@AlexiHarvey said in #26:
> I have looked through report, although there is a number of interesting points there are aspects that make the analysis weak.
>
> (1) Report does not state the source of the 'ratings'. If
chess.com's blitz rating is being used this would make the report very dubious as clearly there would be a circularity.
>
> (2) Defining the 'best move' based only on 1 sec of engine analysis is weak, imo. As a ~1500 player using a fairly powerful modern PC I would analyse my own games at a minimum of 10 seconds per move - and these games would be of the throwaway type, rated OTB games I use 60seconds with even long times of 1+ hour at key conjunctions. The report makes no attempt or mention that to indicate whether 1 second is sufficient. Does the analysis change if 2 seconds etc are used? who knows. At the very least some sort of qualification check should have been performed, possibly using a larger time interval with a correspondently smaller dataset.
>
> (3) The report's key metric is 'average diversion of a over game' and ignores just how powerful selective usage of engine can be on the result of a game. As many elite chess players has pointed out, just knowing an engine evaluation of the game would provide a significant advantage, far less than recommended move in a given position.
>
> The principle basis of Kramnik's analysis is a comparison between on-line blitz play and OTB ratings, with the reasonable assumption that the level of cheating on the latter is likely to be extremely small compared to on-line. This is a very solid way of detecting cheating, as the main purpose of cheating in this context is money based on results. Caruana in a recent c2squared podcast has stated he would not expect there to be any difference in the quality of play between elite player whether playing OTB or Titled Tuesday. - i.e. there is no such thing as a 'blitz specialist' at these level - he put the difference below 25 rating point at worst. If this was true then clearly even 1SD difference over sufficient game would be suspicious. From my understanding of the mental differences between OTB/Blitz I would actually expect to see a bias towards the higher OTB rated player compared to strict ELO probabilities - in short events like Titled Tuesday should have an inherent bias towards higher rated OTB players.
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Agreed. Dorian Quelle made some aggressive claims and put up some fancy looking charts and graphs, but his reasoning was superficial and sloppy. He carefully analyzed the wrong numbers while ignoring the right numbers--a classic Straw Man fallacy.
1 second of engine analysis per move is not nearly enough to judge grandmaster chess.
The discrepancies between some players' OTB FIDE tournament performance numbers and their
chess.com Titled Tuesday performance numbers are among the most obvious red flags. Quelle ignores such red flags.
Among the players with the most suspicious-looking discrepancies there is one who seems extremely suspicious. Online he is among the Top 10 Titled Tuesday players of all time in multiple categories, including total event wins and highest score/winrate in a single event. He's a Titled Tuesday SuperGM. OTB he has never been in the top 100, never won a single major international event, and his FIDE ratings have always been under 2570 at every time control--classical, rapid, and blitz. He is over age 25, so he is not an underrated junior--his main FIDE rating has stayed in the 2500-2570 range over the past 5 years. How do you explain such a difference between OTB and online results? A freak genius-level mouse-clicking talent in an otherwise average GM?
some Titled Tuesday stats:
www.chess.com/article/view/titled-tuesday