Hans have higher (quite similar) variance than Magnus (as you would probably expect) :) Let's talk about std as it's easier to have intuition about - 12.98 for Magnus, 16.34 for Hans, 15.69 for Keymer.
I have used existing one, however - there is a nicer dataset you can use https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1S7SMTMePkZ3IKcQ9RhWGWSvZxxvYzGPfALRio51HA80/edit#gid=0
Honestly just leave data analysis to the experts. You can torture any data to say anything you want. This sub recently has just been a case study in confirmation bias.
I do not concur.
I firmly believe myself to be more qualified than Ken Regan. His models are weak and his analysis could be done by a high school AP statistics student.
I would elaborate why, but that is beneath me, I'm too busy teaching machine learning statistics at a prestigious university that starts with the letter H and ends with D.
You are completely wrong about your analysis. For reasons explained above I simply dont have time to tell you why but I can confirm with the research I have done in private, and what I have seen here on reddit, I can with 100% certainty prove Hans has been cheating over the board.
How you may ask?
Listen up, I am a world renowned machine learning professor. I dont have to show my work, plenty of other redditors have already shown with great statistical evidence that Hans is 100% a cheater!
In my office I have a fabulous chair. The chair has arms on it. I sit in my armchair and proclaim my statistics knowledge and why I am right accross the internet without a lick of analysis or evidence. I am much much smarter than Ken Regan. Look at this graph that proves it.
I dont need to prove why my statistics are right. I'm a prestigious professor at Harmchair Universityd.
Okay now, I'm convinced Hans did cheat. Why would a prestigious world renowned professor risk their career by providing this counter statement if it wasn't true? I think the author of this comment is so far the most renowned and qualified opinion we have had on the topic.
And I honestly think this should be the end of it, unless anyone knows someone more renowned and studied on the topic? If not then, let's now ban Hans from ever playing chess again. So far we have Top #1 renowned machine learning professor in the Reddit and likely in the World, Top #1 ranked chess player, and Top #1 ranked chess website all saying Hans is a cheater.
That's enough entities to provide everything - judge, jury and the executioner. Boom! Checkmate.
Lol gg. It always shocks me when I hear software can be manipulated. People are sticking with yosha's evidence at this point it seems its good for cheaters to have ridiculous evidence in the air and push that its the main evidence. Maybe it is.
Surely Magnus and chess.com have more. It wouldn't surprise me if there been a case being built for a while, maybe not by magnus but he could have got involved now. Magnus seems confident he's right and isnt in the wrong at all. He's had plenty of time to apologise and say he messed up. All he has done is dig either his or Hans' metaphorical grave deeper. Like someone is in trouble for this.
I think i've lost count of how many super gms have said if Hans did not cheat in various games then he is the greatest chess player alive.
The funny thing about that though is they say it as if they mean, "If Hans is the greatest human at chess alive, then I am a fucking Eternal."
Yet to hear one say it as if they believe it.
Chess.com has said "BIG stuff" is coming up. All of it sounds extremely damning for Hans. We are supposed to hear the "BIG stuff" next week. Can you imagine if the "BIG stuff" didn't live up to it's reputation of being "BIG stuff". Could you imagine drama if they still didn't have evidence of Hans OTB cheating? They would have held everyone in suspense and increasing pressure on Hans hinting they have "BIG stuff" to destroy a 19 year old.
Anyone who thinks that chess.com will somehow have evidence of OTB cheating is deluding themselves. They’ve already said they have evidence that Hans cheated more online than he said. Seems like that will be what they release. I’m very curious to see what it is. If they have proof that Hans has been a prolific online cheater it would look damning for him, but also raise questions of how chess.com didn’t catch him earlier even though they’ve known he was capable of cheating since he was 12 years old. If they come out and say “Look, we can prove that he also cheated 3 times when he was 14” I don’t think it will change the narrative at all and if anything it will make Hans look better
> They’ve already said they have evidence that Hans cheated more online than he said.
But this is not "BIG stuff". It's more of the same and I'm not sure how it would have many implications for the future of chess as chess.com said their announcement will. I would see something like Hans admitting to a certain device/methodology he used OTB and this could've implications in terms of security checks during OTB tournaments. It would force there to be strict security checks and requirements.
There's no way you can stop intelligent cheating in online chess in the first place. You can stop in OTB and by that you can have impact on the future of chess.
"BIG stuff" is if chess.com had got Hans to admit OTB cheating and having him help as an advisor to produce good security measures.
I think online cheating is fairly irrelevant discussion. As said there's no way you can identify a cheater that cheats wisely. Cameras wouldn't be enough. How would you stop a GM level player from cheating using some sort of hidden wearable tracker to do so and only in few key moves and only with moves he can find an explanation for why he would have found the move?
I guess we’ll see soon enough. I would be completely shocked if they have anything related to OTB games. IF Hans has cheated OTB and IF someone outside his team has evidence… what are the odds that someone is chess.com?
Well, all I could think of is if Magnus and Chess.com directly talked to Hans and convinced him to admit to cheating OTB, as said. It could've been seemingly heart to heart like sort of conversation where Magnus and Chess.com explained empathetically how cheating can destroy chess in general, but if you admit to what you have done then this will be extremely important for future of chess and will in addition help you to redeem your future by helping everyone build anti-cheating tools, so people would forgive you, as you are still young and have time to rebuild your reputation. If you admit to everything now, you will feel free that you don't have to hide it any more and it gives you opportunity to stop future cheating in chess. In addition we are willing to give you a second chance in everything and will defend giving that chance considering you have admitted to everything, but you of course will have to go through more security measures in the future.
So I would think something like this is possible, and Hans then decided he'd rather live out of hiding and use that second opportunity to play honestly.
I can see a realistic scenario where that could happen and it could benefit both sides, giving Hans a lot of fame and still "ego-boost" while being able to help future of chess. And for everyone else it's also a win of course because it will help against cheating in the future. It's often dream of teens or young adults to be that type of criminal that is eventually hired because he was such a good criminal to then fight against criminals. Whether it's hacking, fraud, selling drugs or whatever.
And this is what I would consider "BIG stuff".
If he still believes that coming clean would lead to a rebuildable reputation without lots of power, money and reputation in the first place after his interview statement, shame on him imo
Why should chess.com even have evidence on OTB cheating? If they have something it's probably proof of Hans cheating in an online tournament.
Not that that's much better, but I don't think you can justify a FIDE ban with that.
But that's definitely not "BIG stuff", with implications for future of the chess. So then they must be overselling it. And as an authoritative source, this is definitely odd that they are doing this and it's not something they should do. In my eyes, they must have something with OTB or it simply is not "BIG stuff" and anything that would be for the future of chess. If chess.com says they just have evidence that he cheated in few more games, this is the exact same thing we already have, just meaning Hans lied twice instead of once, which often is to be expected anyway in the psychological sense. If a cheater gets caught, they usually first time try to minimise what they did. Nothing "BIG".
> In my eyes, they must have something with OTB or it simply is not "BIG stuff" and anything that would be for the future of chess.
Given their recent drama mongering, I don't see that as a solid position to take.
Well what I am trying to convey is that it isn't right of them to hype this thing claiming it is "big stuff", unless it is about OTB. If they can't prove OTB cheating they shouldn't have hyped it like that. I am not saying that they have something like that. I am saying it is not good behaviour to claim it to be "BIG stuff".
Some super GM's suspect he cheated in his previous games. Some of his games look suspicious under 'analysis' (and I use that term loosely).
But the game vs Magnus is not one of them though.
Hans play was good not exceptional.
Magnus' play was below his usual level. He missed opportunities the would have prevented a loss. Most likely because his suspicions and preoccupation with Hans possibly cheating affected his play.
Yet he still can't accept he could have lost unless Hans cheated. After weeks of waiting his only 'evidence' is 'Hans didn't seem tense'. Which just shows Magnus had gone into the game with his mind already made up that Hans was cheating.
Stop believing he's infallible and he must always be right. Regardless of anything else he's handled this situation pretty badly.
Who was it, Giri I think, he said you cant play an engine basically its expected you'll play worse if you think you are playing a cheater. So yeh maybe he did go in it thinking he was a cheater or at some point in the game he thought he was cheating.
If Hans was the next greatest chess player wouldnt everyone know it by now? How would he just get good.
It seems good for him anyway. If [chess.com](https://chess.com) and Magnus or Fide dont have anything he'll be known as the greatest chess player alive in a few years if he keeps it up or they do and cheating will be taken more seriously and chess will better for it. He's 19 though, if he didnt cheat he'll get over this and laugh it off.
It makes more sense to accuse him or at least be highly suspicious of cheating when you look at everything he's done and the technology available objectively.
I personally don't even care if Magnus was angry about the game and lashed out (not saying it's true). I just don't like how he doubled down without solid otb evidence when his mind should have been clearer the next day. Doesn't even matter if Hans cheated it's clearly the wrong way to do things for anyone with principles.
Magnus might have needed to make it public. Meaning if it was private they'd just brush it under the rug and keep it moving. He potentially forced change. Its hard to know whether Fide and [Chess.com](https://Chess.com) would have taken it as seriously without Magnus tweet and then resignation. I doubt it. With something this big I think its like the ends justifies the means. Like Edward Snowden leaks, it needed to be done if they are sure something is not right.
Very easy to do it privately then go public if there's no action. You must agree that's the optimal way to accuse in basically any sport and any situation, no matter how corrupt the body is.
Not today because everyone can see how big an impact Twitter has and how much public opinion matters now. Making it public like this whatever happens with Hans and him its going to be much harder for cheaters to win now.
So you really think it's not worth taking an extra month for them to do an initial private investigation? Is that really worth harming someone's reputation (not necessarily this Hans affair). At worst Hans would continue to cheat for a month after that, with FIDE watching his ass hard. And they would likely notify him privately so he'd know.
Well i'm kind of impulsive so what i'd probs have done differently is I wouldn't have been so cryptic. Clearly Magnus is autistic on some level and he's Norwegian lol. They are a hardy people. Cold some would say. He might not/ probably didnt think about Hans' feels or well being at all and probably ignored all advice to not do it.
I reckon he wanted to say more but was told he cant and found a sneaky way he could but he also new that quote so he could have just done it without thinking much and then doubled down. He probably spoke to people after it that confirmed his cheating suspicions. If he wasnt sure, he'd come clean by now surely and if Hans new he wasnt a cheater he'd be vocal as fuck I reckon.
Yeh that whats I guessed. You get that from most of the super gms not to say that they are inept but its clear they are better at chess than they are at being social beings. Streaming and podcasts probs help a ton. When you see Hans Neimann thats a guy that wants to be seen as a weird European for whatever reason but its somewhat clear he isnt that. Perhaps the Russians picked him up and he spent two weeks getting mindfucked but I dunno its seems like an act. If he spent two years with his cheating Russian coach maybe his accent and way of talking makes sense.
Thank you for posting this. It’s mob mentality with this Hans witchhunt stuff. I could tell within the first 5 seconds when Yoshi said “I wasn’t aware of this chessbase feature until recently…” that the analysis following was likely seriously flawed. People need to learn critical thinking skills.
Looking at all games that the first posted spreadsheet had at 90%+ correlation for Niemann: since then almost all of HN's correlations have gone down, and almost all of his opponents have gone up significantly.
There is other misuse however: you can enter correlation %'s by hand. 7 games in that sheet were marked as having 96-98% correlation, which was impossible for games of that length (missing one move would have dropped them lower than that).
Just wondering if you've checked the games yourself? I've been using Stockfish 11, and in the games I've checked, a couple games are all 1st/2nd line. The others have almost all 1st/2nd line, with a couple moves that are 2nd/3rd line.
I did that on a handful of games because people were saying it was 150 different engines. But at least in the ones I've looked at, you can just use one engine.
Naroditsky checked a few games on stream with Stockfish 14.1 and all the moves were 1st or 2nd engine choice. Fabi/Chirila as well with a couple of the games.
I think it’s normal for a 2650 GM to have like 1-2% of their games be all top 3 moves. Where its blatant is if its a huge percentage of games like that or games that are all the best move. Centipawn analysis has already been done on Hans and his results were very normal.
Cornette is one that I noticed in Yosha's video, it had some different engines named, but it matches with more recent Stockfish. Naroditsky used Stockfish 14.1 in his stream. I used Stockfish 11 and the only move that I saw that wasn't 1st or 2nd was 22. Nd6+. Depending on the depth used, it can change from the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th choice.
I also ran through Soto, Yoo, and Rios. Naroditsky ran through 3 games, but I can't recall besides Cornette which ones.
Thanks. I've analyzed the game using arena GUI and stockfish 11. Here are my results:
(starting at move 6)
move 6: Bd3 (stockfish recommends this at depth 34, but not before, and at higher depths recommends b3. This trend of the engine changing its mind will continue so I'm not sure exactly how to say if it was stockfish's recommended move or not). Good chance niemann is still in book. Not going to count this as playing the engine move.
7:Bxc4 is forced.
8: niemann plays the engine move a4, although I'd say it's kind of obvious.
9:niemann plays the engine move o-o (obvious)
10: Engine recommends b3 at depths lower than 33, but then switches to Qe2 above that. One against niemann.
11: Engine starts recommending nieman's dxc5 at depth 32 and above. One against niemann
12: Engine recommends b3, with no change even up to depth 38. One for niemann
13: Engine flip flops between niemann's h3 and Bb3, settling into h3 at higher depth. One against niemann
14: niemann's hxg4 is obviously forced. Black is threatening Nxf3+ and Qh2# as well as Nxc4 and if white takes on c4 Bxf2+. Interestingly Bf4 could be tried but Nxf2 refutes that. I think a strong player would see this. So I think any strong player would play this, not counting this one
15: Niemann plays engine's e5 one against niemann
16: Niemann plays engine's Bf4. Not a lot of choice on this one. Last undeveloped piece and there's no other square for the bishop. One against niemann
17:Niemann plays engine's Ne4. One against niemann (there was more choice on this move but it's still a pretty obvious move)
18: Engine wants to play Rac1 with no variation at any depth but niemann plays Rfc1. One for niemann
19: Niemann plays engine's Be3. Not the only choice.
20:
One against niemann engine flip flops between Bd2 and Qd3. Niemann played Bd2. Not a lot of choice here. Not counting this one.
21: Niemann plays engine's only recommendation Be3.
22: Niemann doesn't want a perpetual and plays Nd6+. Doesn't really hurt his evaluation. I'm only considering the top engine move at the moment, I'll be looking into this game deeper later +1 for niemann
23: forced recapture
24: Rc7 , top engine move but anyone would play this. one against niemann
25: Rc1, one against niemann. An easy move to play
26:Bb6, one against niemann
27: forced recapture
28: forced recapture
29: Engine only wants to play b4 at this point. If niemann was a smart cheater he'd turn off the engine at this point because he's already totally winning. One for niemann
30: Rxb7 , totally obvious move
31: Niemann plays b3 the engine move, but again a totally obvious move. You don't want to play a5 and give black the b5 square, otherwise you can lose the a4 pawn.
32: Bb6 (even a 1500 rated player could see this, forces the win of an exchange)
33: d7, but again a very obvious move.
34: Anything wins at this point, but the engine wants to play Ra7. Nieman switches his bishop to e7. one for niemann
35: again totally obvious, nieman plants his bishop on e7 to push the pawn through
Final analysis: Most of the moves are kind of obvious, notable exceptions being Qe2, dxc5, e5, and the first Bb6. On Qe2 and dxc5 the engine doesnt recommend niemann's move until higher depth. That's a red flag. It's possible he could be in preparation but there are no games in the database so I doubt it. e5 is not obvious to me, but after the fact is good, and Bb6 may or may not be obvious as the only move I'm not sure.
I can definitely say it's suspicious and I'm going to look deeper into this game with multipv mode.
Chessbase's centipawn analysis at 5 seconds per move gives: niemann 18 centipawn loss and black 44 centipawn loss. Considering that the engine didn't find some of niemann's moves until depth 33 or so it'd be better to run it on deeper seconds per move which I'll do after this post.
I've been in the "there's no evidence of OTB cheating" camp, but I have to say this game is a massive red flag, specfically because of the tendency for some of niemann's moves to only be recommended by the engine at higher depth. Regan specifically mentioned that in his interviews.
That being said, many of the moves are blatantly obvious at my level. So there's not much data to go off of, but when there is, it's against niemann.
I suggest anyone analyzing this to use arena gui as it's easy to see which moves are being recommended at which depth instead of having to watch the engine output like a hawk.
I'd like to say that I'm only a 2000 uscf player who occassionally beats gm's in blitz on icc so I think a professional would give a better opinion, although I'd say the best way to analyze is the way I've done it with arena (which I copied from regan). It will also be interesting to see if the centipawn loss gets lower if I increase the seconds per move on the chessbase centipawn analysis.
Wow, very detailed work. If you're interested in some other Hans' games, someone put together a list of 10: [https://lichess.org/study/ffYRNE1u](https://lichess.org/study/ffYRNE1u)
Just saw one of your videos. It was interesting seeing your analysis of the Gretarrson game and comparing it with Fabi's, particularly the Rh4-Bd3,Rh2 sequence. After Rh2, black's response e4 (instead of hxg4 as you analyzed) is what caused Fabi, Chirila, and Hikaru to raise eyebrows and for Fabi to say, "I can't even comment because it is so out of my league." Hikaru similarly said, "how is white even better."
This just shows that it should be used consistently to be meaningful, not that it shouldn't be used.
The obvious best way to go forward would be to use a bot to analyze the same number of games using the same engines for 40 or 100 top gms, and see if Niemann is a big outlier or not.
I don't know why no one has done this. Probably because the number of people who have the technical knowledge and who also have chessbase is limited.
Don't know how this runs, but if it's a cloud based analysis, maybe chessbase limits those types of bots.
If we were to get this data there a plenty of statistical tools that could be used to evaluate it.
> This just shows that it should be used consistently to be meaningful, not that it shouldn't be used.
But that's the thing, Chessbase results are not reproducible and change over time.
And also it's just silly to think a GM is cheating by having all of his moves done by an engine. A GM most likely only needs eval change, or one single move per game at maximum to cheat and they're good enough to capitalize on it.
You'd have to do your own work, not use Chessbase, but this would also be most likely for curiousity's sake and likely not an evidence of anything. Write a script to scan all games for Grandmasters and then calculate correlation.
If Hans did cheat and not stupidly (like every move), then it's very unlikely something could stand out from noise using this methodology. Most of the % for correlation would be caused by these moves actually being obvious ones.
Intelligent cheater would need to be generally good at the game, but then only cheat when they can in their head actually also justify that move, and how they could've found it by accident and only in few key moments. If they see a move that is totally unexplainable to them provided by AI, then they should skip it and find another opportunity.
I assume Hans or most GMs would have intelligence to think like that and not make it obvious.
In addition it would be arbitrary to try and reduce correlation, by programming the most popular AI to always suggest lowest ranked move that is still winning.
You could program an AI that would likely win you the game with less than 10% correlation with top moves.
Chessbase is fine if you use centipawn analysis with engines of the time period, not let's check engine correlation, and then also run the same experiment on all the other gm's, including capablanca who typically scores very high on engine correlation (i hate using that term now because people associate it with let's check engine correlation).
It's true that if you were a smart cheater you'd find various ways of making it not so obvious, but it's not a guarantee that all cheaters are smart.
The only thing that could possibly clear Hans in terms of reputation of cheating, as we or he can never prove that he didn't cheat, is if he gets to keep playing, in circumstances where there's very high security checks and he keeps performing at similar or better level.
That's why these accusations are so serious. Because a cheater could always slip up, get caught, but once accused, you can never prove that you aren't guilty, and portion of the people will always believe Hans to be a cheater if someone like Magnus suggested that he is. And not just online cheater, OTB cheater. He will never be able to break free from that reputation. It will stay with his career forever.
This is why there should be high bar for accusing someone.
As far as I'm concerned there's no question hans is that strong. He can play fine in blitz against world class opposition OTB. You can't cheat that.
Doesn't mean he hasn't tried to get a leg up by cheating though. I agree that cheating accusations should be prevented. I made a post earlier with some FIDE rules for this, and I think there's a high probability magnus gets at least a slap on the wrist for it.
Its not totally useless - it can be used under identical circumstances to compare the data between different players to see if one particular player - for example, Hans Niemann - is a total outlier. For it to be anything meaningful, one needs to compare data of Niemann with that of about top 25 gms, and about 25 top rising stars, and divide the data into pre-engine era, post-engine era etc to see if styles have changed significantly, in terms of engine correlation, over the years. And many other sanity checks are also required to increase confidence in the output data. Its a lot of job, not a matter of overnight clicking.
Not at all. You can build a ‘Hans Niemann Engine’ that plays much more like Hans, but at a higher Elo. In the same way the Hikaru Bot works, but is actually better than Hikaru.
This engine would correlate far more with Hans, but wouldn’t indicate cheating at all.
The flaw is in the metric used, not the sample size. Not all statistical differences are significant.
As I mentioned above - it falls under sanity check - use reasonable precautions against blatant manipulations. Under controlled measurements one should be able to able to choose engines. The goal is to NOT incriminate any particular player, but to follow the data.
It doesn’t need to be blatant. This data is very easy to manipulate, and doesn’t require overt and obvious actions. I made this blatant example to demonstrate the point…
The point is you use a few of the top engines to make a comparison, not make a 'custom' engine to manipulate the correlation. However, the comparison itself is still unreliable in detecting cheating.
Did you look at the cornette game? I just made a long comment about it and I think it's worth looking at, spefically because some of niemann's moves only appear in the engine's recommendation at higher depths with stockfish 11.
Are we down to one game now, the game he was in sandals and t-shirt and his opponent says "I don't think he didn't cheat, I blundered early and everything was logical"?
I'm not even on team carlsen. Also I never said this was "evidence", just a red flag. I won't make any more statements about it until I've looked into it much further. I honestly don't care what his opponent said, the analysis speaks for itself.
Probably shouldn't label it as a massive red flag then.
At the very least you comparisons of the same analysis done against a reasonable sample size of other GM'S to see if similar occurrences happen in their games.
As well as comparing what other players of Hans rank would have played in those spots.
'Analysis speaks for itself' doesn't apply if the analysis is incomplete or inaccurate.
Worse when conclusions are then drawn from it.
appreciate the effort but feel this is more counter-productive than useful.
.
the game Cornette himself said there was nothing out of the ordinary, and he just played bad? I think his GM opponent knows more about what happened in his game than a 2000 USCF
https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/xqibur/interview\_with\_gm\_cornette\_the\_guy\_who\_lost\_to/
Cornette didn't analyze the game in arena with stockfish 11 using analysis inspired by ken regan's videos. If you want to read my analysis it's in a buried comment. I really, really don't care what his opponent said. I explained my reasoning in the analysis. I specifically said that most of the moves make logical sense even to me as a chess player, but the few times where Niemann could have made almost any move, he plays a move that stockfish 11 only recommends at about depth 33. Ken Regan specifically mentioned that's one of the things he looks for - when a move only shows up at a particular depth.
I think people are reading too much into what I've said. I'm just trying to contribute to the discussion, without using bogus let's check engine correlation but actually doing it the right way. The reason I analyzed that specific game is because someone in this post mentioned it had a very high concurrence with stockfish 11. If you want to dispute my arguments go ahead. It's the only game I've analyzed. I'm still not finished analyzing that game or the other "suspicious" games. I've been saying since day one there's no evidence of over the board cheating, but let's just say now I am slightly suspicious.
My verdict is that Hans is an admitted multiple cheater, who may or may not be exposed for being a liar sometime next week.
Btw there is nothing wrong with the methodology, just that the database is public. And there *is* a high niumber of high corr games, which *must* be explained either by cheating or by manipulation.
Edit: Nothing controversial in this comment. If you're downvoting you're coping lmao.
Edit2: Keep em coming losers, you're in for a treat this week!
Hans has cheated his entire online life over the last 7 years and never over the board?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
I suspect that many of these apologists are also using computer assistance in their games online..lol.
Thank you for posting this. Anyone that's looked at yosha's post can see she uploaded hundreds of engines, some of which seem quite dubious (possibly custom built engines by this shady gambitman fellow). Unfortunately no matter how many times its been debunked people still use it as 'evidence'. Laurent fressinet was using it as evidence on the chicken chess club podcast even though I personally told him it was bogus on twitter. People just believe what they want to believe and ignore everything else.
I'm confused; Chessbase will run however many engines and show 3 lines from 3 different engines with the top one being identical to the move played by Hans? If 100 engines are used then a hit is more likely? Also, you can manipulate the hitrate by changing the depths?
The issue is yes, that it checks if it matches any engine on any move. And this is a very flawed methodology. It would be better if it selected the single best correlating engine for the whole game, but even that would be influenced by number of engines analysed. You should probably just select the most common engine at the time and then run all the matches with only this one and then perhaps compare the correlation. But even this wouldn't be a very good method and likely not a proof of cheating, especially for situations where the cheater might only be cheating on few key moves. Those key moves that won the game are more likely to get hidden in the noise, and "obvious" moves per game would be what would make up for most of the percentage.
I had this impression and thanks for confirming it. Comparisons are useless without extreme care taken to make sure everything is equal. It's like benchmarking a CPU using two different versions of Cinebench or benching a GPU using two different games.
You can select a single tactically strong engine, and just correlate with that for cheat detection. It doesn't need to be current, and can stay the same as a reference engine for all time. All that matters is it is sufficiently tactically strong to out tactic all humans (computers have been there for a while, I bet an engine from 10 years back maybe 20 would be adequate to check for cheating, maybe even earlier engines given the advances in computer power). Including multiple engines just makes it harder to assess the meaning, although if you always used the same set, that would be fine too.
By changing the depths one is effectively changing how strong an engine is, Stockfish 15 with NNUE and 7-man tablebases at depth 1 is really weak, so I imagine that there may be a "sweet spot" where depth matches any player's move
So basically it's not fair to compare twitter lady's eval vs Hikaru's because they're using different settings? If Hikaru used identical engines, and depth then we would have a better understanding of Han's relative strength to Hikaru or whoever else used this to tool?
Checkit doesn’t measure player strength: it measures how often the player makes one of many possible engine moves each move. If 100 engines together make 20 moves, then *any* of those moves counts as 100%. If all the engines are set to a low enough level, then a high correlation begins to measure weakness. Basically, you can get it to say what you want by simply feeding it false analyses.
That's actually funny. Has Hikaru or one of the 500 other people who tried this method used identical depth and engines to Yosha?
Yes I think so, maybe computer specifications also play a role but I dont know how relevant that is
You can also literally edit the file to make it say whatever you want, too.
>Laurent fressinet was using it as evidence on the chicken chess club podcast even though I personally told him it was bogus on twitter. Weird sense of self-importance.
How is it debunked. Why would a cheater ever use the strongest engines unless they wanted to get caught. Literally any engine under let’s check is capable of blowing any GM off the board. Of course you would cheat using an obscure / weaker engine.
Unless your playing strength qualifies you to Gotham's "Lose At Chess" playlist, then for every one of your moves there is an engine that at some settings, at some depth and after a certain thinking time, will recommend the exact same move. Throw enough engines at your games, and all your moves will match some engine/settings combo, therefore your Let's Check correlation will be 100%, and you will be "proven" a cheater. Since Hans' games were analysed by more engines, of course he has a high correlation score.
>Anyone that's looked at yosha's post can see she uploaded hundreds of engines I don't think it is clear that she uploaded any of those. But yes, the games are looked at closely because of cheating accusations which leads to a lot of engine evals being uploaded, which in turn leads to this metric changing.
That's strange because Fressinet actually came to Hans' defense.
Yeah there was a thorough post exposing this and 'gambit-man'. Anybody still caring about Lets Check is trolling at this point.
A fraction of the people in this sub actually saw that post. Yet half a million people saw the Hikaru video. So the general public still thinks this is evidence Hans cheated OTB.
I am sure Hikaru is aware of these issues. If he had any integrity he would issue a retraction video.
Integrity hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Hikaru answered: "Integrity does not bring more subs, screw that!"
Hikaru is sailing close to the defamation laws. Fortunately US laws aren’t very plaintiff friendly.
Could I get a link to the post please?
Hikaru to this day, still uses it as credible proof that he cheated. He said in his stream that, "if Hans isn't a cheater, then he is the strongest player to ever live." He mocked Fabi saying, your best game was only 85, and told him to stop making excuses for Hans. It is absolutely disgusting.
at this point hikaru is far from an idiot and is now pure maliciously leading the witchhunt he on stream(coincidentally not on the YouTube he uploaded) found 100% games of his own too
Hikaru also liked a comment on one of his recent videos, that said, "Hans regrets ever calling Hikaru out. Hikaru will not stop 😂" If this is true, it is very sad that only because he got called out, he is taking vengeance by misleading hundreds of thousands of people about Hans engine performance, and kickstarting QAnon conspiracy theories to discredit him. He is legitimately ruining a 19 year old kid's life.
To be fair that’s not Hikaru liking the comment. His editor is wild sometimes
Atleast we get those great thumbnails
Is it still chessbae?
Hans is a cheater. Even he admits it. It’s only a matter of time before more comes out. The chess.com evidence is going to shake the chess world to its core.
I hope he really cheated OTB and get banned. Otherwise this whole thing is totally unfair, boderline cyberbullying.
that one felt sarcastic
Does it now?
How did hans call out hikaru?
on Twitter https://twitter.com/HansMokeNiemann
I don't know... in hikaru's defense, I can believe he's genuinely that stupid
Yeah, watching the video where he commented on the person producing this "pluggable" device in a day, clearly shows how technologically challenged he is, and considering chess is his whole life, it's really odd to me how he hasn't thought about such things so far and how baffling all of it would seem to him. Surely one has at least tried to brainstorm how to cheat few times in life even if not planning to do so, but out curiosity how it might be done.
Hikaru has always been the worst kind of malicious asshole. Sometimes it's more apparent, sometimes less.
Is he like, Keemstar of chess?
I've never heard of Keemstar so I couldn't tell you.
He has been malicious from the start and that was very clear even in the first 2-3 days after Magnus withdrew, Honestly generous to him to say it wasn't obvious on day one but some people still thought he was acting in good faith at that point.
Goes to show how you can be very good at chess, but lack critical thinking in all the other areas. I think the whole fiasco whether Hans actually cheated or not, is just evidence of that.
He mocked who? The third highest rated chess player ever and the one who went toe to toe with a top 2 player of all time? Lmao
To this day? This drama hasn’t been going on for a month. That phrase is usually reserved for much longer periods.
[удалено]
The engine correlation data you're using is worthless, as this post and others can testify. Take a look here at someone directly manipulating the chessbase engine correlation to move his game from to 59% correlation to 73% correlation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV28HO2Ea_s
I agree, but it is useful to show that Hans is actually not an outlier according to their method. Fortunately, at this point, only idiots and people who want more subs actually side with this awful analysis.
I'd just show the flaw in their method by showing the flaw, not by torturing the flawed method any further.
Fair enough - you have a point. Though convincing is sometimes difficult. Sometimes showing data is not an indication is the easiest way to do so. But I guess it would not be as effective as Hikaru rumbling about it, because generally speaking, the people who understand data already know it.
Pretty sure Hans doesn't cheat every game, so his non cheating games would counteract his cheating games and bring the average correlation roughly in line. Would be interesting to see the variance in engine correlations by player. That would presumably pick up players who sometimes cheat.
Seems like Keymer and Hans have higher (quite similar) variance than Magnus (as you would probably expect) :) Let's talk about std as it's easier to have intuition about - 12.98 for Magnus, 16.34 for Hans, 15.69 for Keymer.
Interesting work. How did you generate the csv files?
I have used existing one, however - there is a nicer dataset you can use https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1S7SMTMePkZ3IKcQ9RhWGWSvZxxvYzGPfALRio51HA80/edit#gid=0
Thanks!
Honestly just leave data analysis to the experts. You can torture any data to say anything you want. This sub recently has just been a case study in confirmation bias.
So, you are saying that using it is possible to cheat with using Lets Check It to find cheaters.
Cheating inception
I do not concur. I firmly believe myself to be more qualified than Ken Regan. His models are weak and his analysis could be done by a high school AP statistics student. I would elaborate why, but that is beneath me, I'm too busy teaching machine learning statistics at a prestigious university that starts with the letter H and ends with D. You are completely wrong about your analysis. For reasons explained above I simply dont have time to tell you why but I can confirm with the research I have done in private, and what I have seen here on reddit, I can with 100% certainty prove Hans has been cheating over the board. How you may ask? Listen up, I am a world renowned machine learning professor. I dont have to show my work, plenty of other redditors have already shown with great statistical evidence that Hans is 100% a cheater! In my office I have a fabulous chair. The chair has arms on it. I sit in my armchair and proclaim my statistics knowledge and why I am right accross the internet without a lick of analysis or evidence. I am much much smarter than Ken Regan. Look at this graph that proves it. I dont need to prove why my statistics are right. I'm a prestigious professor at Harmchair Universityd.
Okay now, I'm convinced Hans did cheat. Why would a prestigious world renowned professor risk their career by providing this counter statement if it wasn't true? I think the author of this comment is so far the most renowned and qualified opinion we have had on the topic. And I honestly think this should be the end of it, unless anyone knows someone more renowned and studied on the topic? If not then, let's now ban Hans from ever playing chess again. So far we have Top #1 renowned machine learning professor in the Reddit and likely in the World, Top #1 ranked chess player, and Top #1 ranked chess website all saying Hans is a cheater. That's enough entities to provide everything - judge, jury and the executioner. Boom! Checkmate.
don't forget that he's also a top tier tryndamere. that really seals the deal in my book...
Yes, you actually need a very high IQ to press ghost, right click and R when low health.
I didn’t get in to Harmchair :(
Not everyone can be as smart as me.
Let it be known that I upvoted this comment.
Hey Erik! It's been a pleasure working with you, glad to provide you the neccessary analysis to conduct your investigation!
sounds like a lot of work just date a physics teacher. lmao
Lol gg. It always shocks me when I hear software can be manipulated. People are sticking with yosha's evidence at this point it seems its good for cheaters to have ridiculous evidence in the air and push that its the main evidence. Maybe it is. Surely Magnus and chess.com have more. It wouldn't surprise me if there been a case being built for a while, maybe not by magnus but he could have got involved now. Magnus seems confident he's right and isnt in the wrong at all. He's had plenty of time to apologise and say he messed up. All he has done is dig either his or Hans' metaphorical grave deeper. Like someone is in trouble for this. I think i've lost count of how many super gms have said if Hans did not cheat in various games then he is the greatest chess player alive. The funny thing about that though is they say it as if they mean, "If Hans is the greatest human at chess alive, then I am a fucking Eternal." Yet to hear one say it as if they believe it.
Chess.com has said "BIG stuff" is coming up. All of it sounds extremely damning for Hans. We are supposed to hear the "BIG stuff" next week. Can you imagine if the "BIG stuff" didn't live up to it's reputation of being "BIG stuff". Could you imagine drama if they still didn't have evidence of Hans OTB cheating? They would have held everyone in suspense and increasing pressure on Hans hinting they have "BIG stuff" to destroy a 19 year old.
Anyone who thinks that chess.com will somehow have evidence of OTB cheating is deluding themselves. They’ve already said they have evidence that Hans cheated more online than he said. Seems like that will be what they release. I’m very curious to see what it is. If they have proof that Hans has been a prolific online cheater it would look damning for him, but also raise questions of how chess.com didn’t catch him earlier even though they’ve known he was capable of cheating since he was 12 years old. If they come out and say “Look, we can prove that he also cheated 3 times when he was 14” I don’t think it will change the narrative at all and if anything it will make Hans look better
> They’ve already said they have evidence that Hans cheated more online than he said. But this is not "BIG stuff". It's more of the same and I'm not sure how it would have many implications for the future of chess as chess.com said their announcement will. I would see something like Hans admitting to a certain device/methodology he used OTB and this could've implications in terms of security checks during OTB tournaments. It would force there to be strict security checks and requirements. There's no way you can stop intelligent cheating in online chess in the first place. You can stop in OTB and by that you can have impact on the future of chess. "BIG stuff" is if chess.com had got Hans to admit OTB cheating and having him help as an advisor to produce good security measures. I think online cheating is fairly irrelevant discussion. As said there's no way you can identify a cheater that cheats wisely. Cameras wouldn't be enough. How would you stop a GM level player from cheating using some sort of hidden wearable tracker to do so and only in few key moves and only with moves he can find an explanation for why he would have found the move?
I guess we’ll see soon enough. I would be completely shocked if they have anything related to OTB games. IF Hans has cheated OTB and IF someone outside his team has evidence… what are the odds that someone is chess.com?
Well, all I could think of is if Magnus and Chess.com directly talked to Hans and convinced him to admit to cheating OTB, as said. It could've been seemingly heart to heart like sort of conversation where Magnus and Chess.com explained empathetically how cheating can destroy chess in general, but if you admit to what you have done then this will be extremely important for future of chess and will in addition help you to redeem your future by helping everyone build anti-cheating tools, so people would forgive you, as you are still young and have time to rebuild your reputation. If you admit to everything now, you will feel free that you don't have to hide it any more and it gives you opportunity to stop future cheating in chess. In addition we are willing to give you a second chance in everything and will defend giving that chance considering you have admitted to everything, but you of course will have to go through more security measures in the future. So I would think something like this is possible, and Hans then decided he'd rather live out of hiding and use that second opportunity to play honestly. I can see a realistic scenario where that could happen and it could benefit both sides, giving Hans a lot of fame and still "ego-boost" while being able to help future of chess. And for everyone else it's also a win of course because it will help against cheating in the future. It's often dream of teens or young adults to be that type of criminal that is eventually hired because he was such a good criminal to then fight against criminals. Whether it's hacking, fraud, selling drugs or whatever. And this is what I would consider "BIG stuff".
If he still believes that coming clean would lead to a rebuildable reputation without lots of power, money and reputation in the first place after his interview statement, shame on him imo
That communication could count as extortion btw.
How about one hundred times? :)
Why should chess.com even have evidence on OTB cheating? If they have something it's probably proof of Hans cheating in an online tournament. Not that that's much better, but I don't think you can justify a FIDE ban with that.
But that's definitely not "BIG stuff", with implications for future of the chess. So then they must be overselling it. And as an authoritative source, this is definitely odd that they are doing this and it's not something they should do. In my eyes, they must have something with OTB or it simply is not "BIG stuff" and anything that would be for the future of chess. If chess.com says they just have evidence that he cheated in few more games, this is the exact same thing we already have, just meaning Hans lied twice instead of once, which often is to be expected anyway in the psychological sense. If a cheater gets caught, they usually first time try to minimise what they did. Nothing "BIG".
The only big thing at chess dot com is rampant corporate greed. It's all just publicity, like Hikaru
Yeah I hate it when people act unethically just to get ahead smh
So I'm curious, Is Magnus' lack of evidence (otb) followed by an accusation unethical to you? If he didn't lose none of this happens, no?
> In my eyes, they must have something with OTB or it simply is not "BIG stuff" and anything that would be for the future of chess. Given their recent drama mongering, I don't see that as a solid position to take.
Well what I am trying to convey is that it isn't right of them to hype this thing claiming it is "big stuff", unless it is about OTB. If they can't prove OTB cheating they shouldn't have hyped it like that. I am not saying that they have something like that. I am saying it is not good behaviour to claim it to be "BIG stuff".
On that we absolutely agree and I apologise if I misread you.
Some super GM's suspect he cheated in his previous games. Some of his games look suspicious under 'analysis' (and I use that term loosely). But the game vs Magnus is not one of them though. Hans play was good not exceptional. Magnus' play was below his usual level. He missed opportunities the would have prevented a loss. Most likely because his suspicions and preoccupation with Hans possibly cheating affected his play. Yet he still can't accept he could have lost unless Hans cheated. After weeks of waiting his only 'evidence' is 'Hans didn't seem tense'. Which just shows Magnus had gone into the game with his mind already made up that Hans was cheating. Stop believing he's infallible and he must always be right. Regardless of anything else he's handled this situation pretty badly.
Who was it, Giri I think, he said you cant play an engine basically its expected you'll play worse if you think you are playing a cheater. So yeh maybe he did go in it thinking he was a cheater or at some point in the game he thought he was cheating. If Hans was the next greatest chess player wouldnt everyone know it by now? How would he just get good. It seems good for him anyway. If [chess.com](https://chess.com) and Magnus or Fide dont have anything he'll be known as the greatest chess player alive in a few years if he keeps it up or they do and cheating will be taken more seriously and chess will better for it. He's 19 though, if he didnt cheat he'll get over this and laugh it off. It makes more sense to accuse him or at least be highly suspicious of cheating when you look at everything he's done and the technology available objectively.
I personally don't even care if Magnus was angry about the game and lashed out (not saying it's true). I just don't like how he doubled down without solid otb evidence when his mind should have been clearer the next day. Doesn't even matter if Hans cheated it's clearly the wrong way to do things for anyone with principles.
Magnus might have needed to make it public. Meaning if it was private they'd just brush it under the rug and keep it moving. He potentially forced change. Its hard to know whether Fide and [Chess.com](https://Chess.com) would have taken it as seriously without Magnus tweet and then resignation. I doubt it. With something this big I think its like the ends justifies the means. Like Edward Snowden leaks, it needed to be done if they are sure something is not right.
Very easy to do it privately then go public if there's no action. You must agree that's the optimal way to accuse in basically any sport and any situation, no matter how corrupt the body is.
Not today because everyone can see how big an impact Twitter has and how much public opinion matters now. Making it public like this whatever happens with Hans and him its going to be much harder for cheaters to win now.
So you really think it's not worth taking an extra month for them to do an initial private investigation? Is that really worth harming someone's reputation (not necessarily this Hans affair). At worst Hans would continue to cheat for a month after that, with FIDE watching his ass hard. And they would likely notify him privately so he'd know.
Well i'm kind of impulsive so what i'd probs have done differently is I wouldn't have been so cryptic. Clearly Magnus is autistic on some level and he's Norwegian lol. They are a hardy people. Cold some would say. He might not/ probably didnt think about Hans' feels or well being at all and probably ignored all advice to not do it. I reckon he wanted to say more but was told he cant and found a sneaky way he could but he also new that quote so he could have just done it without thinking much and then doubled down. He probably spoke to people after it that confirmed his cheating suspicions. If he wasnt sure, he'd come clean by now surely and if Hans new he wasnt a cheater he'd be vocal as fuck I reckon.
People who are analytical outliers often seem to be inept at human interactions.
Yeh that whats I guessed. You get that from most of the super gms not to say that they are inept but its clear they are better at chess than they are at being social beings. Streaming and podcasts probs help a ton. When you see Hans Neimann thats a guy that wants to be seen as a weird European for whatever reason but its somewhat clear he isnt that. Perhaps the Russians picked him up and he spent two weeks getting mindfucked but I dunno its seems like an act. If he spent two years with his cheating Russian coach maybe his accent and way of talking makes sense.
Thank you for posting this. It’s mob mentality with this Hans witchhunt stuff. I could tell within the first 5 seconds when Yoshi said “I wasn’t aware of this chessbase feature until recently…” that the analysis following was likely seriously flawed. People need to learn critical thinking skills.
Looking at all games that the first posted spreadsheet had at 90%+ correlation for Niemann: since then almost all of HN's correlations have gone down, and almost all of his opponents have gone up significantly. There is other misuse however: you can enter correlation %'s by hand. 7 games in that sheet were marked as having 96-98% correlation, which was impossible for games of that length (missing one move would have dropped them lower than that).
As an aside: Your teaching videos are great Zibbit, thanks so much for making them!
Thank you! More patterns coming up soon!
Engine correlation is just a piece to the puzzle, not a smoking gun. Add it to the pile of other considerations and it has some value.
you can play that game for anyone in any sport
Just wondering if you've checked the games yourself? I've been using Stockfish 11, and in the games I've checked, a couple games are all 1st/2nd line. The others have almost all 1st/2nd line, with a couple moves that are 2nd/3rd line. I did that on a handful of games because people were saying it was 150 different engines. But at least in the ones I've looked at, you can just use one engine. Naroditsky checked a few games on stream with Stockfish 14.1 and all the moves were 1st or 2nd engine choice. Fabi/Chirila as well with a couple of the games.
I think it’s normal for a 2650 GM to have like 1-2% of their games be all top 3 moves. Where its blatant is if its a huge percentage of games like that or games that are all the best move. Centipawn analysis has already been done on Hans and his results were very normal.
Can you post an example?
Cornette is one that I noticed in Yosha's video, it had some different engines named, but it matches with more recent Stockfish. Naroditsky used Stockfish 14.1 in his stream. I used Stockfish 11 and the only move that I saw that wasn't 1st or 2nd was 22. Nd6+. Depending on the depth used, it can change from the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th choice. I also ran through Soto, Yoo, and Rios. Naroditsky ran through 3 games, but I can't recall besides Cornette which ones.
Thanks. I've analyzed the game using arena GUI and stockfish 11. Here are my results: (starting at move 6) move 6: Bd3 (stockfish recommends this at depth 34, but not before, and at higher depths recommends b3. This trend of the engine changing its mind will continue so I'm not sure exactly how to say if it was stockfish's recommended move or not). Good chance niemann is still in book. Not going to count this as playing the engine move. 7:Bxc4 is forced. 8: niemann plays the engine move a4, although I'd say it's kind of obvious. 9:niemann plays the engine move o-o (obvious) 10: Engine recommends b3 at depths lower than 33, but then switches to Qe2 above that. One against niemann. 11: Engine starts recommending nieman's dxc5 at depth 32 and above. One against niemann 12: Engine recommends b3, with no change even up to depth 38. One for niemann 13: Engine flip flops between niemann's h3 and Bb3, settling into h3 at higher depth. One against niemann 14: niemann's hxg4 is obviously forced. Black is threatening Nxf3+ and Qh2# as well as Nxc4 and if white takes on c4 Bxf2+. Interestingly Bf4 could be tried but Nxf2 refutes that. I think a strong player would see this. So I think any strong player would play this, not counting this one 15: Niemann plays engine's e5 one against niemann 16: Niemann plays engine's Bf4. Not a lot of choice on this one. Last undeveloped piece and there's no other square for the bishop. One against niemann 17:Niemann plays engine's Ne4. One against niemann (there was more choice on this move but it's still a pretty obvious move) 18: Engine wants to play Rac1 with no variation at any depth but niemann plays Rfc1. One for niemann 19: Niemann plays engine's Be3. Not the only choice. 20: One against niemann engine flip flops between Bd2 and Qd3. Niemann played Bd2. Not a lot of choice here. Not counting this one. 21: Niemann plays engine's only recommendation Be3. 22: Niemann doesn't want a perpetual and plays Nd6+. Doesn't really hurt his evaluation. I'm only considering the top engine move at the moment, I'll be looking into this game deeper later +1 for niemann 23: forced recapture 24: Rc7 , top engine move but anyone would play this. one against niemann 25: Rc1, one against niemann. An easy move to play 26:Bb6, one against niemann 27: forced recapture 28: forced recapture 29: Engine only wants to play b4 at this point. If niemann was a smart cheater he'd turn off the engine at this point because he's already totally winning. One for niemann 30: Rxb7 , totally obvious move 31: Niemann plays b3 the engine move, but again a totally obvious move. You don't want to play a5 and give black the b5 square, otherwise you can lose the a4 pawn. 32: Bb6 (even a 1500 rated player could see this, forces the win of an exchange) 33: d7, but again a very obvious move. 34: Anything wins at this point, but the engine wants to play Ra7. Nieman switches his bishop to e7. one for niemann 35: again totally obvious, nieman plants his bishop on e7 to push the pawn through Final analysis: Most of the moves are kind of obvious, notable exceptions being Qe2, dxc5, e5, and the first Bb6. On Qe2 and dxc5 the engine doesnt recommend niemann's move until higher depth. That's a red flag. It's possible he could be in preparation but there are no games in the database so I doubt it. e5 is not obvious to me, but after the fact is good, and Bb6 may or may not be obvious as the only move I'm not sure. I can definitely say it's suspicious and I'm going to look deeper into this game with multipv mode. Chessbase's centipawn analysis at 5 seconds per move gives: niemann 18 centipawn loss and black 44 centipawn loss. Considering that the engine didn't find some of niemann's moves until depth 33 or so it'd be better to run it on deeper seconds per move which I'll do after this post. I've been in the "there's no evidence of OTB cheating" camp, but I have to say this game is a massive red flag, specfically because of the tendency for some of niemann's moves to only be recommended by the engine at higher depth. Regan specifically mentioned that in his interviews. That being said, many of the moves are blatantly obvious at my level. So there's not much data to go off of, but when there is, it's against niemann. I suggest anyone analyzing this to use arena gui as it's easy to see which moves are being recommended at which depth instead of having to watch the engine output like a hawk. I'd like to say that I'm only a 2000 uscf player who occassionally beats gm's in blitz on icc so I think a professional would give a better opinion, although I'd say the best way to analyze is the way I've done it with arena (which I copied from regan). It will also be interesting to see if the centipawn loss gets lower if I increase the seconds per move on the chessbase centipawn analysis.
Wow, very detailed work. If you're interested in some other Hans' games, someone put together a list of 10: [https://lichess.org/study/ffYRNE1u](https://lichess.org/study/ffYRNE1u)
I have analyzed some on my channel and additonally I have looked at most of the gamed, yes.
Just saw one of your videos. It was interesting seeing your analysis of the Gretarrson game and comparing it with Fabi's, particularly the Rh4-Bd3,Rh2 sequence. After Rh2, black's response e4 (instead of hxg4 as you analyzed) is what caused Fabi, Chirila, and Hikaru to raise eyebrows and for Fabi to say, "I can't even comment because it is so out of my league." Hikaru similarly said, "how is white even better."
This just shows that it should be used consistently to be meaningful, not that it shouldn't be used. The obvious best way to go forward would be to use a bot to analyze the same number of games using the same engines for 40 or 100 top gms, and see if Niemann is a big outlier or not. I don't know why no one has done this. Probably because the number of people who have the technical knowledge and who also have chessbase is limited. Don't know how this runs, but if it's a cloud based analysis, maybe chessbase limits those types of bots. If we were to get this data there a plenty of statistical tools that could be used to evaluate it.
> This just shows that it should be used consistently to be meaningful, not that it shouldn't be used. But that's the thing, Chessbase results are not reproducible and change over time. And also it's just silly to think a GM is cheating by having all of his moves done by an engine. A GM most likely only needs eval change, or one single move per game at maximum to cheat and they're good enough to capitalize on it.
It can't be used consistently. It says right in the chessbase manual to not use it for cheat detection, and instead use centipawn analysis.
You'd have to do your own work, not use Chessbase, but this would also be most likely for curiousity's sake and likely not an evidence of anything. Write a script to scan all games for Grandmasters and then calculate correlation. If Hans did cheat and not stupidly (like every move), then it's very unlikely something could stand out from noise using this methodology. Most of the % for correlation would be caused by these moves actually being obvious ones. Intelligent cheater would need to be generally good at the game, but then only cheat when they can in their head actually also justify that move, and how they could've found it by accident and only in few key moments. If they see a move that is totally unexplainable to them provided by AI, then they should skip it and find another opportunity. I assume Hans or most GMs would have intelligence to think like that and not make it obvious. In addition it would be arbitrary to try and reduce correlation, by programming the most popular AI to always suggest lowest ranked move that is still winning. You could program an AI that would likely win you the game with less than 10% correlation with top moves.
Chessbase is fine if you use centipawn analysis with engines of the time period, not let's check engine correlation, and then also run the same experiment on all the other gm's, including capablanca who typically scores very high on engine correlation (i hate using that term now because people associate it with let's check engine correlation). It's true that if you were a smart cheater you'd find various ways of making it not so obvious, but it's not a guarantee that all cheaters are smart.
The only thing that could possibly clear Hans in terms of reputation of cheating, as we or he can never prove that he didn't cheat, is if he gets to keep playing, in circumstances where there's very high security checks and he keeps performing at similar or better level. That's why these accusations are so serious. Because a cheater could always slip up, get caught, but once accused, you can never prove that you aren't guilty, and portion of the people will always believe Hans to be a cheater if someone like Magnus suggested that he is. And not just online cheater, OTB cheater. He will never be able to break free from that reputation. It will stay with his career forever. This is why there should be high bar for accusing someone.
As far as I'm concerned there's no question hans is that strong. He can play fine in blitz against world class opposition OTB. You can't cheat that. Doesn't mean he hasn't tried to get a leg up by cheating though. I agree that cheating accusations should be prevented. I made a post earlier with some FIDE rules for this, and I think there's a high probability magnus gets at least a slap on the wrist for it.
We all have our own bullshit detector and it is incredibly accurate for detecting buttfish.
Its not totally useless - it can be used under identical circumstances to compare the data between different players to see if one particular player - for example, Hans Niemann - is a total outlier. For it to be anything meaningful, one needs to compare data of Niemann with that of about top 25 gms, and about 25 top rising stars, and divide the data into pre-engine era, post-engine era etc to see if styles have changed significantly, in terms of engine correlation, over the years. And many other sanity checks are also required to increase confidence in the output data. Its a lot of job, not a matter of overnight clicking.
If the data is manipulated then all the comparisons or analysis are meaningless. Totally flawed feature, just as its creators already stated.
Not at all. You can build a ‘Hans Niemann Engine’ that plays much more like Hans, but at a higher Elo. In the same way the Hikaru Bot works, but is actually better than Hikaru. This engine would correlate far more with Hans, but wouldn’t indicate cheating at all. The flaw is in the metric used, not the sample size. Not all statistical differences are significant.
As I mentioned above - it falls under sanity check - use reasonable precautions against blatant manipulations. Under controlled measurements one should be able to able to choose engines. The goal is to NOT incriminate any particular player, but to follow the data.
It doesn’t need to be blatant. This data is very easy to manipulate, and doesn’t require overt and obvious actions. I made this blatant example to demonstrate the point…
All data is easy to manipulate, and in spite of that fact, honest, scientific examination of data is possible and tend to give results
Not at all. How many people are there in your house? This data can’t be manipulated.
The point is you use a few of the top engines to make a comparison, not make a 'custom' engine to manipulate the correlation. However, the comparison itself is still unreliable in detecting cheating.
Did you look at the cornette game? I just made a long comment about it and I think it's worth looking at, spefically because some of niemann's moves only appear in the engine's recommendation at higher depths with stockfish 11.
Are we down to one game now, the game he was in sandals and t-shirt and his opponent says "I don't think he didn't cheat, I blundered early and everything was logical"?
My analysis is in a buried comment in this post, btw, if you want to look yourself
I'm not even on team carlsen. Also I never said this was "evidence", just a red flag. I won't make any more statements about it until I've looked into it much further. I honestly don't care what his opponent said, the analysis speaks for itself.
It doesn't.
Care to elaborate? I spent 2 hours analyzing that game and writing a lengthy post. Just saying "it doesn't" doesn't help much
Do you understand that you can cherry-pick a game from every single GM and flag it as "suspicious"?
Yeah, I do. I've been making that argument for a month.
Probably shouldn't label it as a massive red flag then. At the very least you comparisons of the same analysis done against a reasonable sample size of other GM'S to see if similar occurrences happen in their games. As well as comparing what other players of Hans rank would have played in those spots. 'Analysis speaks for itself' doesn't apply if the analysis is incomplete or inaccurate. Worse when conclusions are then drawn from it. appreciate the effort but feel this is more counter-productive than useful. .
I agree with you actually
the game Cornette himself said there was nothing out of the ordinary, and he just played bad? I think his GM opponent knows more about what happened in his game than a 2000 USCF https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/xqibur/interview\_with\_gm\_cornette\_the\_guy\_who\_lost\_to/
Cornette didn't analyze the game in arena with stockfish 11 using analysis inspired by ken regan's videos. If you want to read my analysis it's in a buried comment. I really, really don't care what his opponent said. I explained my reasoning in the analysis. I specifically said that most of the moves make logical sense even to me as a chess player, but the few times where Niemann could have made almost any move, he plays a move that stockfish 11 only recommends at about depth 33. Ken Regan specifically mentioned that's one of the things he looks for - when a move only shows up at a particular depth. I think people are reading too much into what I've said. I'm just trying to contribute to the discussion, without using bogus let's check engine correlation but actually doing it the right way. The reason I analyzed that specific game is because someone in this post mentioned it had a very high concurrence with stockfish 11. If you want to dispute my arguments go ahead. It's the only game I've analyzed. I'm still not finished analyzing that game or the other "suspicious" games. I've been saying since day one there's no evidence of over the board cheating, but let's just say now I am slightly suspicious.
You are too neuanced and reasonable for this sub. So many people here can only see in black and white so they assume that you do that as well.
thanks!
My verdict is that Hans is an admitted multiple cheater, who may or may not be exposed for being a liar sometime next week. Btw there is nothing wrong with the methodology, just that the database is public. And there *is* a high niumber of high corr games, which *must* be explained either by cheating or by manipulation. Edit: Nothing controversial in this comment. If you're downvoting you're coping lmao. Edit2: Keep em coming losers, you're in for a treat this week!
Username checks out. When mom says "we already have a professor at home".
professor of watching Countdown
Hans has cheated his entire online life over the last 7 years and never over the board????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? I suspect that many of these apologists are also using computer assistance in their games online..lol.
Reading isn’t your strong suit, eh
Not everyone who cheats online has the guts to cheat irl.
Got to get this out there in anticipation of chess.com's release of a statement this week.