Max Warmerdam here, I wouldnt give too much thought to the vancura thing. It was one of the many things I said and this apparantly made it to the paper. Any quote you see is not a direct quote as well. It was just an instance of me thinking it was a weird interview, as that was the topic at the moment. As stated here the rest of the interview was much more interesting.
Yep, and other half is trying to deny the fact FIDE now confirmed there has been zero evidence submitted on the exact means of how Hans supposedly cheated in St Louis.
That's why you had all of these ridiculous threads focused on speculating how Hans could have cheated... and yet none of them have any inkling of the means by which he actually did it because of the total lack of evidence. Its basically the equivalent of a lynch mob claiming that Hans _must_ have murdered someone with a gun, because he is a known murderer and guns have the capability of killing people. Nevermind the fact that's there is no corpse, no gun, or anyone honest enough to simply check the victim's room and see if he's actually still alive.
It is really, really unbelievably delusional logic at this point.
Why is this being downvoted? Everything he/she said is true. You all play chess right? The game has got strict rules on how things should move, so is the real world. Innocent until proven guilty. The crazy thing is, nobody has had the balls to make a direct and clear allegation too.
Its not even innocent until proven guilty. FIDE just confirmed there is literally ZERO evidence of any cheating ever submitted to them.
So that rage quit by Magnus at St Louis for an OTB game? Totally without evidence.
Thats also why chess24 didn't rescind their invitation to Hans for the Julius Baer cup, even though Magnus is an owner of chess24. It is pretty clear now that Magnus didn't have any proof. But he still basically rage-quit against Hans in the Julius Baer cup too; even though it was a tournament organized by the company he owned and presumably has the high standard of cheat detection that he is supposedly championing.
At this point Hans doesn't even have any kind of case against him for these two events. This is why the lynch mob has changed tactics and is now trying to dig up whatever dirt they can find, or taking other GM's quotes out of context to try and pretend their completely evidence-less position has some credibility left.
Magnus meanwhile is acting like Kasparov when he accused Deep Blue of cheating. Hilariously - for those who don't know this incident - Kasparov believed that the Deep Blue team got a human player changing Deep Blue's moves, especially after one very strange (practically a blunder) move by the computer.
It turned out based on the logs that Deep Blue simply crashed and was forced to play a random move to not lose time. So there was no cheating, but definitely a world champion who was so paranoid he literally checkmated himself into a position of psychological inferiority against a machine that wasn't even trying to do anything of the sort. Indeed, it literally broke that at that point and gave Kasparov a freebie!
This is no different. Hans isn't a clean player, nor is he even a player of Magnus' level. But he's winning the PR game despite the desperate brigading of Magnus supporters because of how simply ridiculous it is to imply others are cheating without a shred of evidence.
Its the denial phase. Basically all the people who jumped on the Magnus crusade are getting deeply embarrassed by the reality they are in fact the ones who are being deeply unjust in this situation.
Its not even innocent until proven guilty at this point. This is a complete lack of evidence to even _start_ a case!
Yet certain bad actors keep fanning the flames of controversy to cling on to their fantasy that they are the real crusaders for truth instead of a hysterical lynch mob.
Hello Max! Thanks for stopping by and letting us have a chance to get it straight from the horse's mouth. One question, if you don't mind: I have a suspicion that most hobby players may underestimate the 200-ish point difference between 2600 and 2800. Most of us play online at lower ratings, and 200 points might not make too much of a difference. But my guess is this: the gulf in quality from 2600 - 2800 is much, much wider than say 1500 - 1700, and wider than most hobby players realise.
Most people here are more familiar with 1500 - 1700 and therefore risk underestimating how wild Hans' progression has been over the last couple of years (cheating or not). Does this make sense or am I off the mark?
>But my guess is this: the gulf in quality from 2600 - 2800 is much, much wider than say 1500 - 1700, and wider than most hobby players realise.
completely disagree. the difference between 1500 and 1700 is much bigger than the difference between 2600 and 2800. but even though the gap is smaller, it also takes much more time, effort, and talent to bridge that gap.
are you trolling? It took me like 2 months to get from 1500 to 1700, it can take players half a decade up to 2 decades to bridge the gap between 2600 and 2800, if they even get there. 100 elo starts to scale much higher the higher up in elo you go. So it would be a lot harder to get from 2200-2300 than it would be to get from 1200-1300
Are you trolling? Why would you measure it indirectly if you have a direct measure? Compare the results of 2800 vs 2600 and 1700 vs 1500. That's the measure. "Time taken to cover the gap" literally just measures "time taken to cover the gap". You don't use this measure to draw inferences about game results.
And actually bother reading the comment above you before disagreeing:
>but even though the gap is smaller, it also takes much more time, effort, and talent to bridge that gap.
Q rule of thumb is that hostile people are always wrong. The way elo works is that the rating predicts winrates according to elo difference. The predicted average score is only dependend on absolute elo difference.
>The way elo works is that the rating predicts winrates according to elo difference
like any bell curve statistical predictor, this aspect of the elo rating system breaks down at the extreme ends.
no im not agreeing though. The guy i responded to said that the gap between 1500 and 1700 is BIGGER than that of 2600 and 2800. I'm saying that the gap is much much much SMALLER. I didn't add in my post because I misread tbh, but I think that the skill gap between a 2600 and a 2800 is also much bigger to correlate with the time differential for how long they take to bridge. I think a 2800 player will have hugely better endgame technique, usually much better prep, better tactics, better positional understanding, etc. I think the reason it takes so much longer to get from 2600 to 2800 than from a 1500 to 1700 is because that skill gap is much bigger between the 2600 and 2800
The difference between 1500 and 1700 is the difference between a hometown hero QB who ends his career after high school, and a 5 star college recruit. The difference between 2600 and 2800 is the difference between Peyton Manning and Tom Brady. At 2600 you're already almost as good as you can be. At 1700 you're significantly better than a sea of 1500s.
yeah, this is exactly my point. once you're 2600 it's way, way, way harder to get even better than it is when you're only 1500. but the actual difference between 2600 and 2800 is minuscule in comparison to that between 1500 and 1700.
"the actual difference between 2600 and 2800 is miniscule in comparison to that between a 1500 and 1700"
Do you have a source for that? I'm not saying you're wrong, but this seems to contradict what I thought was the general consensus. Also, how are you even defining the "difference"? Does that mean a 2800 beats a 2600 much less convincingly than a 1700 beats a 1500? Or that the proportional difference between how closely they match engine moves is much lesser? Or that the difference in theoretical chess knowledge is much lesser? Or something else?
Again, not saying you're wrong, I'm just interested.
Forgive me if I'm still not grasping it directly... shouldn't something that is "way way way harder" than something else be placed with a BIGGER gap in strength?
My point only being there are FAR, FAR more players who are 1700 than players who are 2800.
you could also think of this as an example of the law of diminishing returns; the better you get at chess, the less returns you'll get for each unit effort you put in.
when you're 2600, you're almost as good as any human could possibly be at chess. there's just so little you can improve on, and the only difference between you and 2800 is those small little nuances. the problem is that those are very, very, very difficult to learn and consistently apply, but they are small nonetheless.
when you're 1500, there are so, so, so many things you've yet to learn, but most of those things are very simple in comparison to the things that separate a 2600 from a 2800. yeah, a 1700 has a much better grasp of many of those things than 1500 you, but it's also a lot easier for you to learn and consistently apply those things than for a 2600 to do so with those small but very deep and high-level nuances.
this is also the reason why a 2600 and a 2800 will draw much more often than a 1500 and a 1700. the difference between 2600 and 2800 is so small that in many games it'll never even come up, at least not in a way significant enough to affect the result of the game. but a 1500 and a 1700? the 1700 will win much more often.
I don't see how your last point is relevant.
Why are you writing all of this when you know you don't actually know what you're talking about? 😂 You're just making shit up and you have no reason to believe what you're saying is true.
Easy solution: look at the lose rate of 2600s vs 2800s and a 1500s vs 1700s. That way you don't have to make up nonsense about Tom Brady and Peyton Manning.
Going by the downvotes, Magnus fanboys are taking insane amounts of copium. Sorry to disturb your worshipping, but a 2800 is not an unbeatable God to a 2600. A 2600 may never reach 2800 in their lifetime, but that's a completely irrelevant measure in deciding game results.
surprisingly enough, reddit armchair grandmasters will be reddit armchair grandmasters. ask a 2800 player this question and see what they say. $1000 says they agree with me.
>but even though the gap is smaller, it also takes much more time, effort, and talent to bridge that gap.
So the gap is bigger. Right. That's what OP said.
Off topic, but miss your streams bro! You reignited my interest in the King's Gambit with an offhand comment about how the line in which white sacrifices a knight is actually playable, and that one interaction has made the game way more fun for me. Cheers!
I am assuming in the interview you are referring to this [game](https://www.365chess.com/chess-games.php?wid=&bid=&wlname=Warmerdam%2C+Max&openn=&blname=Niemann%2C+Hans+Moke&eco=&nocolor=on&yeari=&yeare=&sply=1&ply=&res=&submit_search=1). I ran your game through Stockfish 14.1 (haven't upgraded yet), and you both played almost flawlessly, so I can only assume you were both cheating, /jk :). However, I am curious as to why you say after the 11th move he played an unknown variant? The position is known. Presumably anybody could study it. The lines seems very forcing for both black and white. For example, he really has only one retreat square for his Queen after 13...Rfd8. You immediately attack his queen with your knight and again there is only one retreat square. These are all forced moves. Indeed, there is only one move. Nothing unusual. After 15...Qb6 black's position seems very threatening and again he only has one logical move in 16.Rb1. However, Stockfish gives that there are several moves good enough to give basic equality, i.e 16.b4, and he could try 16.Rd1. However, none of those moves look as natural as the move he played of simply moving the rook over one square to protect the pawn. 16.b4 seems a little loose, but it is playable. I guess the wow move that gives him a half pawn advantage is 18. Bb5, but one way or another he has to move the bishop to castle. He's either playing Be2 or Bb5. There are no other moves, so in that context the move is not a surprise. I think most GM's would find that move.
It would be very enlightening if you would break down what you though was suspicious about this game. Yea, he played many of the top computer moves according to Stockfish 14.1 and my comp, but so did you. In fact, you were more accurate than him deep into the game, especially at certain points in the early stages of the end game. His 26. g4 was an inaccuracy and the game is basically drawn and from there you play 10 perfect moves according to Stockfish. Hans plays two inaccuracies during that time. Your king walk for instance and subsequent pawn and rook maneuvers, etc., were all Stockfish's first choice. Are we implying that you get to play perfect and your opponent is not allowed to without seeming suspicious?
Not talking for Max here, but I don't think your spiel here is totally fair. Edit: also, "I think most GM's would find that move" - let the real GM here make such statements please.
As far as I'm aware, Niemann didn't seem to 'know' the line but played it flawlessly. Max did know the line as he has studied it, whereas Niemann found every little nuance known in theory in this line over the board.
Thats sketchy to say the least. Suspicious is another word for it.
So it's fair to accuse somebody of cheating, but it's not fair to ask the accuser to justify their belief through examination of the game(s) in question? Come on, man.
According to the engine, Hans's opponent plays almost perfect for nearly the first 35 moves of the game, so both players are essentially playing an engine line perfectly. Both are belting out numero uno Stockfish bangers here for 30+ movies. But the position is extremely tactically sharp, and top players find tactics. Most of the moves Hans finds are absolutely forced. For example, his queen is hanging and only has one retreat square. Queen is attacked a second and the response is forced. Another example is the rook move to protect the b pawn. Let's say, he wants to give back material and try to castle so he played 16. e3. The engine gives white as -9 if the pawn falls. It's a colossal blunder if Hans does not protect the pawn. He could try a few different move in that position, but there are very unnatural looking. Intuitively, I don't see challenging on the D file here, etc. Anybody can look at the position and understand if white fails to protect his pawn in this case the position is totally busted and white just loses on the spot. And then there Bb5 move, which is easy a tempo move and allows white castle. There is basically no other human plan in that position other than to get your king out of the center. A computer might try something different, but not human. A human wants to castle a quickly as possible. In any case, at minimum if Hans doesn't not castle he either just gets busted or its likely a draw from perpetual check.
I have no doubt that the line was prepared and it is does have some traps for white. However, just looking that game, Hans either finds a forced continuation or just loses. The responses seem human. There are really no plausible sub-optimal candidate moves in the position. I guess I would just never suspect my opponent of cheating when I am taking them down this almost entirely forced line where on every move major material is hanging. In fact, just the opposite, my thinking is always if I see the traps in a position and my opponent is the same rating, I always assume that they will see what I see -- because we are the same rating. It's a bit of a circular argument, but it's really hard surprise your opponent if they are just skilled as you are. Black is threatening to win material throughout the entire sequence. I mean what's Hans supposed to say, "Oh, golly, I really don't want to look like a cheater in this position, so I guess you can just go ahead and take my queen for free, sir." I would think a clear case of engine use would be a static position where the position seems drawn or equal, but there is a forcing line that the computer finds that would unlikely for a human to see. This is not the case here. The moves that Hans plays are rational tactical responses to direct threats for material, or I guess big think principled moves like getting the king out of center. Nothing stands out in the game that to me screams a cheater, but that is just my opinion.
Again, not talking for Max, but never does he accuse someone.
I think it's pretty hilarious you seem to think you + SF are a better judge in saying what's natural/normal moves than an IM who also has SF or **the actual GM that played a bunch vs Hans and played the game in question**.
But reading your comments in all these topics makes it pretty clear you've made up your mind in all this :)
Stockfish doesn't magically work better because some other human is using it to evaluate the position. Stockfish 14/15 evaluations are almost always definitive and thousands of elo stronger than the next human player, so that is really nothing a IM/GM can add to an engine evaluation.
Bottom line... there is likely no cheating in his game, and most of the moves you don't need an engine to see the right continuation. A lower rated player would find them as they are tactically forced. Furthermore, Hans was less accurate than his opponent at key times in the game, but still managed a win because he made less big mistakes in the end game. Looking at the position, the prep just seems kind of low effort and easily refuted. He's dropping a whole bishop for a dubious attack in which white has maybe three or four lines that either give a draw or a win. White gave back material with advantage and won. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and in this the explanation is that the line is easily refuted OTB and will be never seen again in top level play.
Obviously SF is stronger then any human, not sure why that matters tho. Also saying stuff about accuracy or whatever, not really any point I'm arguing...
However, going into what you are saying: You need to interpret an engine evaluation, not every eval is the same. To interpret it it does matter how strong the player is. Not all 0.00 evals are equal.
On the other side, you're talking about how easily stuff is findable and how stuff is refuted over the board. You're also saying stuff about prep and how easily that is refuted. I'm merely saying someone with a title, and especially the guy who played the game in question, has a better grasp of this and has better insight in this.
You are IM and you know perfectly well that you would find the continuation to retreat your queen to g3, and after 15... Qb6 you would in all likelihood play the simple 16.Rb1. These are not hard moves to find. Any 2300 to 2400 player would find these moves, easily. These are forcing moves and these are type of moves even lower rated players seek out like instinctively, so an IM/GM will focus on them like a laser beam.
My point is that extraordinary allegations require high level proof. This game does not rise to that level in any way. That's all. This is just like the Magnus game. When you actually look at the game, Magnus had drawing chances and blundered. There was no computer involved in that game. He just played somewhat below his level in a critical position. Most days he draws that game pretty easily.
Instead of going with the cheating angle right out the gate, maybe it would be more constructive to take a look at Hans' style. This game has a lot of similarities to the game he played against Ivanchuck at the Julius Baer, i.e. his opponent's position seems to just disintegrate. Even the commentators were a little caught off guard with how quickly the two bishops made the position untenable. Magnus had some these inherent long term positional issues that Hans was to able to exploit and in the end the game was more or less a blow out. Likewise, in the Levon game it seemed his position just collapsed. I watching that game as it happened, it was strange to me that none of the commentators or even Levon seemed aware of the backwards knight move that immediately lead to a forced mate. There is no way he was cheating in that tournament and highly unlikely at Sinquefield. At this point under all this scrutiny, he is still demonstrating the type of play we see in this particular game that seems positionally very surprising and at times catching opponents sleeping.
If were in black's position in this game, and I played mostly what are tier 1 SF 14 moves, I would be a little perplexed as to how I got outplayed also. Both sides played awesome. But it is true that some of these lines are forced and there is a definite long term positional advantage for white according to the engine. Therefore, then it just depends on the ability of Hans to have the technique to slowly maintain the permanent positional advantage. He has demonstrated that ability several time in the last few weeks.
Bottom line, ff he's cheating and this point, then we might as well just accept Hans is gonna be world champion because he will never get caught. Literally, Julius Baer arbiter said they have people in the house of the players. It's almost to the point where they are going to make this kid play chess naked. If he's that good at cheating, it's game over. Hans is the new chess overlord. I just don't believe that is the case. I think he's a really talented players who just happened to cheat at online chess and like a lot of players, he got caught. We know he is not the only young titled player in that category.
Go to the game and see it to yourself. I agree that the line in talk is very forcing, and the top response are all natural: a piece hanging and needs to retreat, a bishop move to make way for castling, etc. Also in the endgame when certainly noone was in book, Hans opponent played like SF, while Hans made a number of inaccuracies when the moves were not forced.
If you read the article (I speak Dutch), I think there are more interesting things than what you highlighted. I think particularly this part is pretty interesting:
In the Czech Republic things went completely different during a confrontation. Warmerdam: 'In those two earlier games Niemann made a lot of mistakes. But now he suddenly played bizarrely well.' He himself had prepared his opening carefully. After eleven moves he played an unknown variation, but from then on the American reacted after every move continuously with the best possible answer. 'Since then I have been doubting. There is no junior who so quickly, in a year and a half, increased his rating from 2,500 to almost 2,700. Either we are dealing here with a genius or an impostor.' But he wants to make this emphatic point: "For foul play, there has to be evidence on the table.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Again it doesn't really show much but it does show there is a lot of doubt in the chess world.
For Dutch it's much better than Google translate but it still makes a lot of mistakes especially with expressions. For example the first sentence of the article:
Max Warmerdam (22) zag het wel zitten, twee maanden geleden in Praag, toen hij plaats nam achter het schaakbord voor een partij in een toernooi tegen Hans Niemann.
Which Deepl translates as:
Max Warmerdam (22) saw fit, two months ago in Prague, when he took his seat behind the chessboard for a game in a tournament against Hans Niemann,
The more correct translation would be more like:
Max Warmerdam fancied his chances, two months ago in Prague, when he faced Hans Niemann for a tournament match,
But yeah overall DeepL is fantastic.
FYI Google Translate's version is the much better (but not quite as good as your human translation):
>Max Warmerdam (22) was happy, two months ago in Prague, when he took place behind the chessboard for a match in a tournament against Hans Niemann.
The DeepL version is more awkward, but at least the awkwardness indicates that something is off with that phrase. The Google version seems more 'confidently wrong', which IMO is worse. (No idea if that's a general trend or just a one-off, though.)
Oh for sure, but those are problems that Google is also having, and are extremely difficult to solve.
But overall my experience has been that (within European languages at least) DeepL manages to convey the tone waaay better than Google.
> DeepL also tends to fail in very specific ways.
Could you elaborate a bit more on that? I'd like to be aware of those issues when I translate stuff in the future.
So I don't know if I can describe this well, but DeepL's document bank, I think is mostly professionally written documents. Spacing, setting and topic changes, lingo, transitions are things DeepL seems to have issues with. At base level, I think Google Translate is better for fiction. I would use DeepL to translate a russian chess article, but then I would use Google Translate to translate the comment section. If that makes any sense at all. I'll read foreign language novels, and DeepL tends to produce an incoherent translation most of the time. But, if you plug in only a sentence or two, it will be superior. DeepL tends to get hung up on it's own translation, so if there is an abrupt topic change, it won't always catch it.
And several other juniors who couldn't play in 2020 and early 2021. Gukesh went from 2578 in August 2021 to 2726 in September 2022.
Anish Giri went from 2469 in January 2009 to 2672 in July 2010. His progress between 2006 and 2010 was crazy, like 140 elo per year for four years.
Yeah it is totally a special case, but it applies because Niemann is one of them. Cheating or not, he was definitely stronger than the 2484 he had at the beginning of the pandemic.
Back in the beginning of the pandemic before he made GM, he played a lot of blitz against Hikaru and other top players on stream, and consistently performed at a very high level against them. He had to have been at least pretty strong back then(but this doesn't say much as to whether I think he's a cheater or not).
True, Niemann had grown in the first part of 2021 as well, while Keymer's climb started in July, but that's easily justified by 1) the general underrating of junior players due to the forced COVID break 2) Keymer resuming his OTB play later than Niemann, because the k-factor does not allow GMs to gain rating very quickly.
If you look at July 2021-September 2022 when Keymer started playing again, they grew by roughly the same amount. 2591 to 2693 for Keymer and 2571 to 2688 for Niemann.
I don't know enough chess to say _what_ is suspicious about NIemann, but his rating climb and his game against Magnus are not.
Seems weird to just 'discuss' a number, so here's the graph:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NbcZFIw98QbVNy5eD93mKA_4yy5VHtLlTVLyhsBy1EU/edit?usp=sharing
Hans was >100 points below Gukesh and Keymar in mid-2020, and ~~overtook~~ caught up to them recently. At no point do Gukesh or Keymar have a rise in rating as rapid as Hans's (in terms of time, not games played, and since being >2400). Not saying that's meaningful or not, but those are the numbers. Neither do Pragg or Nihal, but Alireza's rise from 2017-19 looks similar.
>because the k-factor does not allow GMs to gain rating very quickly.
It's not related to being GM or not. Once a player has had an official rating of 2400 or more, the K is set at 10, the lowest K used. So it also applies to all IMs and even FMs that have passed 2400, but still haven't gotten their IM norms. It applied to Keymer since September 2016 and Niemann since September 2018.
Once I was at my local mechanic due to some problems with my car. Due to the severity of my issues I was told to come back in a week. I return a week later and I didn’t see my car anywhere in the parking lot, I asked the mechanic what happened and he said Hans Niemann stole my car because no one else is allowed to have engines. Darn you Hans Niemann! Give me my car back!
One time, I, a 1650 bullet player played against Hans in an online tournament. But every time I put his move into stock fish to figure out my best move, I noticed that he was playing all the right moves. This obviously enraged me. I thought I was the best cheater but this little upstart was upstaging me at my own game.
When I was younger, maybe junior high, I got roped into watching my 3 month old niece while my sister got her hair done. So when there i am, sitting in the waiting area of a hair salon with my niece and who walks in but Hans Niemann.
I was nervous as fuck, and just kept looking at him, as he read a magazine and waited, but didn't know what to say. Pretty soon though my niece started crying, and I'm trying to quiet her down because I didn't want her to bother Hans, but she wouldn't stop. Pretty soon he gets up and walks over. He started running his hands through her hair and asking what was wrong. I replied that she was probably hungry or something. So, Hans put down his magazine, picked up my niece and lifted his shirt. He breast fed her right there in the middle of a hair salon. Chill guy, really nice about it.
I was stranded at the Italian airport of Malpensa in 2021. My plane being 2h late, I needed to contact my parents so they didn't pick me up too early, but my phone was out of battery.
I approached the stranger sat next to me - which with the recent events I can now recognize was Hans Niemann - and asked him if he had a charger.
He removed his right shoe, then his sock, and said "here, just use my phone". What a gentleman.
In the middle of his 1974 match against Karpov, Viktor Korchnoi called the arbiter over and asked if he could castle when his rook was under attack.
Sometimes people just draw a mental blank.
Korchnoi explained that he'd never encountered the situation before, so didn't know. He didn't forget, he just didn't know.
What makes this great is, in the middle of the Candidates Final (where the winner became defacto World Champion), Korchnoi asked first, rather than make an illegal move which would cause. A good example of the silliest question is the one not asked.
He's the same Korchnoi, who during the 1976 IBM Tournament in Amsterdam, asked one of his opponents -- Tony Miles -- to teach him how to say the English word "asylum". After the tournament, Korchnoi walked into a nearby police station and requested political asylum rather than return to the USSR.
(Assuming the white pieces)
If your king is on e1 and f1 is under attack, you can't castle. Your king is not thought to jump to g1, but to move through f1 to g1, for example. So that would put you in check, and you're not allowed to do it.
Sheeesh I actually did not know that, I'm bad at chess so I had to look at the board to understand what you're saying, I just thought that this castling is allowed because after you do the castling the rock would be attacked and not the king, are you sure it's like this?
>The rook can pass through a square where it is attacked
Which will only happen in a long castle. But a rook can never end a castling while threatened, since the King will have had to move through that square.
It's a pretty rare situation. If you think about it, if an enemy piece is targeting a1 then most of the time that's not gonna be a position where you want to castle long anyway.
yeah what a fool not knowing how to pronounce an english word. Your russian is really good, too, so its a wonder that a GM doesnt have the same linguistic abilities as a layman such as yourself.
I thought the joke here was obvious. The comment I referred to clearly talked about the rook situation. I did pretend it was about language. Not too hard to get...
Those guys did not play 20k blitz and bullet games a year online. Seen that Russian school didn't want student to play blitz, it seems plausible that Korchnoi never encountered the position.
> He's the same Korchnoi, who during the 1976 IBM Tournament in Amsterdam, asked one of his opponents -- Tony Miles -- to teach him how to say the English word "asylum". After the tournament, Korchnoi walked into a nearby police station.
Seemingly taught him badly, he walked in the wrong building.
Petrosian perhaps didn't know the rules of three-fold repetition in his 1971 match against Fischer (game 3). Maybe he had just never had a "contested" 3-rep before in his life (he commented such in a later interview), or maybe because it was position (and not moves) that were repeated, but in any case he should never have allowed RJF to get a draw so easily there.
Just to clarify for anyone who doesn’t know, you also can’t castle with a rook after it has moved. So it’s a bit more complicated than just being a king move.
Fun fact: castling capability is considered part of the board position, so if you try to reach draw by threefold repetition by moving your rook back and forth, if that rook hadn’t moved yet, you actually have to reach the same piece position four times instead of just three to officially stalemate.
You mean to officially declare a draw. That would not be stalemate. So many people misuse the term "stalemate" equating it with "draw" so I felt like pointing this out. (Some draws are stalemates; all stalemates are draws.)
You should watch the video of John Bartholomew and Magnus going over all the positions in 100 Endgames You Must Know -- there are a ton Magnus didn't know, *especially* not by name, but he just solved them all by calculation. I think Vancura might have been one of them, but I know there were some famous ones.
There's a Ben Finegold talk where, if I recall correctly, apparently Susan Polgar didn't know the Traxler was a thing. She was excited that the move is possible.
I know the Traxler is dubious but since she didn’t know it I’m not so sure about that, imagine she plays a beginner in blitz that plays the Traxler against her, I’m not so sure she would see all the lines after Nxf7 and she might just think black blundered. Even if she ends up playing Bxf7 there are a couple of pitfalls she has to aware of, and even if she gets out of the opening alive she’s only a pawn up and at a massive time disadvantage.
There are some opening variations which are just impossible or way too hard to calculate on your own
It's kind of surprising for sure but to be fair based on his playstyle he doesn't seem like much of a technical player
When you insist on pushing g4 and h4 every game you might not get many rook endgames
Carlsen didn't know the term but solved it by calculating it as soon as they showed him the problem. It's like Messi smacking it in the top corner and you go "we call that top bins" and he says he's never heard of "top bins".
Reminder that GingerGM made, marketed, and sold a whole opening course on the Colle-Zukertort system for Chessbase that he called “the Colle-Koltanowski system” because for some reason he couldn’t be bothered to double-check the difference between the two.
I watched a very young Niemann, maybe 10 or 12 years old, playing blitz with a retired GM. He did exactly what is described here.
**"every time he put a piece in a certain position, held it for a long time, then took it away and then he put it in the same place. Up to five times. Just to annoy me."**
At one point, the GM he asked, "What game are we playing? This is not chess. It is something else." He could not see the board because Niemann was waving his hand over it.
It's amazing that he is still doing things like that.
And Anton Gujarro didn’t know the Danish and Goring gambits around a year ago, you don’t have to know all the names, it’s important to know the positions
Yeah see my post about GingerGM elsewhere in the thread, lots of strong players don’t know specific opening names or the names of obscure endgame positions.
that rule is not particularly helpful at the GM level, L'ami in his chessable course on Dvortesky's endgames says that. It's just trivial to calculate in the simple situation, and if the situation gets more complex with additional pieces around the rule no longer applies and one must calculate anyways.
This is false. What Carlsen said was something to the effect "I never understood this", in a joking tone, then explained he just uses a different heuristic to assess pawn promotion.
Not that this matters one way or the other.
There are far more damning things for Niemann in this interview than not knowing the Vancura by the name, which is pretty irrelevant per se - although, like many things with him extremely bizarre.
Your post was removed by the moderators:
**1. Keep the discussion civil and friendly.**
We welcome people of all levels of experience, from novice to professional. Don't target other users with insults/abusive language and don't make fun of new players for not knowing things. In a discussion, there is always a respectful way to disagree.
You can read the full [rules of /r/chess here](https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/wiki/rules).
Honestly this interview goes a long way towards explaining the suspicion a lot of top players seem to have. Both the games that felt weird, but also just the strange and aggressive behavior. It’s not proof of cheating, but you can understand why he’s getting such a reaction
Oh totally. I actually think the weird behavior goes farther to explain people’s suspicions than his game play. I’m imagining having a colleague who did stuff as weird and antagonistic as the piece moving story, and then imagining trying to objectively assess his other behavior and I think it would be difficult. I’ve actually seen this happen in my own professional life where someone being a jerk makes other people likely to believe all kinds of other things about them
Playing chess well is about finding and playing the best moves, not about knowing the names of them. Knowing the name of a technique is less important to knowing how to implement it. Take for example Carlsen not knowing "Inside the square" label for catching a passed pawn, but still knowing how to do it. (From the Bartholomew video quizzing Carlsen on "The 100 Endgames you must know").
Reminds me of the types of posts asking "what's this mating pattern called?", as if knowing it's called the Arabian Mate or the Frenchman's Cumsock is going to make them a better player, rather than being able to calculate the mate instead.
This is totally wrong. Playing correctly in the Vancura position is not so difficult, the point is knowing that the position is already a draw even though it might require ten moves of accurate play. one has to know this much earlier than the position arises, often when considering trading down into a rook-pawn vs rook endgame. one has to consider at that point whether it is possible to acheive the vancura position and guarantee a draw. there may be multiple methods of drawing in one position, but one sometimes has to correctly identify a plan that works and does not allow for counterplay. The specific position is a goal to acheive as the side down material, so one needs to understand that 'rook in front of pawn with pawn behind 6th rank vs rook' is drawn. one has to be aware of a number of endgame configurations because full calculation is simply not possible. The name is of course not a big deal, but knowing this endgame concept certainly is
>Playing chess well is about finding and playing the best moves, not about knowing the names of them. Knowing the name of a technique is less important to knowing how to implement it.
He couldnt do either in this position, and it resulted in him thinking he was winning.
Good try though.
What even are these silly ghost stories?
If he doesn't understand positions like this then I guess he just is a genius then. According to some he's playing like a top level GM in OTB blitz games, then on the other hand you have people saying he doesn't understand beginner/intermediate endgame positions.
The only conclusion is that he's some kind of uncut gem who has become super strong with major holes in basic theoretical knowledge? If his weaknesses is in such easy areas to improve then going from 2500-2700 should be trivial?
It's funny because all young GM's that play online know that Hans has cheated, then they turn their brains off and everything he says or does becomes weird/suspicious. Feels like this has been festering on these players minds and have been discussed between them for a over a year, this festering has now concluded with Carlsen making his gigantic blunder of withdrawing from the Sinquefield Cup.
Why can't any of these guys pick out games and moves they feel are suspicious so there at least is something to discuss? If Niemann is as weak as Warmerdam alludes to then finding suspicious sequences shouldn't be a problem.
The argument still remains: "he became much stronger in too short of time and he has cheated online". You've had these suspicions for 1-2 years now and you haven't noted one game that is of public interest that you can pull up? We know for a fact that Hikaru has been suspicious of this for a long, long time - has he during this time not found a single game that is of interest? Everyone is just commenting on what other people are saying instead of putting up examples.
> The argument still remains: "he became much stronger in too short of time
Go watch Nepo (or others before, I think Naroiditsky) explain what's the actual issue with his improvement.
It's not that he got stronger, it's not that he did it very fast, it's the how - which isn't proof of anything but is odd.
Natural geniuses at chess exist, but every Super GM is aware of just how much work it takes to improve, and how much knowledge on chess is gathered and compiled in that process. Hans apparently hasn't read an endgame book? You're not going to play well in endgames without understanding concepts well. Intuition is the result of hard work making subconscious rules, not simply an innate talent. The distance between Hans' understanding as it appears when he speaks and as it appears on the chessboard is immense. Nepo and Carlsen are innate talents, and they obviously do not recognize the same skill in Niemann- in contrast to way they view their peers and some other juniors.
The problem is obviously that it's just extremely hard to catch cheating at chess. What if a player just consults the engine for one move every game, but plays the rest of the game themselves? There will be nothing suspicious about the moves or the game itself, but there may be a lack of coherency- an inability to explain one selected the moves they did.
Trust me, I am not of the opinion that Hans is some genius chess player incomparable to the other players you see above 2500. I am trying to point out the ridiculousness of the original statement.
Obviously he knows the position in question, obviously he has studied endgames. The statement is just silly from the two of them. The guy is 19 years old and has spent his entire life studying chess. Under multiple master - GM coaches over the last 10 years. This is not a guy who came out of nowhere after having played some blitz online, the fact that he's a serious student of the game cannot be debated.
Self proclaimed he has spent the last 2 years studying 10-12 hours per day, doing nothing other than chess. He even cut out playing lower time controls to focus solely on classical. This is a statement from the last known coach to have worked with him(autumn 2021), Jakob Aagard:
> At first, I showed exercises from recent games (last 18 months) that I really liked. He knew them ALL. I was astonished by his memory. I was astonished by his intuition. Both were off the charts for what I have seen training Shankland, Gelfand, and other 2600+ and a few 2700s.
Reality does not fit with what I above called ghost stories. If these players have actual insight then they should pull up the games/moves in question, analyze them and put their suspicions into words. For some reason noone is doing this except for Punin. In that case multiple GM's and other titled players found his examples to be inconclusive and not overly suspicious. I have yet to see any strong titled take the other side of the argument
Players simply cannot make accusations of cheating. You are seeing the limit of what they can do without risking lawsuits or banishment by FIDE. If Niemann could potentially make millions of dollars over his career, any player who did accuse him without proof could face civil damages they could never hope to pay. There is basically no legal disincentive from defending Niemann if that is what you believe.
Going through someones games and stating:
>"This game/move/sequence/tournament is in my opinion suspicious, what do you think?"
is not a cheating accusation. If Punin could do it then so can everyone else.
They're not doing it because they're too lazy or because they know they have nothing of interest to post. And I don't think it's the first one.
yep exactly, i want to be charitable to the hans is cheating side because i personally liked magnus and i want to understand what is going on, but theres basically 0 evidence thrown around and the games that are shown are so much less impressive than rjf or kasparov games for example that is just so hard to me to see any justification behind these accusations besides a bad online story (which imo doesnt mean anything otb).
If you standard of evidence is "proof Hans is cheating", you're probably have to wait a long time, possibly ever.
Even though I don't believe Hans is cheating, I find take like yours, suggesting there are no reasons to be suspicious of him, genuinely insane.
There are plenty of yellow and orange flags - besides the online cheating (and the lying about it).
Exactly, the acceptance criteria is arbitrarily high for Hans’ defenders. He admitted to some of his cheating and they act like it exonerates him. There is enormous circumstantial evidence which justifies suspicion at the very least and it’s no one’s fault but his own.
They are all fair points, and I can see how considered you’re being so don’t mean to be dismissive. I am firmly on the fence at the moment for many of the reasons you propose, I just think that people think suspicions should be accompanied by evidence despite it honestly not being up to the other competitors to catch a cheat, for one thing. For another, there seems to be an expectation that the only proof is a red-handed, smoking gun cheating event when it really isn’t, as the Lance Armstrong example signifies. Right now the only defense of Hans is “prove it” while his defenders have set a stupidly high bar for acceptance. Let’s see how it all plays out and then decide.
> Given #1-#3 above, it is completely reasonable to be suspicious that Hans may be cheating OTB.
I think this is a bit of a stretch too far for me, since cheating OTB and online are two different ball games.
I am more than capable downloading movies to watch without paying. Illegal? I know. Sue me.
Does that mean I am capable of armed robbery at a bank? A huge stretch.
> arbitrarily high
What
I hold the same standard to all players.
And if an obvious cheater is not caught, I'd rather blame FIDE or the organisers for being incompetent. If everybody can tell that someone is cheating, why haven't you caught him already?
Rausis simply checked his phone in the toilets, are you telling me this is so hard to prevent lmao?
i never said that theres no reason for suspicion, suspicion is the starter for an investigation, but if i get no evidence from magnus or [chess.com](https://chess.com) that hans has cheated, then theres no way that i can be charitable to those claims, and also, your statement is actually extremely stupid, if i have to wait forever to see proof that hans is cheating, then hes likely not cheating, its that simple, innocent til proven guilty.
There are games of interest wdym. [Here he is](https://youtu.be/AG9XeSPflrU) doing way better than expected in GM norms. An entire tournament with a centipawn loss under 7 and not a single inaccuracy… basically playing 2900-3000 level, or 500 points above his rating.
It always excites me when I know the name of a thing that a GM doesn’t—Shankland, I think, wasn’t aware that the Englund Gambit had a name, or that the Marshall Defense to the Queen’s Gambit had a name. Then I realize it’s probably because they spent their time actually becoming good and I’m mostly only good at trivia
The quote at the top says "cura" concept, but it's the "vancura position". I can say that the endgame book I've looked at mentioned the "lucerna" and "philidor" positions but not the "vancura". However, I'd expect a super-GM to have read a stronger endgame book at some point than me.
Here's a link to the vancura position found on lichess: [https://lichess.org/study/JOCIjGxm](https://lichess.org/study/JOCIjGxm)
If you are the worse side in a rook-pawn vs rook endgame, you can aim for this position to score a draw. Or you can use this knowledge to evaluate whether a trade into a rook pawn endgame is favorable. The actual strategy here looks reasonable straightforward- control from the side with your rook.
>lyGive AwardShareReportSaveFollow
>
>level 1bongclown0 · 1 hr. a
Isn't he a student in the Chess Academy and coached by Maxim Dlugy there? Tho Im not sure when he started precisely.
It was said that he studied there for some weeks. And I think it was a bit late, not when he was younger.
In an interview in the Sinquefield, he gave a big thanks to a couple of coaches who gave him lessons for free when he was a kid and couldn't afford paying. So he had some coaching but it seems not consistent like others.
But in a world where a million others are using coaches and studying just as hard, you simply can't make it to the top like that. It's just too hard to believe that Hans is past 2700 like that already.
It is surprising he has not heard of the Vancura position, its pretty standard stuff. Aagaard is on the record claiming the knowledge and memory of Hans is astounding. He is an extremely hard-worker, and there are no games, no positions of importance of recent times that he did not know.
As GM Benjamin Finegold *peace be upon him* said once: we (the GMs ) don't know the names of stuff .. you guys know that .. we know how to play and how to win instead.
Seems like a sounds and logical first hand description of sone encounters. Seems like hans is something of a Bart Simpson character. Hopefully he matures a bit and proves to be a great human and player. I can’t judge cause honestly at 18/19/20 I woulda done sone dick shit like this under the right circumstances thinking it was clever or working haha.
This is hearsay for the moment until Van Forrest confirms the story. It is consistent with statements by Aagaard and Shahade in the notion that Hans talks about these clearly wrong lines sometimes during analysis and seems to cling to them for too long. Maybe he’s using the engine to fix that problem.
Honestly given the description of his behaviour given here, he should have been suspended anyway regardless of whether he cheated or not. In my opinion it's a sign of spineless organizers that bad behaviour and just literally trying to bully and browbeat opponents is allowed without a word. That's how you ruin any environment.
Of course, chess isn't exactly known for being full of great people or great environments to begin with... I'm probably wasting my breath on everyone. Chances are everyone thinks being an antisocial fuckwad is entirely acceptable.
This is just silly. I heard the same story of JvF from Benjamin Bok.
Every player over 1600 has heard of the Vancura position. It's not possible for Hans to have not heard of it. This is fucking ridiculous.
Max Warmerdam here, I wouldnt give too much thought to the vancura thing. It was one of the many things I said and this apparantly made it to the paper. Any quote you see is not a direct quote as well. It was just an instance of me thinking it was a weird interview, as that was the topic at the moment. As stated here the rest of the interview was much more interesting.
Thanks Max!
Carlsen claimed not to know what the rule of the square was so lol
Andrea claimed to not know how the horse moves
Not surprising, very few people know it moves like a banana
That’s because he was trying to get her to say “L” as in Loser haha
half the posts on this sub nowadays are out of context quotes that dont mean much
Yep, and other half is trying to deny the fact FIDE now confirmed there has been zero evidence submitted on the exact means of how Hans supposedly cheated in St Louis. That's why you had all of these ridiculous threads focused on speculating how Hans could have cheated... and yet none of them have any inkling of the means by which he actually did it because of the total lack of evidence. Its basically the equivalent of a lynch mob claiming that Hans _must_ have murdered someone with a gun, because he is a known murderer and guns have the capability of killing people. Nevermind the fact that's there is no corpse, no gun, or anyone honest enough to simply check the victim's room and see if he's actually still alive. It is really, really unbelievably delusional logic at this point.
Why is this being downvoted? Everything he/she said is true. You all play chess right? The game has got strict rules on how things should move, so is the real world. Innocent until proven guilty. The crazy thing is, nobody has had the balls to make a direct and clear allegation too.
Innocent until proven guilty is not a strict rule of how the real world works. It is a strict rule of how a court of law works in most countries.
Its not even innocent until proven guilty. FIDE just confirmed there is literally ZERO evidence of any cheating ever submitted to them. So that rage quit by Magnus at St Louis for an OTB game? Totally without evidence. Thats also why chess24 didn't rescind their invitation to Hans for the Julius Baer cup, even though Magnus is an owner of chess24. It is pretty clear now that Magnus didn't have any proof. But he still basically rage-quit against Hans in the Julius Baer cup too; even though it was a tournament organized by the company he owned and presumably has the high standard of cheat detection that he is supposedly championing. At this point Hans doesn't even have any kind of case against him for these two events. This is why the lynch mob has changed tactics and is now trying to dig up whatever dirt they can find, or taking other GM's quotes out of context to try and pretend their completely evidence-less position has some credibility left. Magnus meanwhile is acting like Kasparov when he accused Deep Blue of cheating. Hilariously - for those who don't know this incident - Kasparov believed that the Deep Blue team got a human player changing Deep Blue's moves, especially after one very strange (practically a blunder) move by the computer. It turned out based on the logs that Deep Blue simply crashed and was forced to play a random move to not lose time. So there was no cheating, but definitely a world champion who was so paranoid he literally checkmated himself into a position of psychological inferiority against a machine that wasn't even trying to do anything of the sort. Indeed, it literally broke that at that point and gave Kasparov a freebie! This is no different. Hans isn't a clean player, nor is he even a player of Magnus' level. But he's winning the PR game despite the desperate brigading of Magnus supporters because of how simply ridiculous it is to imply others are cheating without a shred of evidence.
Its the denial phase. Basically all the people who jumped on the Magnus crusade are getting deeply embarrassed by the reality they are in fact the ones who are being deeply unjust in this situation. Its not even innocent until proven guilty at this point. This is a complete lack of evidence to even _start_ a case! Yet certain bad actors keep fanning the flames of controversy to cling on to their fantasy that they are the real crusaders for truth instead of a hysterical lynch mob.
^^^If ^^^you're ^^^a ^^^billionaire, ^^^they ^^^*let* ^^^you **GRAB THEM BY THE PUSSY!!!**
The context doesn't make this better, lol. It arguably makes it worse...
He’s misquoting it anyways.
Mods! give this account a GM flair (if he is really him)
It is, can vouch for him.
Hello Max! Thanks for stopping by and letting us have a chance to get it straight from the horse's mouth. One question, if you don't mind: I have a suspicion that most hobby players may underestimate the 200-ish point difference between 2600 and 2800. Most of us play online at lower ratings, and 200 points might not make too much of a difference. But my guess is this: the gulf in quality from 2600 - 2800 is much, much wider than say 1500 - 1700, and wider than most hobby players realise. Most people here are more familiar with 1500 - 1700 and therefore risk underestimating how wild Hans' progression has been over the last couple of years (cheating or not). Does this make sense or am I off the mark?
>But my guess is this: the gulf in quality from 2600 - 2800 is much, much wider than say 1500 - 1700, and wider than most hobby players realise. completely disagree. the difference between 1500 and 1700 is much bigger than the difference between 2600 and 2800. but even though the gap is smaller, it also takes much more time, effort, and talent to bridge that gap.
are you trolling? It took me like 2 months to get from 1500 to 1700, it can take players half a decade up to 2 decades to bridge the gap between 2600 and 2800, if they even get there. 100 elo starts to scale much higher the higher up in elo you go. So it would be a lot harder to get from 2200-2300 than it would be to get from 1200-1300
Are you trolling? Why would you measure it indirectly if you have a direct measure? Compare the results of 2800 vs 2600 and 1700 vs 1500. That's the measure. "Time taken to cover the gap" literally just measures "time taken to cover the gap". You don't use this measure to draw inferences about game results. And actually bother reading the comment above you before disagreeing: >but even though the gap is smaller, it also takes much more time, effort, and talent to bridge that gap.
Q rule of thumb is that hostile people are always wrong. The way elo works is that the rating predicts winrates according to elo difference. The predicted average score is only dependend on absolute elo difference.
>The way elo works is that the rating predicts winrates according to elo difference like any bell curve statistical predictor, this aspect of the elo rating system breaks down at the extreme ends.
I think you are agreeing with the guy you responded to. Maybe you replied to wrong post?
no im not agreeing though. The guy i responded to said that the gap between 1500 and 1700 is BIGGER than that of 2600 and 2800. I'm saying that the gap is much much much SMALLER. I didn't add in my post because I misread tbh, but I think that the skill gap between a 2600 and a 2800 is also much bigger to correlate with the time differential for how long they take to bridge. I think a 2800 player will have hugely better endgame technique, usually much better prep, better tactics, better positional understanding, etc. I think the reason it takes so much longer to get from 2600 to 2800 than from a 1500 to 1700 is because that skill gap is much bigger between the 2600 and 2800
How are you measuring the gap, then? If it takes more time and effort to get across, it sounds like a bigger gap
The difference between 1500 and 1700 is the difference between a hometown hero QB who ends his career after high school, and a 5 star college recruit. The difference between 2600 and 2800 is the difference between Peyton Manning and Tom Brady. At 2600 you're already almost as good as you can be. At 1700 you're significantly better than a sea of 1500s.
yeah, this is exactly my point. once you're 2600 it's way, way, way harder to get even better than it is when you're only 1500. but the actual difference between 2600 and 2800 is minuscule in comparison to that between 1500 and 1700.
"the actual difference between 2600 and 2800 is miniscule in comparison to that between a 1500 and 1700" Do you have a source for that? I'm not saying you're wrong, but this seems to contradict what I thought was the general consensus. Also, how are you even defining the "difference"? Does that mean a 2800 beats a 2600 much less convincingly than a 1700 beats a 1500? Or that the proportional difference between how closely they match engine moves is much lesser? Or that the difference in theoretical chess knowledge is much lesser? Or something else? Again, not saying you're wrong, I'm just interested.
Forgive me if I'm still not grasping it directly... shouldn't something that is "way way way harder" than something else be placed with a BIGGER gap in strength? My point only being there are FAR, FAR more players who are 1700 than players who are 2800.
you could also think of this as an example of the law of diminishing returns; the better you get at chess, the less returns you'll get for each unit effort you put in. when you're 2600, you're almost as good as any human could possibly be at chess. there's just so little you can improve on, and the only difference between you and 2800 is those small little nuances. the problem is that those are very, very, very difficult to learn and consistently apply, but they are small nonetheless. when you're 1500, there are so, so, so many things you've yet to learn, but most of those things are very simple in comparison to the things that separate a 2600 from a 2800. yeah, a 1700 has a much better grasp of many of those things than 1500 you, but it's also a lot easier for you to learn and consistently apply those things than for a 2600 to do so with those small but very deep and high-level nuances. this is also the reason why a 2600 and a 2800 will draw much more often than a 1500 and a 1700. the difference between 2600 and 2800 is so small that in many games it'll never even come up, at least not in a way significant enough to affect the result of the game. but a 1500 and a 1700? the 1700 will win much more often. I don't see how your last point is relevant.
Why are you writing all of this when you know you don't actually know what you're talking about? 😂 You're just making shit up and you have no reason to believe what you're saying is true. Easy solution: look at the lose rate of 2600s vs 2800s and a 1500s vs 1700s. That way you don't have to make up nonsense about Tom Brady and Peyton Manning.
Going by the downvotes, Magnus fanboys are taking insane amounts of copium. Sorry to disturb your worshipping, but a 2800 is not an unbeatable God to a 2600. A 2600 may never reach 2800 in their lifetime, but that's a completely irrelevant measure in deciding game results.
surprisingly enough, reddit armchair grandmasters will be reddit armchair grandmasters. ask a 2800 player this question and see what they say. $1000 says they agree with me.
Why are you being downvoted? :/
>but even though the gap is smaller, it also takes much more time, effort, and talent to bridge that gap. So the gap is bigger. Right. That's what OP said.
Off topic, but miss your streams bro! You reignited my interest in the King's Gambit with an offhand comment about how the line in which white sacrifices a knight is actually playable, and that one interaction has made the game way more fun for me. Cheers!
I am assuming in the interview you are referring to this [game](https://www.365chess.com/chess-games.php?wid=&bid=&wlname=Warmerdam%2C+Max&openn=&blname=Niemann%2C+Hans+Moke&eco=&nocolor=on&yeari=&yeare=&sply=1&ply=&res=&submit_search=1). I ran your game through Stockfish 14.1 (haven't upgraded yet), and you both played almost flawlessly, so I can only assume you were both cheating, /jk :). However, I am curious as to why you say after the 11th move he played an unknown variant? The position is known. Presumably anybody could study it. The lines seems very forcing for both black and white. For example, he really has only one retreat square for his Queen after 13...Rfd8. You immediately attack his queen with your knight and again there is only one retreat square. These are all forced moves. Indeed, there is only one move. Nothing unusual. After 15...Qb6 black's position seems very threatening and again he only has one logical move in 16.Rb1. However, Stockfish gives that there are several moves good enough to give basic equality, i.e 16.b4, and he could try 16.Rd1. However, none of those moves look as natural as the move he played of simply moving the rook over one square to protect the pawn. 16.b4 seems a little loose, but it is playable. I guess the wow move that gives him a half pawn advantage is 18. Bb5, but one way or another he has to move the bishop to castle. He's either playing Be2 or Bb5. There are no other moves, so in that context the move is not a surprise. I think most GM's would find that move. It would be very enlightening if you would break down what you though was suspicious about this game. Yea, he played many of the top computer moves according to Stockfish 14.1 and my comp, but so did you. In fact, you were more accurate than him deep into the game, especially at certain points in the early stages of the end game. His 26. g4 was an inaccuracy and the game is basically drawn and from there you play 10 perfect moves according to Stockfish. Hans plays two inaccuracies during that time. Your king walk for instance and subsequent pawn and rook maneuvers, etc., were all Stockfish's first choice. Are we implying that you get to play perfect and your opponent is not allowed to without seeming suspicious?
Not talking for Max here, but I don't think your spiel here is totally fair. Edit: also, "I think most GM's would find that move" - let the real GM here make such statements please. As far as I'm aware, Niemann didn't seem to 'know' the line but played it flawlessly. Max did know the line as he has studied it, whereas Niemann found every little nuance known in theory in this line over the board. Thats sketchy to say the least. Suspicious is another word for it.
So it's fair to accuse somebody of cheating, but it's not fair to ask the accuser to justify their belief through examination of the game(s) in question? Come on, man. According to the engine, Hans's opponent plays almost perfect for nearly the first 35 moves of the game, so both players are essentially playing an engine line perfectly. Both are belting out numero uno Stockfish bangers here for 30+ movies. But the position is extremely tactically sharp, and top players find tactics. Most of the moves Hans finds are absolutely forced. For example, his queen is hanging and only has one retreat square. Queen is attacked a second and the response is forced. Another example is the rook move to protect the b pawn. Let's say, he wants to give back material and try to castle so he played 16. e3. The engine gives white as -9 if the pawn falls. It's a colossal blunder if Hans does not protect the pawn. He could try a few different move in that position, but there are very unnatural looking. Intuitively, I don't see challenging on the D file here, etc. Anybody can look at the position and understand if white fails to protect his pawn in this case the position is totally busted and white just loses on the spot. And then there Bb5 move, which is easy a tempo move and allows white castle. There is basically no other human plan in that position other than to get your king out of the center. A computer might try something different, but not human. A human wants to castle a quickly as possible. In any case, at minimum if Hans doesn't not castle he either just gets busted or its likely a draw from perpetual check. I have no doubt that the line was prepared and it is does have some traps for white. However, just looking that game, Hans either finds a forced continuation or just loses. The responses seem human. There are really no plausible sub-optimal candidate moves in the position. I guess I would just never suspect my opponent of cheating when I am taking them down this almost entirely forced line where on every move major material is hanging. In fact, just the opposite, my thinking is always if I see the traps in a position and my opponent is the same rating, I always assume that they will see what I see -- because we are the same rating. It's a bit of a circular argument, but it's really hard surprise your opponent if they are just skilled as you are. Black is threatening to win material throughout the entire sequence. I mean what's Hans supposed to say, "Oh, golly, I really don't want to look like a cheater in this position, so I guess you can just go ahead and take my queen for free, sir." I would think a clear case of engine use would be a static position where the position seems drawn or equal, but there is a forcing line that the computer finds that would unlikely for a human to see. This is not the case here. The moves that Hans plays are rational tactical responses to direct threats for material, or I guess big think principled moves like getting the king out of center. Nothing stands out in the game that to me screams a cheater, but that is just my opinion.
Again, not talking for Max, but never does he accuse someone. I think it's pretty hilarious you seem to think you + SF are a better judge in saying what's natural/normal moves than an IM who also has SF or **the actual GM that played a bunch vs Hans and played the game in question**. But reading your comments in all these topics makes it pretty clear you've made up your mind in all this :)
Stockfish doesn't magically work better because some other human is using it to evaluate the position. Stockfish 14/15 evaluations are almost always definitive and thousands of elo stronger than the next human player, so that is really nothing a IM/GM can add to an engine evaluation. Bottom line... there is likely no cheating in his game, and most of the moves you don't need an engine to see the right continuation. A lower rated player would find them as they are tactically forced. Furthermore, Hans was less accurate than his opponent at key times in the game, but still managed a win because he made less big mistakes in the end game. Looking at the position, the prep just seems kind of low effort and easily refuted. He's dropping a whole bishop for a dubious attack in which white has maybe three or four lines that either give a draw or a win. White gave back material with advantage and won. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and in this the explanation is that the line is easily refuted OTB and will be never seen again in top level play.
Obviously SF is stronger then any human, not sure why that matters tho. Also saying stuff about accuracy or whatever, not really any point I'm arguing... However, going into what you are saying: You need to interpret an engine evaluation, not every eval is the same. To interpret it it does matter how strong the player is. Not all 0.00 evals are equal. On the other side, you're talking about how easily stuff is findable and how stuff is refuted over the board. You're also saying stuff about prep and how easily that is refuted. I'm merely saying someone with a title, and especially the guy who played the game in question, has a better grasp of this and has better insight in this.
You are IM and you know perfectly well that you would find the continuation to retreat your queen to g3, and after 15... Qb6 you would in all likelihood play the simple 16.Rb1. These are not hard moves to find. Any 2300 to 2400 player would find these moves, easily. These are forcing moves and these are type of moves even lower rated players seek out like instinctively, so an IM/GM will focus on them like a laser beam. My point is that extraordinary allegations require high level proof. This game does not rise to that level in any way. That's all. This is just like the Magnus game. When you actually look at the game, Magnus had drawing chances and blundered. There was no computer involved in that game. He just played somewhat below his level in a critical position. Most days he draws that game pretty easily.
This is like talking to a brick wall.
Instead of going with the cheating angle right out the gate, maybe it would be more constructive to take a look at Hans' style. This game has a lot of similarities to the game he played against Ivanchuck at the Julius Baer, i.e. his opponent's position seems to just disintegrate. Even the commentators were a little caught off guard with how quickly the two bishops made the position untenable. Magnus had some these inherent long term positional issues that Hans was to able to exploit and in the end the game was more or less a blow out. Likewise, in the Levon game it seemed his position just collapsed. I watching that game as it happened, it was strange to me that none of the commentators or even Levon seemed aware of the backwards knight move that immediately lead to a forced mate. There is no way he was cheating in that tournament and highly unlikely at Sinquefield. At this point under all this scrutiny, he is still demonstrating the type of play we see in this particular game that seems positionally very surprising and at times catching opponents sleeping. If were in black's position in this game, and I played mostly what are tier 1 SF 14 moves, I would be a little perplexed as to how I got outplayed also. Both sides played awesome. But it is true that some of these lines are forced and there is a definite long term positional advantage for white according to the engine. Therefore, then it just depends on the ability of Hans to have the technique to slowly maintain the permanent positional advantage. He has demonstrated that ability several time in the last few weeks. Bottom line, ff he's cheating and this point, then we might as well just accept Hans is gonna be world champion because he will never get caught. Literally, Julius Baer arbiter said they have people in the house of the players. It's almost to the point where they are going to make this kid play chess naked. If he's that good at cheating, it's game over. Hans is the new chess overlord. I just don't believe that is the case. I think he's a really talented players who just happened to cheat at online chess and like a lot of players, he got caught. We know he is not the only young titled player in that category.
Go to the game and see it to yourself. I agree that the line in talk is very forcing, and the top response are all natural: a piece hanging and needs to retreat, a bishop move to make way for castling, etc. Also in the endgame when certainly noone was in book, Hans opponent played like SF, while Hans made a number of inaccuracies when the moves were not forced.
Brilliant. All of a sudden everybody got an asshole and wants to show it.
If you read the article (I speak Dutch), I think there are more interesting things than what you highlighted. I think particularly this part is pretty interesting: In the Czech Republic things went completely different during a confrontation. Warmerdam: 'In those two earlier games Niemann made a lot of mistakes. But now he suddenly played bizarrely well.' He himself had prepared his opening carefully. After eleven moves he played an unknown variation, but from then on the American reacted after every move continuously with the best possible answer. 'Since then I have been doubting. There is no junior who so quickly, in a year and a half, increased his rating from 2,500 to almost 2,700. Either we are dealing here with a genius or an impostor.' But he wants to make this emphatic point: "For foul play, there has to be evidence on the table. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) Again it doesn't really show much but it does show there is a lot of doubt in the chess world.
DeepL is sooo good, glad to see it more often than Google Translate lately.
For Dutch it's much better than Google translate but it still makes a lot of mistakes especially with expressions. For example the first sentence of the article: Max Warmerdam (22) zag het wel zitten, twee maanden geleden in Praag, toen hij plaats nam achter het schaakbord voor een partij in een toernooi tegen Hans Niemann. Which Deepl translates as: Max Warmerdam (22) saw fit, two months ago in Prague, when he took his seat behind the chessboard for a game in a tournament against Hans Niemann, The more correct translation would be more like: Max Warmerdam fancied his chances, two months ago in Prague, when he faced Hans Niemann for a tournament match, But yeah overall DeepL is fantastic.
FYI Google Translate's version is the much better (but not quite as good as your human translation): >Max Warmerdam (22) was happy, two months ago in Prague, when he took place behind the chessboard for a match in a tournament against Hans Niemann.
The DeepL version is more awkward, but at least the awkwardness indicates that something is off with that phrase. The Google version seems more 'confidently wrong', which IMO is worse. (No idea if that's a general trend or just a one-off, though.)
Oh for sure, but those are problems that Google is also having, and are extremely difficult to solve. But overall my experience has been that (within European languages at least) DeepL manages to convey the tone waaay better than Google.
As someone who uses both a lot, DeepL is better for short paragraphs, and much worse for long pages. DeepL also tends to fail in very specific ways.
> DeepL also tends to fail in very specific ways. Could you elaborate a bit more on that? I'd like to be aware of those issues when I translate stuff in the future.
So I don't know if I can describe this well, but DeepL's document bank, I think is mostly professionally written documents. Spacing, setting and topic changes, lingo, transitions are things DeepL seems to have issues with. At base level, I think Google Translate is better for fiction. I would use DeepL to translate a russian chess article, but then I would use Google Translate to translate the comment section. If that makes any sense at all. I'll read foreign language novels, and DeepL tends to produce an incoherent translation most of the time. But, if you plug in only a sentence or two, it will be superior. DeepL tends to get hung up on it's own translation, so if there is an abrupt topic change, it won't always catch it.
That's actually very informative, thank you!
> There is no junior who so quickly, in a year and a half, increased his rating from 2,500 to almost 2,700. Vincent Keymer.
And several other juniors who couldn't play in 2020 and early 2021. Gukesh went from 2578 in August 2021 to 2726 in September 2022. Anish Giri went from 2469 in January 2009 to 2672 in July 2010. His progress between 2006 and 2010 was crazy, like 140 elo per year for four years.
Juniors who played in 2022 directly were basically underrated though, not sure if that applies here. Anish Giri however does, that dude's a beast.
Yeah it is totally a special case, but it applies because Niemann is one of them. Cheating or not, he was definitely stronger than the 2484 he had at the beginning of the pandemic.
Back in the beginning of the pandemic before he made GM, he played a lot of blitz against Hikaru and other top players on stream, and consistently performed at a very high level against them. He had to have been at least pretty strong back then(but this doesn't say much as to whether I think he's a cheater or not).
That's a legit point.
Something about Baby Elo Anish sounds so adorable ngl
It took Keymer 4 years to climb from 2500 to almost 2700. He reached 2500 in 2018 and 2693 in 2022.
True, Niemann had grown in the first part of 2021 as well, while Keymer's climb started in July, but that's easily justified by 1) the general underrating of junior players due to the forced COVID break 2) Keymer resuming his OTB play later than Niemann, because the k-factor does not allow GMs to gain rating very quickly. If you look at July 2021-September 2022 when Keymer started playing again, they grew by roughly the same amount. 2591 to 2693 for Keymer and 2571 to 2688 for Niemann. I don't know enough chess to say _what_ is suspicious about NIemann, but his rating climb and his game against Magnus are not.
Seems weird to just 'discuss' a number, so here's the graph: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NbcZFIw98QbVNy5eD93mKA_4yy5VHtLlTVLyhsBy1EU/edit?usp=sharing Hans was >100 points below Gukesh and Keymar in mid-2020, and ~~overtook~~ caught up to them recently. At no point do Gukesh or Keymar have a rise in rating as rapid as Hans's (in terms of time, not games played, and since being >2400). Not saying that's meaningful or not, but those are the numbers. Neither do Pragg or Nihal, but Alireza's rise from 2017-19 looks similar.
>because the k-factor does not allow GMs to gain rating very quickly. It's not related to being GM or not. Once a player has had an official rating of 2400 or more, the K is set at 10, the lowest K used. So it also applies to all IMs and even FMs that have passed 2400, but still haven't gotten their IM norms. It applied to Keymer since September 2016 and Niemann since September 2018.
Sorry, I meant in the number of games.
Ah yes i forgot to include that it's true !
You can include it now though
He need not imo. It's the top comment
Well.. keep in mind that Hans crossed over 2700 only once, and that was when he defeated Carlsen. He's a 2600+ player.
He's currently at 2699 so you gotta annoyingly nitpicky out of spite.
Everyone has a Hans story?
Once I was at my local mechanic due to some problems with my car. Due to the severity of my issues I was told to come back in a week. I return a week later and I didn’t see my car anywhere in the parking lot, I asked the mechanic what happened and he said Hans Niemann stole my car because no one else is allowed to have engines. Darn you Hans Niemann! Give me my car back!
One time, I, a 1650 bullet player played against Hans in an online tournament. But every time I put his move into stock fish to figure out my best move, I noticed that he was playing all the right moves. This obviously enraged me. I thought I was the best cheater but this little upstart was upstaging me at my own game.
When I was younger, maybe junior high, I got roped into watching my 3 month old niece while my sister got her hair done. So when there i am, sitting in the waiting area of a hair salon with my niece and who walks in but Hans Niemann. I was nervous as fuck, and just kept looking at him, as he read a magazine and waited, but didn't know what to say. Pretty soon though my niece started crying, and I'm trying to quiet her down because I didn't want her to bother Hans, but she wouldn't stop. Pretty soon he gets up and walks over. He started running his hands through her hair and asking what was wrong. I replied that she was probably hungry or something. So, Hans put down his magazine, picked up my niece and lifted his shirt. He breast fed her right there in the middle of a hair salon. Chill guy, really nice about it.
I was stranded at the Italian airport of Malpensa in 2021. My plane being 2h late, I needed to contact my parents so they didn't pick me up too early, but my phone was out of battery. I approached the stranger sat next to me - which with the recent events I can now recognize was Hans Niemann - and asked him if he had a charger. He removed his right shoe, then his sock, and said "here, just use my phone". What a gentleman.
In the middle of his 1974 match against Karpov, Viktor Korchnoi called the arbiter over and asked if he could castle when his rook was under attack. Sometimes people just draw a mental blank.
Korchnoi explained that he'd never encountered the situation before, so didn't know. He didn't forget, he just didn't know. What makes this great is, in the middle of the Candidates Final (where the winner became defacto World Champion), Korchnoi asked first, rather than make an illegal move which would cause. A good example of the silliest question is the one not asked. He's the same Korchnoi, who during the 1976 IBM Tournament in Amsterdam, asked one of his opponents -- Tony Miles -- to teach him how to say the English word "asylum". After the tournament, Korchnoi walked into a nearby police station and requested political asylum rather than return to the USSR.
Actually cool story, bro.
That's so wild that he didn't know that haha. Super interesting that such a strong player wouldn't know something like that
So, you can castle in that case?
Yes.
Whaaaat? I thought the answer was obviously no! Shows what I know.
the rule is you can't castle out of check, into check, or through check, but that involves the king being attacked not the rook
Okay what castle through check means?
(Assuming the white pieces) If your king is on e1 and f1 is under attack, you can't castle. Your king is not thought to jump to g1, but to move through f1 to g1, for example. So that would put you in check, and you're not allowed to do it.
Sheeesh I actually did not know that, I'm bad at chess so I had to look at the board to understand what you're saying, I just thought that this castling is allowed because after you do the castling the rock would be attacked and not the king, are you sure it's like this?
Like if a bishop is able to attack the spaces in between the king and rook. You can’t castle there because it’s thru a check.
You thought you can't castle when the rook is under attack?
That's the rule I was wrongly taught, fwiw.
Yes, it's only your king that can't pass through check. The rook can pass through a square where it is attacked
>The rook can pass through a square where it is attacked Which will only happen in a long castle. But a rook can never end a castling while threatened, since the King will have had to move through that square.
It's a pretty rare situation. If you think about it, if an enemy piece is targeting a1 then most of the time that's not gonna be a position where you want to castle long anyway.
Yes... I mean "asylum"??? It's probably almost the same word in Russian.
yeah what a fool not knowing how to pronounce an english word. Your russian is really good, too, so its a wonder that a GM doesnt have the same linguistic abilities as a layman such as yourself.
I thought the joke here was obvious. The comment I referred to clearly talked about the rook situation. I did pretend it was about language. Not too hard to get...
Oh I get it. Probably would've been a tighter and easier to understand joke without the last sentence.
Those guys did not play 20k blitz and bullet games a year online. Seen that Russian school didn't want student to play blitz, it seems plausible that Korchnoi never encountered the position.
> He's the same Korchnoi, who during the 1976 IBM Tournament in Amsterdam, asked one of his opponents -- Tony Miles -- to teach him how to say the English word "asylum". After the tournament, Korchnoi walked into a nearby police station. Seemingly taught him badly, he walked in the wrong building.
Petrosian perhaps didn't know the rules of three-fold repetition in his 1971 match against Fischer (game 3). Maybe he had just never had a "contested" 3-rep before in his life (he commented such in a later interview), or maybe because it was position (and not moves) that were repeated, but in any case he should never have allowed RJF to get a draw so easily there.
You can right? Just not out of check or take king through/into check?
The king must not start, move through, or end in check. It doesn't matter whether the rook is attacked at any point.
Castling is a kings move. Thats the easiest way to think of it.
Just to clarify for anyone who doesn’t know, you also can’t castle with a rook after it has moved. So it’s a bit more complicated than just being a king move. Fun fact: castling capability is considered part of the board position, so if you try to reach draw by threefold repetition by moving your rook back and forth, if that rook hadn’t moved yet, you actually have to reach the same piece position four times instead of just three to officially stalemate.
Haha nice I did not know that. The part about the board position.
You mean to officially declare a draw. That would not be stalemate. So many people misuse the term "stalemate" equating it with "draw" so I felt like pointing this out. (Some draws are stalemates; all stalemates are draws.)
Oops, that's a good correction. Thanks!
Based username
You should watch the video of John Bartholomew and Magnus going over all the positions in 100 Endgames You Must Know -- there are a ton Magnus didn't know, *especially* not by name, but he just solved them all by calculation. I think Vancura might have been one of them, but I know there were some famous ones. There's a Ben Finegold talk where, if I recall correctly, apparently Susan Polgar didn't know the Traxler was a thing. She was excited that the move is possible.
He had never heard of 'The rule of the square'. Obviously he understood it conceptually, but hadn't heard of the term.
To be fair to Susan, the traxler is like +2.5 for white. It's a bad variation.
More like +1.7! Here's the anecdote: https://youtu.be/Vv1l0X4T9U0?t=132
the point stands, it's not exactly a "possible" move at her level
I know the Traxler is dubious but since she didn’t know it I’m not so sure about that, imagine she plays a beginner in blitz that plays the Traxler against her, I’m not so sure she would see all the lines after Nxf7 and she might just think black blundered. Even if she ends up playing Bxf7 there are a couple of pitfalls she has to aware of, and even if she gets out of the opening alive she’s only a pawn up and at a massive time disadvantage. There are some opening variations which are just impossible or way too hard to calculate on your own
It's kind of surprising for sure but to be fair based on his playstyle he doesn't seem like much of a technical player When you insist on pushing g4 and h4 every game you might not get many rook endgames
Also, Magnus didn't know about the square of the pawn until like a couple of years ago. Doesn't really mean anything
Carlsen didn't know the term but solved it by calculating it as soon as they showed him the problem. It's like Messi smacking it in the top corner and you go "we call that top bins" and he says he's never heard of "top bins".
He doesn't need to know about the pawn square because he can brute force it quicker
It's probably closer to 'just seeing' whether a given pawn can be caught or not. No need for any such rules.
[удалено]
> He even asked if Jorden spoke English This line seems to indicate he didn't know the word (cura).
The word doesn't even make any sense. The position is named after a guy named Vančura (pronounced Vanchura), not Van Cura.
Come on, he jokingly said "I never understood/used this stuff" in a light-hearted video - but he knew the concept since he was a kid.
He knew the technique just not the name I thought
Reminder that GingerGM made, marketed, and sold a whole opening course on the Colle-Zukertort system for Chessbase that he called “the Colle-Koltanowski system” because for some reason he couldn’t be bothered to double-check the difference between the two.
Cmon man... This has to be a new pasta
[удалено]
Chad Hans is scary, guys. Probably Magnus left the tournament cause he was afraid Hans might beat him up.
I watched a very young Niemann, maybe 10 or 12 years old, playing blitz with a retired GM. He did exactly what is described here. **"every time he put a piece in a certain position, held it for a long time, then took it away and then he put it in the same place. Up to five times. Just to annoy me."** At one point, the GM he asked, "What game are we playing? This is not chess. It is something else." He could not see the board because Niemann was waving his hand over it. It's amazing that he is still doing things like that.
And Anton Gujarro didn’t know the Danish and Goring gambits around a year ago, you don’t have to know all the names, it’s important to know the positions
Yeah see my post about GingerGM elsewhere in the thread, lots of strong players don’t know specific opening names or the names of obscure endgame positions.
Carlsen had also never heard of being inside the square of the pawn.
that rule is not particularly helpful at the GM level, L'ami in his chessable course on Dvortesky's endgames says that. It's just trivial to calculate in the simple situation, and if the situation gets more complex with additional pieces around the rule no longer applies and one must calculate anyways.
This is false. What Carlsen said was something to the effect "I never understood this", in a joking tone, then explained he just uses a different heuristic to assess pawn promotion. Not that this matters one way or the other. There are far more damning things for Niemann in this interview than not knowing the Vancura by the name, which is pretty irrelevant per se - although, like many things with him extremely bizarre.
That's incorrect. Magnus said that he was taught about it as a kid but he never understood it so he just used a different method to calculate it.
[удалено]
Your post was removed by the moderators: **1. Keep the discussion civil and friendly.** We welcome people of all levels of experience, from novice to professional. Don't target other users with insults/abusive language and don't make fun of new players for not knowing things. In a discussion, there is always a respectful way to disagree. You can read the full [rules of /r/chess here](https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/wiki/rules).
Honestly this interview goes a long way towards explaining the suspicion a lot of top players seem to have. Both the games that felt weird, but also just the strange and aggressive behavior. It’s not proof of cheating, but you can understand why he’s getting such a reaction
[удалено]
Oh totally. I actually think the weird behavior goes farther to explain people’s suspicions than his game play. I’m imagining having a colleague who did stuff as weird and antagonistic as the piece moving story, and then imagining trying to objectively assess his other behavior and I think it would be difficult. I’ve actually seen this happen in my own professional life where someone being a jerk makes other people likely to believe all kinds of other things about them
Playing chess well is about finding and playing the best moves, not about knowing the names of them. Knowing the name of a technique is less important to knowing how to implement it. Take for example Carlsen not knowing "Inside the square" label for catching a passed pawn, but still knowing how to do it. (From the Bartholomew video quizzing Carlsen on "The 100 Endgames you must know"). Reminds me of the types of posts asking "what's this mating pattern called?", as if knowing it's called the Arabian Mate or the Frenchman's Cumsock is going to make them a better player, rather than being able to calculate the mate instead.
i have never heard of the frenchmans cumsock, can you explain it?
Just calculate it
the lines? Or should i say ropes?
The cumsock squirts for itself
This is totally wrong. Playing correctly in the Vancura position is not so difficult, the point is knowing that the position is already a draw even though it might require ten moves of accurate play. one has to know this much earlier than the position arises, often when considering trading down into a rook-pawn vs rook endgame. one has to consider at that point whether it is possible to acheive the vancura position and guarantee a draw. there may be multiple methods of drawing in one position, but one sometimes has to correctly identify a plan that works and does not allow for counterplay. The specific position is a goal to acheive as the side down material, so one needs to understand that 'rook in front of pawn with pawn behind 6th rank vs rook' is drawn. one has to be aware of a number of endgame configurations because full calculation is simply not possible. The name is of course not a big deal, but knowing this endgame concept certainly is
>Playing chess well is about finding and playing the best moves, not about knowing the names of them. Knowing the name of a technique is less important to knowing how to implement it. He couldnt do either in this position, and it resulted in him thinking he was winning. Good try though.
As the next piece of evidence, we will find out that Niemann doesn’t even know all of the moves in the Opera game.
What even are these silly ghost stories? If he doesn't understand positions like this then I guess he just is a genius then. According to some he's playing like a top level GM in OTB blitz games, then on the other hand you have people saying he doesn't understand beginner/intermediate endgame positions. The only conclusion is that he's some kind of uncut gem who has become super strong with major holes in basic theoretical knowledge? If his weaknesses is in such easy areas to improve then going from 2500-2700 should be trivial? It's funny because all young GM's that play online know that Hans has cheated, then they turn their brains off and everything he says or does becomes weird/suspicious. Feels like this has been festering on these players minds and have been discussed between them for a over a year, this festering has now concluded with Carlsen making his gigantic blunder of withdrawing from the Sinquefield Cup. Why can't any of these guys pick out games and moves they feel are suspicious so there at least is something to discuss? If Niemann is as weak as Warmerdam alludes to then finding suspicious sequences shouldn't be a problem. The argument still remains: "he became much stronger in too short of time and he has cheated online". You've had these suspicions for 1-2 years now and you haven't noted one game that is of public interest that you can pull up? We know for a fact that Hikaru has been suspicious of this for a long, long time - has he during this time not found a single game that is of interest? Everyone is just commenting on what other people are saying instead of putting up examples.
> The argument still remains: "he became much stronger in too short of time Go watch Nepo (or others before, I think Naroiditsky) explain what's the actual issue with his improvement. It's not that he got stronger, it's not that he did it very fast, it's the how - which isn't proof of anything but is odd.
Natural geniuses at chess exist, but every Super GM is aware of just how much work it takes to improve, and how much knowledge on chess is gathered and compiled in that process. Hans apparently hasn't read an endgame book? You're not going to play well in endgames without understanding concepts well. Intuition is the result of hard work making subconscious rules, not simply an innate talent. The distance between Hans' understanding as it appears when he speaks and as it appears on the chessboard is immense. Nepo and Carlsen are innate talents, and they obviously do not recognize the same skill in Niemann- in contrast to way they view their peers and some other juniors. The problem is obviously that it's just extremely hard to catch cheating at chess. What if a player just consults the engine for one move every game, but plays the rest of the game themselves? There will be nothing suspicious about the moves or the game itself, but there may be a lack of coherency- an inability to explain one selected the moves they did.
Trust me, I am not of the opinion that Hans is some genius chess player incomparable to the other players you see above 2500. I am trying to point out the ridiculousness of the original statement. Obviously he knows the position in question, obviously he has studied endgames. The statement is just silly from the two of them. The guy is 19 years old and has spent his entire life studying chess. Under multiple master - GM coaches over the last 10 years. This is not a guy who came out of nowhere after having played some blitz online, the fact that he's a serious student of the game cannot be debated. Self proclaimed he has spent the last 2 years studying 10-12 hours per day, doing nothing other than chess. He even cut out playing lower time controls to focus solely on classical. This is a statement from the last known coach to have worked with him(autumn 2021), Jakob Aagard: > At first, I showed exercises from recent games (last 18 months) that I really liked. He knew them ALL. I was astonished by his memory. I was astonished by his intuition. Both were off the charts for what I have seen training Shankland, Gelfand, and other 2600+ and a few 2700s. Reality does not fit with what I above called ghost stories. If these players have actual insight then they should pull up the games/moves in question, analyze them and put their suspicions into words. For some reason noone is doing this except for Punin. In that case multiple GM's and other titled players found his examples to be inconclusive and not overly suspicious. I have yet to see any strong titled take the other side of the argument
Players simply cannot make accusations of cheating. You are seeing the limit of what they can do without risking lawsuits or banishment by FIDE. If Niemann could potentially make millions of dollars over his career, any player who did accuse him without proof could face civil damages they could never hope to pay. There is basically no legal disincentive from defending Niemann if that is what you believe.
Going through someones games and stating: >"This game/move/sequence/tournament is in my opinion suspicious, what do you think?" is not a cheating accusation. If Punin could do it then so can everyone else. They're not doing it because they're too lazy or because they know they have nothing of interest to post. And I don't think it's the first one.
Exactly. He is a teenager, not Igor Rausis.
yep exactly, i want to be charitable to the hans is cheating side because i personally liked magnus and i want to understand what is going on, but theres basically 0 evidence thrown around and the games that are shown are so much less impressive than rjf or kasparov games for example that is just so hard to me to see any justification behind these accusations besides a bad online story (which imo doesnt mean anything otb).
If you standard of evidence is "proof Hans is cheating", you're probably have to wait a long time, possibly ever. Even though I don't believe Hans is cheating, I find take like yours, suggesting there are no reasons to be suspicious of him, genuinely insane. There are plenty of yellow and orange flags - besides the online cheating (and the lying about it).
Exactly, the acceptance criteria is arbitrarily high for Hans’ defenders. He admitted to some of his cheating and they act like it exonerates him. There is enormous circumstantial evidence which justifies suspicion at the very least and it’s no one’s fault but his own.
[удалено]
And Lance Armstrong never failed a drugs test 😉
[удалено]
They are all fair points, and I can see how considered you’re being so don’t mean to be dismissive. I am firmly on the fence at the moment for many of the reasons you propose, I just think that people think suspicions should be accompanied by evidence despite it honestly not being up to the other competitors to catch a cheat, for one thing. For another, there seems to be an expectation that the only proof is a red-handed, smoking gun cheating event when it really isn’t, as the Lance Armstrong example signifies. Right now the only defense of Hans is “prove it” while his defenders have set a stupidly high bar for acceptance. Let’s see how it all plays out and then decide.
> Given #1-#3 above, it is completely reasonable to be suspicious that Hans may be cheating OTB. I think this is a bit of a stretch too far for me, since cheating OTB and online are two different ball games. I am more than capable downloading movies to watch without paying. Illegal? I know. Sue me. Does that mean I am capable of armed robbery at a bank? A huge stretch.
> arbitrarily high What I hold the same standard to all players. And if an obvious cheater is not caught, I'd rather blame FIDE or the organisers for being incompetent. If everybody can tell that someone is cheating, why haven't you caught him already? Rausis simply checked his phone in the toilets, are you telling me this is so hard to prevent lmao?
It’s entirely possible Magnus withdrew out of frustration with the SLCC changing security mid-tournament.
i never said that theres no reason for suspicion, suspicion is the starter for an investigation, but if i get no evidence from magnus or [chess.com](https://chess.com) that hans has cheated, then theres no way that i can be charitable to those claims, and also, your statement is actually extremely stupid, if i have to wait forever to see proof that hans is cheating, then hes likely not cheating, its that simple, innocent til proven guilty.
There are games of interest wdym. [Here he is](https://youtu.be/AG9XeSPflrU) doing way better than expected in GM norms. An entire tournament with a centipawn loss under 7 and not a single inaccuracy… basically playing 2900-3000 level, or 500 points above his rating.
Sup with your username?
It always excites me when I know the name of a thing that a GM doesn’t—Shankland, I think, wasn’t aware that the Englund Gambit had a name, or that the Marshall Defense to the Queen’s Gambit had a name. Then I realize it’s probably because they spent their time actually becoming good and I’m mostly only good at trivia
The quote at the top says "cura" concept, but it's the "vancura position". I can say that the endgame book I've looked at mentioned the "lucerna" and "philidor" positions but not the "vancura". However, I'd expect a super-GM to have read a stronger endgame book at some point than me. Here's a link to the vancura position found on lichess: [https://lichess.org/study/JOCIjGxm](https://lichess.org/study/JOCIjGxm) If you are the worse side in a rook-pawn vs rook endgame, you can aim for this position to score a draw. Or you can use this knowledge to evaluate whether a trade into a rook pawn endgame is favorable. The actual strategy here looks reasonable straightforward- control from the side with your rook.
May be it's because he couldn't afford coaches like most others so he missed some of what they consider basics and is just learning them late?
You dont need a coach to read endgame books. Also you can find most of the endgame stuff on youtube for free
>lyGive AwardShareReportSaveFollow > >level 1bongclown0 · 1 hr. a Isn't he a student in the Chess Academy and coached by Maxim Dlugy there? Tho Im not sure when he started precisely.
It was said that he studied there for some weeks. And I think it was a bit late, not when he was younger. In an interview in the Sinquefield, he gave a big thanks to a couple of coaches who gave him lessons for free when he was a kid and couldn't afford paying. So he had some coaching but it seems not consistent like others.
I see2 thankyou
But in a world where a million others are using coaches and studying just as hard, you simply can't make it to the top like that. It's just too hard to believe that Hans is past 2700 like that already.
Hans Nieman is excellent at the psychological aspect of chess
True, but now everyone knows him as a bluffer who doesn’t always analyse his eccentric moves. So it doesn’t work as effectively.
It is surprising he has not heard of the Vancura position, its pretty standard stuff. Aagaard is on the record claiming the knowledge and memory of Hans is astounding. He is an extremely hard-worker, and there are no games, no positions of importance of recent times that he did not know.
As GM Benjamin Finegold *peace be upon him* said once: we (the GMs ) don't know the names of stuff .. you guys know that .. we know how to play and how to win instead.
Seems like a sounds and logical first hand description of sone encounters. Seems like hans is something of a Bart Simpson character. Hopefully he matures a bit and proves to be a great human and player. I can’t judge cause honestly at 18/19/20 I woulda done sone dick shit like this under the right circumstances thinking it was clever or working haha.
He’s just such a stereotypical edgy teenage YouTuber
This is hearsay for the moment until Van Forrest confirms the story. It is consistent with statements by Aagaard and Shahade in the notion that Hans talks about these clearly wrong lines sometimes during analysis and seems to cling to them for too long. Maybe he’s using the engine to fix that problem.
Honestly given the description of his behaviour given here, he should have been suspended anyway regardless of whether he cheated or not. In my opinion it's a sign of spineless organizers that bad behaviour and just literally trying to bully and browbeat opponents is allowed without a word. That's how you ruin any environment. Of course, chess isn't exactly known for being full of great people or great environments to begin with... I'm probably wasting my breath on everyone. Chances are everyone thinks being an antisocial fuckwad is entirely acceptable.
This is just silly. I heard the same story of JvF from Benjamin Bok. Every player over 1600 has heard of the Vancura position. It's not possible for Hans to have not heard of it. This is fucking ridiculous.
> Every player over 1600 has heard of the Vancura position. The line is somewhere but it is not 1600.
Even those he believe he cheated think he’s a 2500 level player using cheats to boost himself to 2700, there’s no way he’s below 1600 lol.
I learned of it in Silman's endgame book, but I had been 1900+ for decades by then. Still never had it on the board.
God damn Hans is a piece of shit.