Interesting piece. It highlights how it's hard to differentiate between someone genuinely playing at a level higher, and a cheater. A few things I noted from this article:
1. The driving force behind the original accusations is that Magnus felt his opponent wasn't "exerting" himself enough, compared to other young prodigies.
2. Chess.com's case is that his results are "statistically extraordinary."
3. There is a history of cheating
4. Allegations that he admitted cheating privately (though it's not clear to whom)
1, 2, and 3 could easily be cause for suspicion; however, that's not the same as evidence. The one crucial piece absent from this article is any suggestion of how he cheated.
Without providing a means, I find this piece premature and questionable. That said, I don't know anything about chess, lot alone cheating at the master level. So maybe the "how" is common sense and not difficult?
And of course, there's also this:
> The report also addresses the relationship during the saga between Carlsen and Chess.com, which is buying Carlsen’s “Play Magnus” app for nearly $83 million.
FIDE are doing their own investigation, but the chess.com cheat detection algorithm is apparently well regarded, and online cheating is obviously very simple to do. He's admitted cheating online as recently as 3 years ago. If he can reasonably be proved to having cheated online more often and more recently than he has admitted to, then that gives good reason to suspect he'll have cheated OTB too given the chance.
There are various ways one might cheat OTB, from taking one's phone the bathroom in the middle of a tournament (some allow this!!), to getting signals from an accomplice who is seeing the game in real time. Signals could be electronic to some device on the player, or visual from an audience member in the room. It's been proposed to introduce a 15-30 min broadcast delay in tournament games as one way to prevent cheating. Some tournaments scan the players for electronic devices - not sure how foolproof this is.
> it's hard to differentiate between someone genuinely playing at a level higher, and a cheater
Actually, it isn't! Great chess bots have very different play styles and there are people currently studying them. It's very unlikely someone will come out of nowhere so to speak (as in, not on some amazing rise as a young child) with these types of techniques. I'm nowhere near these levels of chess players but have played competitively for my county as a school-kid and still play a couple hundred games a year so have some idea.
A smart cheater isn't just going to replicate bot moves and make it easy to detect. They may just use it to decide between 2 moves they were 50/50 on already. Do this 2 or 3 times and it would make a big difference at the grand master level. This would be quite hard to detect.
1. The driving force behind the original accusations is that Magnus felt his opponent wasn't "exerting" himself enough, compared to other young prodigies.
2. Chess.com's case is that his results are "statistically extraordinary."
3. There is a history of cheating
4. Allegations that he admitted cheating privately (though it's not clear to whom)
1, 2, and 3 could easily be cause for suspicion; however, that's not the same as evidence. The one crucial piece absent from this article is any suggestion of how he cheated.
Without providing a means, I find this piece premature and questionable. That said, I don't know anything about chess, lot alone cheating at the master level. So maybe the "how" is common sense and not difficult?
And of course, there's also this:
> The report also addresses the relationship during the saga between Carlsen and Chess.com, which is buying Carlsen’s “Play Magnus” app for nearly $83 million.