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fallen chess king

Hassan Pasha

Can chess speak for itself?

Off topic
Has online chess devolved into a popularity contest?

These opinions are mine, not those of Lichess.

Likely you've heard about Chess.com's latest fair play ban. Levy's first video on this topic makes claims:
- Games started at 3:56AM
- Only Magnus could coordinate pieces like a top GM
- Naroditsky plays fast while playing good moves (in game 2, up 25 seconds in the opening) "because he's a fast player"
- Naroditsky's piece sacrifices are all brilliant, whereas his opponent's sacrifices likely indicate cheating

We all know that players play their best before dawn, at a time zone handicap. Longitudinal studies verify this, or at least they would if anyone gave a damn about online chess cheating.

Since Magnus has many excellent results in endgames both at blitz and classical time controls, it is established that only top-10 players are allowed to play well in blitz endgames. Studies from watching in-browser evaluation bars show that knight fork tricks are ineffective against grandmasters, so in blitz it is better to have a rook than to have a minor piece.

Fast players play well while playing quickly, because they are the only skilled players at blitz games. It is wholly inconceivable that anyone else could play well and play quickly, especially before dawn.

Playing a bad opening means you deserve to lose the game (unless you are a popular player). Openings which cause an engine's evaluation to decrease are always bad.

sat·ire (noun): the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues

Levy's second video takes a step back and after carefully presenting some games, considers the two main possibilities:

  • The banned player made a genuine post on reddit and everything there is true
  • Some form of fair play violation occurred, causing the ban

Ignoring some possibility that some other fair play violation could have occurred before that morning, that seems about right; however, if we'd started from that reasonable position we wouldn't have a blog post to read and Levy wouldn't have 2 viral videos, now would we?

EDIT May 7: GM Kramnik published an interesting video:
https://youtu.be/hV-ADbE1F5o


Image credit: Hassan Pasha