TopNotch wrote on 03/30/21 at 22:38:35:


Thanks for the link. Hikaru is really good on YouTube I think. Incredibly strong, obviously, he is personable and cheerful, and he explains well for punters. I don't watch the Twitchy stuff and all sorts of challenges against pseudo-slebs and all that, just the blitz chess against other strong GMs, and it is instructive and fun.

> The games and the moves
I looked through the games there as Hikaru played through them. Looks like a reasonable player beating others who all misplay their openings. Not impressed by her opponents particularly. I would have fancied winning all those too - as the opponents kinda rolled over and died. Repeated opponents going for early baths will result in a z-score overreach over just several games, of course.

Question 1 - Is this just a decent FM/IM strength player putting some not-so-good play to sleep?
Question 2 - What other evidence is there?

> Sutovsky FB
Sutovsky's FB page is open to all (and which is curiously still seemingly both his personal and official page). Discussions there. Notable are comments by Macieja.

One would very much hope that when such accusations (and resulting punishments) occur that the evidence - matches, move times, physical observations etc - is just so strong as to be incontrovertible.

Yes, I agree, it is intriguing.

Hikaru has now also weighed in on his Youtube channel and shares my opinion that nothing in the five games themselves seems to suggest engine cheating by Osmak, Iulija, however he feels there is more to the story than meets the eye. I have to admit, this case really has me intrigued.

Here is the Hikaru link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0Jt4WB3KQ0

Thoughts?

Analyzing one event at a time will probably never give enough moves to provide a statistically reliable conclusion. Either events will need to be aggregated, or other types of evidence added, or both. It sounds like that's what they've done here, but it's not an easy job.

Let's not jump to conclusions though. It's not at all unusual for a tournament winner to outperform their published Elo by 300 or even 400. It's not even a red flag, especially in shorter events. Some play better than their Elo, others play worse. Just take a look at the winner's TPR in a big open like Gibraltar. Only if someone does it in event after event is it a red flag. But then what would one say about Fischer's streak in 1970-1971? Impossible, right?

Even multiple events is still not conclusive, because you have to allow for people studying like crazy and just improving. I remember being a sub-1600 player for about a year. Some 43 years ago when USCF ratings came out quarterly and were already out-of-date when published, my number was 1599 and I knew this was it. I entered every U1600 event I could find and even traveled out-of-state to find some more. I won every game except one! I was winning that one too but became over-confident. My next published rating was 1760, and three months after that I was a little over 1800. No cheating whatsoever, I just needed to ripen as a player. But statistically impossible I guess.

One other effect is the amplification provided by the playing-the-rating blunder. For example, what if some improving junior (me 40+ years ago) has a published rating of 1599 but a true strength of about 1800? In that scenario, a 1700 opponent may take some risks against a 1600 that they wouldn't try against an 1800. And that's how an (unpublished) 1800 player ends up with a TPR closer to 2000. Once the published rating catches up, opponents start playing more sanely, and the consecutive outlandish performances stop.

To be clear, when I played through Osmak's games I could plainly see she played way above her 2400 rating. hicetnunc's analysis confirms it. But to me it's not a red flag. How many players were in the event? Not just counting her 6-player group, but counting all players. In a group that large, the distribution of net-Elo performances will easily be from -400 to +400. Of course most will perform close to their published Elo, but even without any real improvement *somebody* is bound to have an outlandish performance; it just happened to be her. That's one explanation. The fair play people gave a different explanation.

I have been reviewing the Fair Trading Committee statements and edicts more closely and it made me shudder to think that a governing body has the audacity to assume they can get away with such autocracy. Some of their policies are complete lunacy, and makes me wonder who is running the asylum.

In this case the cure being worse than the disease is an understatement and opens the door to wholesale corruption. Imagine banning Magnus or Caruana for fairplay violations and then stipulating the verdict or sentence is final and cannot be challenged or appealed in anyway while also claiming that a ban for fair play violation does not harm the player's reputation. Whoever was involved in drafting such a ridiculous  document should be impeached and removed forthwith.

Judge for yourselves:

"FIDE World University online chess championships 2021 Fair Play FIDE World University Individual Online Blitz Championship (14 March)

The Fair Play Panel (FPP) of the FIDE World University Chess Championships, after examining the games followed by several meetings, disqualified 5 (five) players from the World University Individual Online Blitz Championship for breach of Fair Play.
Due to the large number of games (4763 in total), the procedure took 70 hours to perform the fair play check.
The investigation included:
- statistical evidence
- Host internet platform (HIP) evidence
- physical evidence
- expert opinion
The statistics included several parameters, which combined with the other criteria lead to the decision for disqualification.

As part of our ongoing efforts to build a community of players that play fairly at all times, a Fair Play review is conducted during every event. We supervise players during their games and undertake a comprehensive analysis of all games played in order to protect players with exceptional performances from accusations of unfair play.
The decision of FPP to disqualify a player for a suspected fair play violation is final and is not subject to any appeal, review or other challenge. The disqualified players have lost their right to participate in the next events of the 2021 Online University Championships.

It's an open-source tool to collect some statistics from pgn files. I've sent you a pm.

https://github.com/MGleason1/PGN-Spy

Quick report (for player Osmak): pgn-spy scores are indeed very high for someone at this level (they are similar to what you would expect from a 2750+ player in 2hrs games), but the sample is too small to be fully conclusive imo.

Definitely ground for suspicions though, so I can understand the ban if they use better tools (hopefully !) or do have additional pieces of evidence.

disclaimer : I'm using my own methods and baselines

hicetnunc wrote on 03/29/21 at 10:01:07:


Relevant pgn file attached, please let me know what you find.

hicetnunc wrote on 03/29/21 at 10:01:07:


I can produce a pgn from chess24. Does pgn-spy use move times? If yes, what time format is required? Chess24 gives per-move time consumed like so:
1 d4 0.29 Nf6 0.31 3s
2 c4 0.26 1s g6 0.53 1s

I can produce times either incremental/total, consumed/remaining. Format m:ss would be like so:
1. d4 {0:00} Nf6 {0:03}
2. c4 {0:01} g6 {0:01}

One of the games the arbiter stopped the clocks, I don't know if I could produce valid times remaining for that game.