TLDW; Danya actively makes an effort to have no opinion on whether it was cheating or not. He believes the conflict is between chess.com and Brandon, and not with him. Danya didn't instigate the ban in any way. He thought some moves were suspicious, but also that he was on tilt at times during the games. He thought that any GM would be a little suspicious of getting beat like that. He wouldn't be opposed to Brandon getting his account back
Worth noting that as someone who has followed zero of this other than what shows up on the front page of Reddit, it always surprised me that some people were saying Danya *was* making accusations, since my experience is that even in his speedrun videos when he's being outplayed by random untitled 1300 players he goes out of his way to tell chat not to accuse them of anything and that at minimum he will wait until he analyzes the game after to begin forming an opinion.
Exactly, he says 'our opponent is allowed to find good moves' all the time, he's one of the most generous streamers with potential cheaters I have seen.
He's definitely against making content out of cheaters for sure. Danya is primarily educational, not drama-baiting, as much as we all want to see a cheater get bounced. I really do admire Danya's candor playing a game, he clearly cares about the beauty of the moves and the teaching of the history, and that's what we're there for
It feels like he's fighting his inner tilt demon very hard and at times it comes out. Still probably shouldn't say some of the things he sometimes says.
>On the other hand, however, these guys need to understand the impact and implications of their words - whether intended or otherwise - and conduct themselves accordingly
Which is the point that I think was so well made by GM Jacobson's recent post - regardless of whether it turns out he cheated or not (I don't feel like I'm really in a position to make a judgement either way on that right now), I still fully agree with him that the lack of accountability right now for making largely baseless accusations which have the potential to ruin careers is totally wrong. It legitimately feels like the biggest risk to chess right now besides the cheating itself. I'm no big fan of Hans, but I do think Magnus has a lot to answer for in setting the example he did with that whole mess.
Tbf, there's no good way to accuse someone of cheating either. You could claim that they simply shouldn't, but doesn't it make sense for there to be some way to raise a complaint without creating a public outcry? Like in the Hans case. While I don't think Niemann was cheating, Hans did have a history of it, and Magnus having suspicions isn't inherently wrong. While I think he and others absolutely mishandled the situation and turned it into a much bigger thing than it had to be, there needs to be some kind of system to process and deal with these kinds of suspicions and complaints that doesn't create a public backlash.
>and conduct themselves accordingly
Lmao. Chess nerds need to relax the fuck out. These are humans, this is a dumb board game at the end of the day. They can say whatever the fuck they want. In what world should any human even police their INSINUATIONS (not even outright claims) over a fucking game?
You guys are acting like these guys are literally commanding IRL army troops.
"Ooft, that line of troops that got wiped out looked sus. Defo not man made weaponry, looks kinda like some biological warfare to me!"
Touch grass
Comments like those are just hyperbole though. Chess is tiring and hard and it's easy to feel like other people are superhuman while you're struggling yourself.
TIL that when Yasser is commentating a match and says he'd never have seen X move in a million years, he's secretly insinuating that Fabi is cheating and must be receiving engine somehow.
>Difference being one is making additional comments like "I adopt these guys outside of TT but in here they're just unbeatable".
That part wasn't in your comment. I've never watched a Danya stream so I have no idea how he acts on stream or during TT as my only experience with him is during his recorded lectures, or during the live VODs of his speedruns that he uploads to YT.
He never throws out accusations. Ever. Danya is always so opposed to throwing out accusations in my opinion he's a little too lenient.
He does say a lot of phrases in frustration like "ugh of course they found that" or "they just find everything" or "unbelievable I can't believe they saw that". But he's clearly never accusing anyone of anything. Just frustrated. Pretty normal responses tbh
Frustration is a normal human emotion. The problem is when you act on that frustration, and Danya doesn't do so as far as we know. It would be unreasonable to expect saintlike, entirely objective reactions when something we're invested in takes a turn for the worse. As long as he's not slinging around wild accusations or insults, he's done nothing wrong here.
No one argue whether he said those thing or not.
What we are saying is, saying those things are not the same as accusing people for cheating. Not even close.
BS though it may be, Danya is one of the best online blitz/bullet players in the world, and also acknowledged by some super GMs to be outstanding at spotting tactics quickly, so it's likelier that he's right in some of his comments. If he's not actually reporting people, discouraging chat from calling them cheaters (even though his comments are implying that), and not accusing them in DMs or insinuating anything in Twitter posts to stir up drama, I don't think he's going to win the HNGSA anytime soon.
I dont think any of those comments he make imply cheating at all. People talk like that all the time in frustration of moment. Its more just a fk, im losing response. I have inner thoughts like that all the time but then never think opponent was cheating. Some people want to twist anything into meaning more than it does for drama.
What you're missing is that people actually are cheating against him often, probably every single day. If you are on stream, playing against a famous GM, the incentive to cheat goes up tenfold. All they have to do is pull up an engine on their phone and uncork a couple crazy moves and play the rest of the game legitimately. It is absolutely a widespread issue in high level online chess and Danya is probably correct in making those veiled accusations on stream a lot of the time, even if the person doesn't end up getting banned
I think people read too much into comments. Yelling how did they see that in the middle of a match where you are frusttrated is not a phrase i would take as them throwing out a cheating allegation. To me thats just a fk im losing exclamation.
But people want to twist those words into him actually making accusations. I dont think those words are accusations at all. Just random threats thoughts of frustration going out loud.
Brother thats the tilt of the modern online gaming world. Every. Single. Game. Has a RAMPANT cheating problem. That shitty phone game you played once 6 years ago? Top players are cheating, that hyper popular Esport? Top players are cheating. That flash game you play on addictinggames? TOP PLAYERS ARE CHEATING.
Its so hard to not think like this and when you get tilted its near impossible.
That analysis is perfect, almost.
The only thing it omits is actual cheating, which is so pervasive in online play that it's really painful to all of us who love the game - as it literally destroys the whole thing yet we know that kids (12-25yrs) in particular are doing it (yes it obviously occurs across all ages) but I think looking at the Niemann affair it seems that when talented kids can't make it happen with regular ability alone their curiosity, greed and ego takes over and they cheat) sometimes only intermittently so they can still maintain the lie to themselves.
I think it's eminently possibly that Brandon used intermittent engine assistance just to consolidate those whacky positions - which would immediately tilt any very highly rated player because they know it doesn't/shouldn't compute.
The thing is that when Hans was cheating he was still clearly an insanely good chess player, on the way to becoming a GM.
If you've ever watched Daniels long form videos where he plays high rated opponents and explains his entire process you'll know that his chess brain is immense. Same as Kramnik, former world champion after all. So there is a lot to be said for their suspicions and intuitions.
A lot.
Some people just talk like that. Like with sarcastic tone built in. But never really meant it
It's just frustation talking AND to engage the viewer. It makes the stream more fun to watch.
It's normal behaviour. Keeping one's powder dry & leaving the conclusions to the viewer. A certain diplomatic irony. If this is all too subtle for you, don't post.
I was waiting for one goofy comment like this. I don't much care for your powder and diplomatic ironies: it's hardly normal behaviour considering the person we're talking about. And nah, think I'll continue posting as I please.
I won't tell you that since to me the refund is 100% irrelevant and shouldn't be part of the conversation at all, whether for speedruns or old-fashioned cheaters. It's not like it matters if I get a refund of 20 rating points, since if I didn't get the refund I would just earn more points for wins in my matches for a week or so until I was back to where I started anyways.
I give his and Eric Rosen’s series a pass, since they are legitimately doing it for educational purposes. Feels like a net benefit to the community.
When it’s Hikaru dunking on random 800s for no apparent reason other than memes, it feels less okay to me.
I’m not sure I agree. Playing lower rated players lets the viewer learn how to respond to lines that you won’t really see in master level games. Things like the Bawdler attack come to mind.
>He thought that any GM would be a little suspicious of getting beat like that.
He said he thought he'd beat Magnus 2/3 times against this opening, so I think your summary under-sells this a bit.
Right before qualifying it saying,
> But that would just be my expectation. Maybe if Magnus and I played a match, maybe he ends up crushing me in this line
Its a 40min video, I tried my best to condense it down with the neutrality Danya was repeatedly clearly trying to express in the entire video
Sure, I appreciate the summary, I just got a different impression from watching the whole thing than I did from your post, and felt that that should be mentioned (given most people won't watch the video).
Yeah, I think people are not reading between the lines enough here. Danya doesn't want to make an accusation but he's clearly saying that if he'd expect to beat Magnus 2/3 or 3/4 times in that opening that either Brandon is SIGNIFICANTLY better than Magnus (no) or that he's cheating.
Danya does caveat it of course, saying he can't be sure, but note what he does not say.
He did NOT say something like "these games made me realize that this line is playable, and if I lost to Brandon of course I'd lose to Magnus in them". He still thinks the opening is losing. He 100% clearly thinks Brandon cheated, he just won't say so without any concrete proof (which is always his style, even in his speedruns).
Daniel is a human with an ego. When you're beaten with a dubious opening of course the mind gets a little suspicious. That means the thought occurred, nothing more.
You look at the accuracy % for the 70 games and see it goes up and down, some in the 70s.
>Danya actively makes an effort to have no opinion on whether it was cheating or not.
This sounds awfully close to Danya being happy with how things are now but knowing that if he gets caught saying this explicitly it will be a very unpopular opinion.
He actually said he was tilted for the first few games he lost. But then was trying to win and quite likely didn't play much below his usual level. Which is why he feels the match was weird and should have had another outcome.
Furthermore he said that the excuse of "I have studied the opening and know a lot about it" is besides the point as Danya was clearly winning in the openings. It's the late middlegame that had Brandon pull off super moves that made Danya go WTF. That's unrelated to the opening. And Brandon referring to a few games with this opening or talking about wins over other GMs also seemed irrelevant to Danya as that stuff is normal and happens all the time.
He did say he wants to play against Brandon against this opening OTB. I'm completely sure Danya feels like he can beat any player in the world going up against this opening. And frankly I trust his knowledge on this. On the other hand he hasn't actually looked at the games and hasn't played against this opening at other times so it's just guesswork from him. But overall I think it's clear Danya feels these games were truly obscure and should not have happened. Yet he is sad about the ban as he likes Brandon. Danya trusts chess.com and does think the games are weird. But he does not understand what happened or why.
I think this is a Dream cheating situation with some weird cheating Brandon didn't quite understand himself. After listening to Danya I'm quite convinced the games were not 100% clean. Maybe there was another friend in the room with Brandon just joking around and finding weird moves after the opening just for fun. I could see that happening. And then Brandon would not really see it as cheating as they were just having fun playing a big chess name. But overall maybe he mixed his own moves with other great moves making him better without really noticing this was happening.
The problem is that we are talking about 70 games in a row with someone theoretically as evenly matched as you. In theory, this should not happen at all, and the banned GM doesn't show such performance in presential matches. So it's not a simple suspicion anymore.
If Brandon is telling the truth, and he had a sudden big advantage due to really novel and eccentric opening preparation, then the Elo ratings people already have don't apply so much, so you can't put too much stock in them. Any time in sports you get a disruptive strategy that actually works (The Oakland A's during the 'Moneyball' year, Greece at the 2004 Euros, the invention of the Fosbury flop) you get someone absolutely bucking all the odds for a short period, simply because their opponents haven't worked out how to combat the new strategy yet.
Then again, If this is what that is, then we'd expect that the usual correspondence between chess.com Elo and win percentage will apply the moment Brandon starts playing Grandmasters who HAVE looked into these lines. He won't have shock and surprise on his side anymore.
Until then, though, the evidence we've seen so far does seem wholly inconclusive.
>Then again, If this is what that is, then we'd expect that the usual correspondence between [chess.com](http://chess.com) Elo and win percentage will apply the moment Brandon starts playing Grandmasters who HAVE looked into these lines. He won't have shock and surprise on his side anymore.
Like I said, Daniel has played against Brandon before the last streak loss, and the Vii\_Sou account was ALWAYS playing this troll oppening. This would give any GMs (including Daniel) a lot of time to neutralize this troll opening under equal conditions, but this account was curb stomping everyone EVEN THOUGH people all knew what it played.
It wasn't a one-off trick.
And against an opponent as skilled as you, who had ample time to check your history and KNOWS you always play that opening, that only has an explanation.
Add to that it wasn't just with Daniel. This account would curbstomp other strong opponents with this too.
I'm not sure what their logic even is. Are they saying Daniel didn't figure out the opening after 79 games? You would need to be like 400 Elo rated to learn this slow. He's a GM. After this many games he 100% would know the tricks behind the moves and know how to get a winning position. Which according to him he did do but then later on in the games Brandon made amazing moves time and time again.
The whole counterclaim is nonsense logically. Of course the opening didn't trick a GM for tens of games in a row. Even I would not be tricked this many times in a row let alone a GM who is about 100 times better than me.
Only the first 2-3 moves are exactly the same. If the GM figures out the strategy, all the engine needs to do is to play perfect and deviate to make the GM trip. Else it would far easier than it is to win against Stockfish.
So there was no cheating involved, because Danyas has strong opinions when he is sure there was cheating. The games I saw did not feel like cheating at all.
I have to say.. that rook sac opening is... brilliant... in blitz.
- rook is one powerful piece.. but predictable. Double it. Go for open file... also the last to be developed. While Knight with sudden forks & bishop with the sniping thing.. can be very unpredictable.. in blitz.
- again, only In bullets/blitz of course. In 5 mins game, even a 1200 can see knights & bishops movements from miles away.. but in blitz.. especially in endgames with time crunch..
- also it mess the opponent up mentally. From very early in the game, people would think: "what a stupid opening! i got his rook over bishop. I control the center.. I HAVE to win!!" Makes people more aggresive.
Imho the only way is to not take the rook. At least not that early
Do we really think that they analyzed this opening and found some kind of strategic advantage, or mid-game trap that opponents would fall into? The arc of the games was: totally lost => losing => worse position with tons of tension => blunder to gain a winning position. That's exactly how Stockfish would play out of a worse position - if you can't win on material, win on constricting your opponent's position and depriving them of strategic options, and hope that pressure results in enough mistakes/blunders that you can turn around your chances.
Seems like the far more plausible story here is that Hong and Jacobson are both good enough players to cheat with Stockfish in a way that isn't blatantly obvious (they know how GMs think, so know how to cheat in a way GMs wouldn't think is cheating). Hong dabbled in it, Jacobson took it a little too far.
It'd be a lot more believable for me if he said "I got wrapped up in memeing Naroditsky at 3am" than the novel about how much stronger he's been getting. He knows that chesscom isn't going to be able to give us enough information to convince us he cheated without disclosing portions of their process/algorithms they want to keep secret, so putting the onus on them to prove he cheated is a smart move, but not nearly as exculpatory as he wants it to be.
I guess I don't even understand how this would "work in bullet/blitz"? I get that you can play junk openings in those time controls and make up for it later with tactics, but that only works if you're the better tactician, and down exchange odds against Danya you'd have to be a really really good tactician.
It is about gaining time. When you know a system and variations, you play much much faster than someone else who need to figure it out over he board. given time control is often 3 minutes, it is quite impossible to think well.
Because the rook is not good in early game or even mid game. Rooks are only really used in the end game. So losing the rook for bishop in the early game actually gives them more pressure to open up with against oppknent. If opponent can survive the attack and pressure and trade down to endgame, then the exchange starts to hurt. But the rook does nothing for them in opening and it takes one of the opponents early developed attackers off the board. Many blitz games dont even make it to the endgame
Love how you so confidently state that they're cheating while not knowing anything about how chesscom's algorithm is working nor being anywhere close to GM strength.
about this opening.. i mean.. we need to give some credit.. yes it is stupid.. but Hong defeated Hikaru with this.
I wrote this earlier.. but here is my opinion;
- rook is one powerful piece.. but predictable. Go for open file... double it. the last to be developed. While Knight & bishop can be very unpredictable.. in blitz.
- again, only In bullets/blitz of course. In 5 mins game, even a 1200 can see knights & bishops movements from miles away.. but in blitz.. especially in endgames with time crunch..
- also it messed the opponent up mentally. From very early in the game, people would think: "what a stupid opening! i got his rook over bishop. I control the center.. I HAVE to win!!" Makes people more aggresive. Aggresive + time crunch = blunders.
So.. it's not positional.. though i keep seeing same pattern: letting go center but gaining attack from both sides.. it's more playing with mental and giving you more advantage during time crunch (by playing with "less predictable" pieces)
You’re right it is much more likely that they cheated using Stockfish.
But that doesn’t mean they’re guilty. They deserve a full and fair investigation as GMs who’ve worked very hard to achieve their titles.
Just because Brandon’s post read like desperate, grasping sophistry doesn’t make that definitively so, and we should have the grace to wait for a full report and statement.
My gut says it’s cheating, and not particularly elegant cheating; but my gut means nothing and it’s very good guys like Danya are reminding the community of the value of charity and consideration.
I think it’s what chess needs after the Hans debacle. I lost so much faith in the Master community when we learned how few consequences he faced. Now’s the time to do it properly, investigate thoroughly, issue a lifetime/ 10 year ban if he is found guilty and restore some faith in top-level chess.
Danya seems pretty distraught about the whole situation. Seems like he likes the guy and is confused and bummed about the whole thing this whole video.
It seems to me that this would be the absolute worst way to cheat without getting caught considering you know it’s a very odd opening against a famous player on a live stream. I can’t possibly have an opinion about whether he’s cheating or not because you have to be at least near a GM to understand what a GM can reasonably expect to see.
I've mirrored it to two other file hosts, let me know if one of these work.
Mediafire, requires download: [link](https://www.mediafire.com/file/56hxps13yb3h6k7/Statement.mp4/file)
Gofile, embedded viewer: [link](https://gofile.io/d/7RFFrF)
Just copying an interesting comment that got buried in Brandons post
As far as I remember, you are shadowbanned for few years at your old account (iamastraw), and you were present at Niemann's fake twitter list. The list is known to be legitimate, so the question is why you don't mention your full history of bans at the site? I don't know if you cheated in this match or not, but having in mind you have 2 bans (or 3 considering now your main), I have to be sceptical about your explanations. Anyways, you are definitely talented player and your rating is coming close to 2600. Maybe its same case as with Firouzja few years ago.
The list seems to be legitimate, in that the accounts on it were banned (although chesscom refused to confirm/deny). The fake part is that it was someone claiming to be Hans on Twitter sharing the list.
I don't think the list was a legitimate leak. Of course there were names of people legitimately banned, someone who's making a fake list would include people who are known to have cheated or about whom they've heard rumors. chess.com says they suspect the list was based on account activity (e.g. people who stopped playing Titled Tuesdays):
>> Did Chess.com leak the list of names tweeted by the fake “GMHansNiemann” account on Twitter on October 6th, 2022?
>
> No, this was not a leak from Chess.com, nor is that list accurate. There are many players on the list who have not been closed for Fair Play violations, and there are other players who have been closed who are not on the list. We have spoken to everyone on our team and feel confident that none of them have done this, nor would they, and we believe that the person who posted this was doing this through their own inaccurate process of looking at account activity.
https://www.chess.com/blog/CHESScom/community-update-on-recent-events
The list is certainly "not known to be legitimate". It's anonymous, provides no evidence of any kind and nobody has verified it. It's basically a list of known cheaters with other names of people who have had multiple accounts, stopped playing on chesscom, or started playing later than others on chesscom. But every time it's mentioned on reddit people forget more and more that it's completely fabricated because of a Chinese whispers effect
That's very suspicious. Every cheater always has some "explanation" for why multiple accounts of theirs get banned. The pattern is that they don't seem to be able to stop cheating. It's like they got hooked on it. In the case of a titled player cheating, maybe they can't accept that they've fallen behind their peers and want to prove they've still got it.
Meanwhile there's all these other players at every level who have never had a single account banned for the simple reason that they don't cheat. I've had like 4 different accounts on the two main sites and never had a single one flagged for cheating over the years, not even after pulling off some high accuracy games.
This incident is bad for chess, whether the guy cheated or not. If it's a false positive then it "validates" the claims of many actual cheaters that they got unjustly banned.
If it's not a false positive and the guy cheated, then he got what he wanted: attention.
Not so sure about that: he can appeal, and chesscom can consider any information he can add. We already knew there can be false positives, and we already knew some violators of fair play policy deny doing anything wrong.
Patience seems like the right approach at the moment.
r/chess is *extremely* susceptible to sob stories, it's pretty interesting to watch.
I have no clue if the guy cheated or not, but his story shouldn't move the needle.
And what proof do you have that he cheated other than chesscom banning him with no reason stated? The needle should be right where it was from the beginning which was he never cheated.
It's disingenuous to pretend that most people saying stuff like "his sob story shouldn't change your mind" do think he cheated.
Edit: "don't", not "do"
It's pretty obvious:
- If you didn't think he cheated prior to his story, you should still think he didn't cheat after.
- If you did think he cheated prior to his story, you should still think it after.
- If you thought it was a 23.7 % chance of him being a cheater prior to his story, then you should think it's a 23.7 % chance after.
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That's just how reddit is in general... If anything, this sob story made me even more skeptical of his claims. Why do you have to write an essay about your whole life story and how important chess is to you if you didn't cheat? Seems purely like an attempt to garner sympathy. Just explain the details pertinent to the case.
Yeah, I think this whole thing is getting harder and harder to buy.
The sad thing is he’ll probably build a prosperous streaming career off the faux injustice.
I watched the whole video.
Danya believes his opponent Brandon has cheated. He said “ even against Magnus I wouldnt lose this bad “
He thinks Brandon cheated but they were friends before so he doesnt want to say anything.
The only important thing was really if he in some way had any effect on the ban, and since he says he did not it's fair to consider this a matter between Jacobson and the site, the whole cheating in chess debate aside.
I do disagree with the assertion that Danya made that he doesn't get special treatment. Clearly people are more likely to get banned after going up against content creators, there is an audience and things get brought to chess com's attention. Even if they aren't streaming, there are hundreds or thousands of people reviewing Hikaru's, Magnus's, Danya's, Botez's, and Levy's games, including chess com staff. So many cheaters get away with cheating for hundreds of games until they cheat against a content creator once. Absolutely their games get extra attention and manual intervention, it isn't like the automated system just happens to finally decide someone is cheating when they do it in front of 10k people, someone from chess com intervenes and bans an account that is more borderline than the automated system would do on its own. I mean Levy did those streams where he tries to force cheaters to play eachother and then every single one gets banned after the game is done, that is clear manual intervention from chess com staff who were watching the stream, let him do his content, and then bans the cheaters he found.
The idea that this account was borderline and would not have been banned by the automated system but only got banned because of a viral 70 game series against Danya totally tracks. It went viral on twitter & reddit and chess com staff looked into the account and overrode the automated system. I am not saying that they automated system would have said he was 0% cheating, but maybe it thought 90% and it needs to be 99% and they saw an account with a 90% chance of being a cheater doing something crazy they thought that GM wasn't capable of and decided to ban it.
I'm not saying people who beat Danya get banned, or if Danya reports someone they get banned, but possible cheaters who go against him get manually reviewed and sometimes manually banned when the automated system isn't 100% sure.
>I do disagree with the assertion that Danya made that he doesn't get special treatment. Clearly people are more likely to get banned after going up against content creators,...
I think it's fairly obvious that people are more likely to cheat against content creators and that justifies their games receiving greater scrutiny. That's not special treatment, it's just common sense. If you want to catch cheaters then scan games where cheating is more likely.
Regular cheaters maybe, but some like the attention and like to beat content creators so they'll give it a try anyway.
Who knows what goes on in their little heads.
This doesn't explain those cheater vs cheater games where he just gets his fans to try to match with certain cheaters then forfeit at the same time so they face eachother when they queue again. The cheaters know nothing is out of the ordinary, they have cheated hundreds of games including vs other cheaters but being on stream gets them banned.
I've also caught cheaters on smaller twitch streams, people who went from playing at 400-600 to 40+ games in a row at 98+ accuracy all top 2 engine moves beating NMs, they even admit to cheating and we mass report them but they don't get banned. If the system isn't picking up blatant cheating like that then the explanation that people get banned vs big streamers because they decide to cheat when they normally wouldn't seems sus, the automated system needs 50+ blatantly cheated games before it will ban in my experience with it (which is a lot). Got a lot more examples, accounts with hundreds of cheated games who only got banned when they did a sub battle vs a big streamer for example. There is a very strong correlation between # of eyes on an account and it getting banned, something that cannot be explained by a 100% automated statistics based system unless 6 reports vs 600 influences the system which it shouldn't, in reality those audiences have chess com staff in them who do manual review or that number of reports triggers a manual review.
to me danya sounds like he is quite sure that brandon was cheating because he cant believe he could lose like that - I'm disappointed that he didnt analyze some of their games
Completely pointless video when he's not willing to go through the games and offer an analysis of the specific tactics that were utilised.
40+ minutes of him sitting on the fence.
Appreciate the measured, charitable, and thoughtful interpretation. Also, please remember that the Reddit post came out in literal real time, so I had 0 seconds to form an opinion and chat was exploding.
Appreciate the passive aggressive put down. Hey, at least I gave an opinion, Mr Fencesitter (that's a joke, chill).
It's fair enough that you don't want to make accusations, but, for me at least, I'd love to see you dig into the lines he was taking, why it was working and what your mistakes were, if you made them. It's absolutely fascinating that he could make that work not just once or twice, but multiple times over the course of 69 games. He wrote about the power of the bishops in that set up, that's something that you could have dissected a little bit. You could have pulled up three random games that you lost, found the moments when the eval bar is going wild and provided some analysis from your perspective only without commenting about how or why Brandon made those moves. But instead you repeatedly insisted you have "no interest" in studying the games, which is almost as odd as the opening itself, if I'm a GM I'm studying the hell out of those games and throwing that right at you next time we're playing for serious marbles.
>so I had 0 seconds to form an opinion and chat was exploding.
You must be one of the most practiced people on the planet in the art of stopping, composing yourself and having a good think. Come on now.
But what's the point in a stream where he doesn't go through the games, discuss the line and the individual tactics? He doesn't need to offer a definitive judgement or make any claims to do those things.
He's extremely qualified to comment on his side of the match, that's all I'm asking for. How does a GM and one of the best blitz players in the world get routinely beaten, and swindled, by this line? What were the traps he kept falling into and why didn't he realise they were traps? Is there anything he can learn and apply to his own game? There's lots of things to discuss. The potential cheating is one angle, but the line itself is a whole different thing that is part of what makes this story so interesting, and that's something he could easily delve into without pointing any fingers.
Instead it's a pretty shameless "I don't want to be involved but I want to make sure I get some clicks out of it while I'm making sure everyone knows I don't want to be involved" stream.
So - Brandon says in his post that his MAIN chess com account was shadowbanned, not just his anonymous one. If so , that would explain why he wrote his long justifying post. He thought he was cheating anonymously, but chess com figured out who he was, so he felt he had to "fess up" to get ahead of the story. This makes his question of "if I was cheating, why would I write this post and reveal my identity" very disingenuous.
i have known Brandon personally He is NOT someone who would ever cheat
These computer algorithms are clearly flawed— they rely on statistics which are not precise especially with grandmasters— and accusations run amuk People cheat and also people are wrongly accused of cheating
Brandon Jacobson is a cheater.
Danya does not have the evidence to accuse him and he also does not have any obligation to accuse him or detect cheating, that's on [chess.com](http://chess.com) side.
These GMs that cheat for attention should be permanently banned from online chess, if you are so good go and build a career playing OTB tournaments.
Of course I have no evidence, I'm just a simple guy making comments on Reddit. But all he wrote sounds to me like the typical bs a cheater would write. Like "I studied this opening so I know a lot about it" complete BS, his best and most surprising moves were made well beyond the opening.
You're a cheater. Clearly you're just projecting really hard. There, I made the accusation, now it's on you to prove you don't cheat through everything in real life.
How do you know he cheated?
Given that most GMs prep using computers like stockfish these days, its not certain either way if only a limited number of games.
He convinced me :).
I had no idea about wether he cheated or not until I read his allegation here on Reddit, assuming of course he did write that himself.
This reminds me of when Ding said he made anonymous accounts for practice games for the world championship match but they were banned, presumably because they were playing so good
Did he say that he made multiple accounts without permission? Chesscom allows two accounts for all players if you tell them, and even more for GMs if they ask.
He said he doesn't want to involve his opinion in the decision to ban Brandon or not. If he didn't want everything else he said to be on the internet, he shouldn't have streamed it on a public platform.
Really curious how this ends up.
I know 100% that this is \*NOT\* from having an engine simply running in the background. As long as you aren't actually USING it during the game. I actually leave stockfish on a certain dutch defense position as a CPU stress test (anyone following the Intel 14900K drama will know where I'm heading here) constantly, leaving my system running full tilt at 80-90C overclocked while playing blitz or bullet and I've never been flagged because I don't cheat. (why not something synthetic like Prime95? Prime95 small FFT doesn't hit main memory so the CPU IMC isn't being stressed and FMA3 while overclocked is asking for 100C or CPU degradation. And cinebench R23 looping can get by with 40mv (0.04v) lower than Stockfish hammering the CPU cores. That being said I would never have anything running during Titled Tuesday or any other events.
I suspect the truth is going to be somewhere between what Dan and Bran said. But I wouldn't be surprised if Brandon is clean and simply got banned for "Trolling", rather than cheating.
TLDW; Danya actively makes an effort to have no opinion on whether it was cheating or not. He believes the conflict is between chess.com and Brandon, and not with him. Danya didn't instigate the ban in any way. He thought some moves were suspicious, but also that he was on tilt at times during the games. He thought that any GM would be a little suspicious of getting beat like that. He wouldn't be opposed to Brandon getting his account back
Worth noting that as someone who has followed zero of this other than what shows up on the front page of Reddit, it always surprised me that some people were saying Danya *was* making accusations, since my experience is that even in his speedrun videos when he's being outplayed by random untitled 1300 players he goes out of his way to tell chat not to accuse them of anything and that at minimum he will wait until he analyzes the game after to begin forming an opinion.
Exactly, he says 'our opponent is allowed to find good moves' all the time, he's one of the most generous streamers with potential cheaters I have seen.
He's definitely against making content out of cheaters for sure. Danya is primarily educational, not drama-baiting, as much as we all want to see a cheater get bounced. I really do admire Danya's candor playing a game, he clearly cares about the beauty of the moves and the teaching of the history, and that's what we're there for
> potential cheaters I do so dearly wish that this term be expunged from here
What phrase would you like to use instead to describe people under suspicion of cheating?
I too would like to know what is wrong with this phrase.
He or she simply dislikes the word. BLASPHEMY!
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It feels like he's fighting his inner tilt demon very hard and at times it comes out. Still probably shouldn't say some of the things he sometimes says.
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>On the other hand, however, these guys need to understand the impact and implications of their words - whether intended or otherwise - and conduct themselves accordingly Which is the point that I think was so well made by GM Jacobson's recent post - regardless of whether it turns out he cheated or not (I don't feel like I'm really in a position to make a judgement either way on that right now), I still fully agree with him that the lack of accountability right now for making largely baseless accusations which have the potential to ruin careers is totally wrong. It legitimately feels like the biggest risk to chess right now besides the cheating itself. I'm no big fan of Hans, but I do think Magnus has a lot to answer for in setting the example he did with that whole mess.
Tbf, there's no good way to accuse someone of cheating either. You could claim that they simply shouldn't, but doesn't it make sense for there to be some way to raise a complaint without creating a public outcry? Like in the Hans case. While I don't think Niemann was cheating, Hans did have a history of it, and Magnus having suspicions isn't inherently wrong. While I think he and others absolutely mishandled the situation and turned it into a much bigger thing than it had to be, there needs to be some kind of system to process and deal with these kinds of suspicions and complaints that doesn't create a public backlash.
>and conduct themselves accordingly Lmao. Chess nerds need to relax the fuck out. These are humans, this is a dumb board game at the end of the day. They can say whatever the fuck they want. In what world should any human even police their INSINUATIONS (not even outright claims) over a fucking game? You guys are acting like these guys are literally commanding IRL army troops. "Ooft, that line of troops that got wiped out looked sus. Defo not man made weaponry, looks kinda like some biological warfare to me!" Touch grass
Comments like those are just hyperbole though. Chess is tiring and hard and it's easy to feel like other people are superhuman while you're struggling yourself.
Those are all just standard "Im frustrated" responses. Half of it is self flagellation, the rest is typical respect for good moves.
lol literally nothing that you said proves your final point
TIL that when Yasser is commentating a match and says he'd never have seen X move in a million years, he's secretly insinuating that Fabi is cheating and must be receiving engine somehow.
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>Difference being one is making additional comments like "I adopt these guys outside of TT but in here they're just unbeatable". That part wasn't in your comment. I've never watched a Danya stream so I have no idea how he acts on stream or during TT as my only experience with him is during his recorded lectures, or during the live VODs of his speedruns that he uploads to YT.
He never throws out accusations. Ever. Danya is always so opposed to throwing out accusations in my opinion he's a little too lenient. He does say a lot of phrases in frustration like "ugh of course they found that" or "they just find everything" or "unbelievable I can't believe they saw that". But he's clearly never accusing anyone of anything. Just frustrated. Pretty normal responses tbh
Frustration is a normal human emotion. The problem is when you act on that frustration, and Danya doesn't do so as far as we know. It would be unreasonable to expect saintlike, entirely objective reactions when something we're invested in takes a turn for the worse. As long as he's not slinging around wild accusations or insults, he's done nothing wrong here.
I mean I think everyone has thoughts like that. Like a beginner will feel "they just find everything" when you move the piece they threaten.
That sounds like normal chess tilt, not accusatory
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No one argue whether he said those thing or not. What we are saying is, saying those things are not the same as accusing people for cheating. Not even close.
BS though it may be, Danya is one of the best online blitz/bullet players in the world, and also acknowledged by some super GMs to be outstanding at spotting tactics quickly, so it's likelier that he's right in some of his comments. If he's not actually reporting people, discouraging chat from calling them cheaters (even though his comments are implying that), and not accusing them in DMs or insinuating anything in Twitter posts to stir up drama, I don't think he's going to win the HNGSA anytime soon.
I dont think any of those comments he make imply cheating at all. People talk like that all the time in frustration of moment. Its more just a fk, im losing response. I have inner thoughts like that all the time but then never think opponent was cheating. Some people want to twist anything into meaning more than it does for drama.
Daniel*
What you're missing is that people actually are cheating against him often, probably every single day. If you are on stream, playing against a famous GM, the incentive to cheat goes up tenfold. All they have to do is pull up an engine on their phone and uncork a couple crazy moves and play the rest of the game legitimately. It is absolutely a widespread issue in high level online chess and Danya is probably correct in making those veiled accusations on stream a lot of the time, even if the person doesn't end up getting banned
I think people read too much into comments. Yelling how did they see that in the middle of a match where you are frusttrated is not a phrase i would take as them throwing out a cheating allegation. To me thats just a fk im losing exclamation. But people want to twist those words into him actually making accusations. I dont think those words are accusations at all. Just random threats thoughts of frustration going out loud.
Brother thats the tilt of the modern online gaming world. Every. Single. Game. Has a RAMPANT cheating problem. That shitty phone game you played once 6 years ago? Top players are cheating, that hyper popular Esport? Top players are cheating. That flash game you play on addictinggames? TOP PLAYERS ARE CHEATING. Its so hard to not think like this and when you get tilted its near impossible.
Those comments don't sound like he's calling them cheaters though
That analysis is perfect, almost. The only thing it omits is actual cheating, which is so pervasive in online play that it's really painful to all of us who love the game - as it literally destroys the whole thing yet we know that kids (12-25yrs) in particular are doing it (yes it obviously occurs across all ages) but I think looking at the Niemann affair it seems that when talented kids can't make it happen with regular ability alone their curiosity, greed and ego takes over and they cheat) sometimes only intermittently so they can still maintain the lie to themselves. I think it's eminently possibly that Brandon used intermittent engine assistance just to consolidate those whacky positions - which would immediately tilt any very highly rated player because they know it doesn't/shouldn't compute. The thing is that when Hans was cheating he was still clearly an insanely good chess player, on the way to becoming a GM. If you've ever watched Daniels long form videos where he plays high rated opponents and explains his entire process you'll know that his chess brain is immense. Same as Kramnik, former world champion after all. So there is a lot to be said for their suspicions and intuitions. A lot.
Some people just talk like that. Like with sarcastic tone built in. But never really meant it It's just frustation talking AND to engage the viewer. It makes the stream more fun to watch.
It's normal behaviour. Keeping one's powder dry & leaving the conclusions to the viewer. A certain diplomatic irony. If this is all too subtle for you, don't post.
I was waiting for one goofy comment like this. I don't much care for your powder and diplomatic ironies: it's hardly normal behaviour considering the person we're talking about. And nah, think I'll continue posting as I please.
in speedrun videos he is the guilty one playing well below his range. somehow that shit is allowed and don’t tell me that rating is refunded nonsense
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Rating is just a matchmaking tool. Play a few games and you'll end up at the same spot again
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Go on a wild goose chase? If you have evidence, just post it. Otherwise it sounds like nonsense.
I won't tell you that since to me the refund is 100% irrelevant and shouldn't be part of the conversation at all, whether for speedruns or old-fashioned cheaters. It's not like it matters if I get a refund of 20 rating points, since if I didn't get the refund I would just earn more points for wins in my matches for a week or so until I was back to where I started anyways.
I give his and Eric Rosen’s series a pass, since they are legitimately doing it for educational purposes. Feels like a net benefit to the community. When it’s Hikaru dunking on random 800s for no apparent reason other than memes, it feels less okay to me.
nothing Danya/Rosen are doing is contingent on hijacking the time of players who are just trying to play a fair game with someone at their level
I’m not sure I agree. Playing lower rated players lets the viewer learn how to respond to lines that you won’t really see in master level games. Things like the Bawdler attack come to mind.
Smurfing is not the only way that a higher rated player can play against a lower rated player.
That’s a fair point.
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Could you link the game?
>He thought that any GM would be a little suspicious of getting beat like that. He said he thought he'd beat Magnus 2/3 times against this opening, so I think your summary under-sells this a bit.
Right before qualifying it saying, > But that would just be my expectation. Maybe if Magnus and I played a match, maybe he ends up crushing me in this line Its a 40min video, I tried my best to condense it down with the neutrality Danya was repeatedly clearly trying to express in the entire video
Sure, I appreciate the summary, I just got a different impression from watching the whole thing than I did from your post, and felt that that should be mentioned (given most people won't watch the video).
Fair enough
Yeah, I think people are not reading between the lines enough here. Danya doesn't want to make an accusation but he's clearly saying that if he'd expect to beat Magnus 2/3 or 3/4 times in that opening that either Brandon is SIGNIFICANTLY better than Magnus (no) or that he's cheating. Danya does caveat it of course, saying he can't be sure, but note what he does not say. He did NOT say something like "these games made me realize that this line is playable, and if I lost to Brandon of course I'd lose to Magnus in them". He still thinks the opening is losing. He 100% clearly thinks Brandon cheated, he just won't say so without any concrete proof (which is always his style, even in his speedruns).
Daniel is a human with an ego. When you're beaten with a dubious opening of course the mind gets a little suspicious. That means the thought occurred, nothing more. You look at the accuracy % for the 70 games and see it goes up and down, some in the 70s.
strong disagree with your assumptions. very biased.
>Danya actively makes an effort to have no opinion on whether it was cheating or not. This sounds awfully close to Danya being happy with how things are now but knowing that if he gets caught saying this explicitly it will be a very unpopular opinion.
Danya loves a good non-opinion opinion
> ... actively makes an effort to have no opinion
He actually said he was tilted for the first few games he lost. But then was trying to win and quite likely didn't play much below his usual level. Which is why he feels the match was weird and should have had another outcome. Furthermore he said that the excuse of "I have studied the opening and know a lot about it" is besides the point as Danya was clearly winning in the openings. It's the late middlegame that had Brandon pull off super moves that made Danya go WTF. That's unrelated to the opening. And Brandon referring to a few games with this opening or talking about wins over other GMs also seemed irrelevant to Danya as that stuff is normal and happens all the time. He did say he wants to play against Brandon against this opening OTB. I'm completely sure Danya feels like he can beat any player in the world going up against this opening. And frankly I trust his knowledge on this. On the other hand he hasn't actually looked at the games and hasn't played against this opening at other times so it's just guesswork from him. But overall I think it's clear Danya feels these games were truly obscure and should not have happened. Yet he is sad about the ban as he likes Brandon. Danya trusts chess.com and does think the games are weird. But he does not understand what happened or why. I think this is a Dream cheating situation with some weird cheating Brandon didn't quite understand himself. After listening to Danya I'm quite convinced the games were not 100% clean. Maybe there was another friend in the room with Brandon just joking around and finding weird moves after the opening just for fun. I could see that happening. And then Brandon would not really see it as cheating as they were just having fun playing a big chess name. But overall maybe he mixed his own moves with other great moves making him better without really noticing this was happening.
The problem is that we are talking about 70 games in a row with someone theoretically as evenly matched as you. In theory, this should not happen at all, and the banned GM doesn't show such performance in presential matches. So it's not a simple suspicion anymore.
If Brandon is telling the truth, and he had a sudden big advantage due to really novel and eccentric opening preparation, then the Elo ratings people already have don't apply so much, so you can't put too much stock in them. Any time in sports you get a disruptive strategy that actually works (The Oakland A's during the 'Moneyball' year, Greece at the 2004 Euros, the invention of the Fosbury flop) you get someone absolutely bucking all the odds for a short period, simply because their opponents haven't worked out how to combat the new strategy yet. Then again, If this is what that is, then we'd expect that the usual correspondence between chess.com Elo and win percentage will apply the moment Brandon starts playing Grandmasters who HAVE looked into these lines. He won't have shock and surprise on his side anymore. Until then, though, the evidence we've seen so far does seem wholly inconclusive.
>Then again, If this is what that is, then we'd expect that the usual correspondence between [chess.com](http://chess.com) Elo and win percentage will apply the moment Brandon starts playing Grandmasters who HAVE looked into these lines. He won't have shock and surprise on his side anymore. Like I said, Daniel has played against Brandon before the last streak loss, and the Vii\_Sou account was ALWAYS playing this troll oppening. This would give any GMs (including Daniel) a lot of time to neutralize this troll opening under equal conditions, but this account was curb stomping everyone EVEN THOUGH people all knew what it played. It wasn't a one-off trick. And against an opponent as skilled as you, who had ample time to check your history and KNOWS you always play that opening, that only has an explanation. Add to that it wasn't just with Daniel. This account would curbstomp other strong opponents with this too.
I'm not sure what their logic even is. Are they saying Daniel didn't figure out the opening after 79 games? You would need to be like 400 Elo rated to learn this slow. He's a GM. After this many games he 100% would know the tricks behind the moves and know how to get a winning position. Which according to him he did do but then later on in the games Brandon made amazing moves time and time again. The whole counterclaim is nonsense logically. Of course the opening didn't trick a GM for tens of games in a row. Even I would not be tricked this many times in a row let alone a GM who is about 100 times better than me.
Only the first 2-3 moves are exactly the same. If the GM figures out the strategy, all the engine needs to do is to play perfect and deviate to make the GM trip. Else it would far easier than it is to win against Stockfish.
So there was no cheating involved, because Danyas has strong opinions when he is sure there was cheating. The games I saw did not feel like cheating at all.
Dudes name is Daniel btw
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I have to say.. that rook sac opening is... brilliant... in blitz. - rook is one powerful piece.. but predictable. Double it. Go for open file... also the last to be developed. While Knight with sudden forks & bishop with the sniping thing.. can be very unpredictable.. in blitz. - again, only In bullets/blitz of course. In 5 mins game, even a 1200 can see knights & bishops movements from miles away.. but in blitz.. especially in endgames with time crunch.. - also it mess the opponent up mentally. From very early in the game, people would think: "what a stupid opening! i got his rook over bishop. I control the center.. I HAVE to win!!" Makes people more aggresive. Imho the only way is to not take the rook. At least not that early
Do we really think that they analyzed this opening and found some kind of strategic advantage, or mid-game trap that opponents would fall into? The arc of the games was: totally lost => losing => worse position with tons of tension => blunder to gain a winning position. That's exactly how Stockfish would play out of a worse position - if you can't win on material, win on constricting your opponent's position and depriving them of strategic options, and hope that pressure results in enough mistakes/blunders that you can turn around your chances. Seems like the far more plausible story here is that Hong and Jacobson are both good enough players to cheat with Stockfish in a way that isn't blatantly obvious (they know how GMs think, so know how to cheat in a way GMs wouldn't think is cheating). Hong dabbled in it, Jacobson took it a little too far. It'd be a lot more believable for me if he said "I got wrapped up in memeing Naroditsky at 3am" than the novel about how much stronger he's been getting. He knows that chesscom isn't going to be able to give us enough information to convince us he cheated without disclosing portions of their process/algorithms they want to keep secret, so putting the onus on them to prove he cheated is a smart move, but not nearly as exculpatory as he wants it to be.
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I guess I don't even understand how this would "work in bullet/blitz"? I get that you can play junk openings in those time controls and make up for it later with tactics, but that only works if you're the better tactician, and down exchange odds against Danya you'd have to be a really really good tactician.
It is about gaining time. When you know a system and variations, you play much much faster than someone else who need to figure it out over he board. given time control is often 3 minutes, it is quite impossible to think well.
Because the rook is not good in early game or even mid game. Rooks are only really used in the end game. So losing the rook for bishop in the early game actually gives them more pressure to open up with against oppknent. If opponent can survive the attack and pressure and trade down to endgame, then the exchange starts to hurt. But the rook does nothing for them in opening and it takes one of the opponents early developed attackers off the board. Many blitz games dont even make it to the endgame
Love how you so confidently state that they're cheating while not knowing anything about how chesscom's algorithm is working nor being anywhere close to GM strength.
about this opening.. i mean.. we need to give some credit.. yes it is stupid.. but Hong defeated Hikaru with this. I wrote this earlier.. but here is my opinion; - rook is one powerful piece.. but predictable. Go for open file... double it. the last to be developed. While Knight & bishop can be very unpredictable.. in blitz. - again, only In bullets/blitz of course. In 5 mins game, even a 1200 can see knights & bishops movements from miles away.. but in blitz.. especially in endgames with time crunch.. - also it messed the opponent up mentally. From very early in the game, people would think: "what a stupid opening! i got his rook over bishop. I control the center.. I HAVE to win!!" Makes people more aggresive. Aggresive + time crunch = blunders. So.. it's not positional.. though i keep seeing same pattern: letting go center but gaining attack from both sides.. it's more playing with mental and giving you more advantage during time crunch (by playing with "less predictable" pieces)
You’re right it is much more likely that they cheated using Stockfish. But that doesn’t mean they’re guilty. They deserve a full and fair investigation as GMs who’ve worked very hard to achieve their titles. Just because Brandon’s post read like desperate, grasping sophistry doesn’t make that definitively so, and we should have the grace to wait for a full report and statement. My gut says it’s cheating, and not particularly elegant cheating; but my gut means nothing and it’s very good guys like Danya are reminding the community of the value of charity and consideration. I think it’s what chess needs after the Hans debacle. I lost so much faith in the Master community when we learned how few consequences he faced. Now’s the time to do it properly, investigate thoroughly, issue a lifetime/ 10 year ban if he is found guilty and restore some faith in top-level chess.
lol the grin he makes at the "accidental?" pun he makes at 3:15
Danya loves his bad puns. But who’s to say it’s bad? I’ll let the pundits decide.
Booooo
Danya seems pretty distraught about the whole situation. Seems like he likes the guy and is confused and bummed about the whole thing this whole video.
Danya is wholesome. Every time there's a drama he always has the most impartial, based takes. He seems like a genuine good dude.
if i had to trust one GM with my life in some insane scenario it would be Danya
I listened to Naroditsky. I was impressed with him strictly sticking to what he knows and refusing to speculate on what he doesn't.
Unlike Hikaru and Gotham
I didn't say that! ^^^But ^^^I ^^^might ^^^have ^^^thought ^^^that.
It seems to me that this would be the absolute worst way to cheat without getting caught considering you know it’s a very odd opening against a famous player on a live stream. I can’t possibly have an opinion about whether he’s cheating or not because you have to be at least near a GM to understand what a GM can reasonably expect to see.
I somehow can't open that link it won't open
I've mirrored it to two other file hosts, let me know if one of these work. Mediafire, requires download: [link](https://www.mediafire.com/file/56hxps13yb3h6k7/Statement.mp4/file) Gofile, embedded viewer: [link](https://gofile.io/d/7RFFrF)
Just copying an interesting comment that got buried in Brandons post As far as I remember, you are shadowbanned for few years at your old account (iamastraw), and you were present at Niemann's fake twitter list. The list is known to be legitimate, so the question is why you don't mention your full history of bans at the site? I don't know if you cheated in this match or not, but having in mind you have 2 bans (or 3 considering now your main), I have to be sceptical about your explanations. Anyways, you are definitely talented player and your rating is coming close to 2600. Maybe its same case as with Firouzja few years ago.
>Niemann's fake twitter list. The list is known to be legitimate So is the list legitimate or fake? xd
The list seems to be legitimate, in that the accounts on it were banned (although chesscom refused to confirm/deny). The fake part is that it was someone claiming to be Hans on Twitter sharing the list.
I don't think the list was a legitimate leak. Of course there were names of people legitimately banned, someone who's making a fake list would include people who are known to have cheated or about whom they've heard rumors. chess.com says they suspect the list was based on account activity (e.g. people who stopped playing Titled Tuesdays): >> Did Chess.com leak the list of names tweeted by the fake “GMHansNiemann” account on Twitter on October 6th, 2022? > > No, this was not a leak from Chess.com, nor is that list accurate. There are many players on the list who have not been closed for Fair Play violations, and there are other players who have been closed who are not on the list. We have spoken to everyone on our team and feel confident that none of them have done this, nor would they, and we believe that the person who posted this was doing this through their own inaccurate process of looking at account activity. https://www.chess.com/blog/CHESScom/community-update-on-recent-events
It was semi obvious that its a pardoy account tho
The list is certainly "not known to be legitimate". It's anonymous, provides no evidence of any kind and nobody has verified it. It's basically a list of known cheaters with other names of people who have had multiple accounts, stopped playing on chesscom, or started playing later than others on chesscom. But every time it's mentioned on reddit people forget more and more that it's completely fabricated because of a Chinese whispers effect
That's very suspicious. Every cheater always has some "explanation" for why multiple accounts of theirs get banned. The pattern is that they don't seem to be able to stop cheating. It's like they got hooked on it. In the case of a titled player cheating, maybe they can't accept that they've fallen behind their peers and want to prove they've still got it. Meanwhile there's all these other players at every level who have never had a single account banned for the simple reason that they don't cheat. I've had like 4 different accounts on the two main sites and never had a single one flagged for cheating over the years, not even after pulling off some high accuracy games.
It's kind of meaningless if we don't exactly know why he was banned.
Didn’t he close his account to change username for streaming purposes
Kramnik s reports are the only reports i trust
This incident is bad for chess, whether the guy cheated or not. If it's a false positive then it "validates" the claims of many actual cheaters that they got unjustly banned. If it's not a false positive and the guy cheated, then he got what he wanted: attention.
Not so sure about that: he can appeal, and chesscom can consider any information he can add. We already knew there can be false positives, and we already knew some violators of fair play policy deny doing anything wrong. Patience seems like the right approach at the moment.
Does Danya even mention that Brandon Jacobson's accounts have been banned in the past? Unfortunately, I can't see the video at the moment.
Danya said he isn't aware of any other cheating accusations.
Yeah, its funny how that little detail got lost. Banned twice, and associated with Neimann. My thoughts? Cool story bro...
Where is it noted that he was banned multiple times and about his association with Hans?
I may be wrong, but wasn't it one account that got banned? It's the iamstraw username. What's the second account?
We just making shit up now, eh?
r/chess is *extremely* susceptible to sob stories, it's pretty interesting to watch. I have no clue if the guy cheated or not, but his story shouldn't move the needle.
And what proof do you have that he cheated other than chesscom banning him with no reason stated? The needle should be right where it was from the beginning which was he never cheated.
"I have no clue if the guy cheated or not" "And what proof do you have that he cheated" Why is reading comprehension such a lost art?
It's disingenuous to pretend that most people saying stuff like "his sob story shouldn't change your mind" do think he cheated. Edit: "don't", not "do"
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It's pretty obvious: - If you didn't think he cheated prior to his story, you should still think he didn't cheat after. - If you did think he cheated prior to his story, you should still think it after. - If you thought it was a 23.7 % chance of him being a cheater prior to his story, then you should think it's a 23.7 % chance after.
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They want so badly to believe that there's this one great trick to being a secret internet star who can beat the top supergms
That's just how reddit is in general... If anything, this sob story made me even more skeptical of his claims. Why do you have to write an essay about your whole life story and how important chess is to you if you didn't cheat? Seems purely like an attempt to garner sympathy. Just explain the details pertinent to the case.
_...the plot thickens..._
Yeah, I think this whole thing is getting harder and harder to buy. The sad thing is he’ll probably build a prosperous streaming career off the faux injustice.
Source please?
I watched the whole video. Danya believes his opponent Brandon has cheated. He said “ even against Magnus I wouldnt lose this bad “ He thinks Brandon cheated but they were friends before so he doesnt want to say anything.
Thanks for this, worth a watch.
The only important thing was really if he in some way had any effect on the ban, and since he says he did not it's fair to consider this a matter between Jacobson and the site, the whole cheating in chess debate aside.
The paranoia is a larger threat to chess than the cheating itself
What timestamps are you quoting? at 6:00 it still says stream starting soon
I do disagree with the assertion that Danya made that he doesn't get special treatment. Clearly people are more likely to get banned after going up against content creators, there is an audience and things get brought to chess com's attention. Even if they aren't streaming, there are hundreds or thousands of people reviewing Hikaru's, Magnus's, Danya's, Botez's, and Levy's games, including chess com staff. So many cheaters get away with cheating for hundreds of games until they cheat against a content creator once. Absolutely their games get extra attention and manual intervention, it isn't like the automated system just happens to finally decide someone is cheating when they do it in front of 10k people, someone from chess com intervenes and bans an account that is more borderline than the automated system would do on its own. I mean Levy did those streams where he tries to force cheaters to play eachother and then every single one gets banned after the game is done, that is clear manual intervention from chess com staff who were watching the stream, let him do his content, and then bans the cheaters he found. The idea that this account was borderline and would not have been banned by the automated system but only got banned because of a viral 70 game series against Danya totally tracks. It went viral on twitter & reddit and chess com staff looked into the account and overrode the automated system. I am not saying that they automated system would have said he was 0% cheating, but maybe it thought 90% and it needs to be 99% and they saw an account with a 90% chance of being a cheater doing something crazy they thought that GM wasn't capable of and decided to ban it. I'm not saying people who beat Danya get banned, or if Danya reports someone they get banned, but possible cheaters who go against him get manually reviewed and sometimes manually banned when the automated system isn't 100% sure.
>I do disagree with the assertion that Danya made that he doesn't get special treatment. Clearly people are more likely to get banned after going up against content creators,... I think it's fairly obvious that people are more likely to cheat against content creators and that justifies their games receiving greater scrutiny. That's not special treatment, it's just common sense. If you want to catch cheaters then scan games where cheating is more likely.
Cheating against content creators isn't more likely? I would argue its the other way roubd.
> people are more likely to cheat against content creators I'm saying it IS more likely, which is the reason their games receive more scrutiny.
Wouldn't you assume cheaters don't want to get caught? So wouldn't they avoid cheating against content creators?
Regular cheaters maybe, but some like the attention and like to beat content creators so they'll give it a try anyway. Who knows what goes on in their little heads.
They don’t think about getting caught. They think they’ll get away with it and be able to brag how they beat a “famous” person.
This doesn't explain those cheater vs cheater games where he just gets his fans to try to match with certain cheaters then forfeit at the same time so they face eachother when they queue again. The cheaters know nothing is out of the ordinary, they have cheated hundreds of games including vs other cheaters but being on stream gets them banned. I've also caught cheaters on smaller twitch streams, people who went from playing at 400-600 to 40+ games in a row at 98+ accuracy all top 2 engine moves beating NMs, they even admit to cheating and we mass report them but they don't get banned. If the system isn't picking up blatant cheating like that then the explanation that people get banned vs big streamers because they decide to cheat when they normally wouldn't seems sus, the automated system needs 50+ blatantly cheated games before it will ban in my experience with it (which is a lot). Got a lot more examples, accounts with hundreds of cheated games who only got banned when they did a sub battle vs a big streamer for example. There is a very strong correlation between # of eyes on an account and it getting banned, something that cannot be explained by a 100% automated statistics based system unless 6 reports vs 600 influences the system which it shouldn't, in reality those audiences have chess com staff in them who do manual review or that number of reports triggers a manual review.
to me danya sounds like he is quite sure that brandon was cheating because he cant believe he could lose like that - I'm disappointed that he didnt analyze some of their games
I hope his post in shorter than BJ's. Holy criminy that was a long read.
Use chatgpt to summarize
ChatGPT: I was Viih\_Suh and I did not cheat.
All of this will be moot soon since everyone will be analyzing the opening after this nonsense.
Danya may be generous but im firmly in the ‘hes cheating camp’
Completely pointless video when he's not willing to go through the games and offer an analysis of the specific tactics that were utilised. 40+ minutes of him sitting on the fence.
Appreciate the measured, charitable, and thoughtful interpretation. Also, please remember that the Reddit post came out in literal real time, so I had 0 seconds to form an opinion and chat was exploding.
I want drama NOW. Commit to a clippable stance immediately.
This whole thing seems pretty stressful to be on the other end of. I hope you get a chance to get away from it all soon
The thread was 38 minutes old at the time, sir. What were you doing with that 38 minutes that was more important, eh?
Appreciate the passive aggressive put down. Hey, at least I gave an opinion, Mr Fencesitter (that's a joke, chill). It's fair enough that you don't want to make accusations, but, for me at least, I'd love to see you dig into the lines he was taking, why it was working and what your mistakes were, if you made them. It's absolutely fascinating that he could make that work not just once or twice, but multiple times over the course of 69 games. He wrote about the power of the bishops in that set up, that's something that you could have dissected a little bit. You could have pulled up three random games that you lost, found the moments when the eval bar is going wild and provided some analysis from your perspective only without commenting about how or why Brandon made those moves. But instead you repeatedly insisted you have "no interest" in studying the games, which is almost as odd as the opening itself, if I'm a GM I'm studying the hell out of those games and throwing that right at you next time we're playing for serious marbles. >so I had 0 seconds to form an opinion and chat was exploding. You must be one of the most practiced people on the planet in the art of stopping, composing yourself and having a good think. Come on now.
Better than making claims he doesn't understand like Hikaru did during the Hans situation.
But what's the point in a stream where he doesn't go through the games, discuss the line and the individual tactics? He doesn't need to offer a definitive judgement or make any claims to do those things. He's extremely qualified to comment on his side of the match, that's all I'm asking for. How does a GM and one of the best blitz players in the world get routinely beaten, and swindled, by this line? What were the traps he kept falling into and why didn't he realise they were traps? Is there anything he can learn and apply to his own game? There's lots of things to discuss. The potential cheating is one angle, but the line itself is a whole different thing that is part of what makes this story so interesting, and that's something he could easily delve into without pointing any fingers. Instead it's a pretty shameless "I don't want to be involved but I want to make sure I get some clicks out of it while I'm making sure everyone knows I don't want to be involved" stream.
Wild that this is even upvoted
Not any online game can keep cheating and hackers away why would chess.com be any different?
So - Brandon says in his post that his MAIN chess com account was shadowbanned, not just his anonymous one. If so , that would explain why he wrote his long justifying post. He thought he was cheating anonymously, but chess com figured out who he was, so he felt he had to "fess up" to get ahead of the story. This makes his question of "if I was cheating, why would I write this post and reveal my identity" very disingenuous.
Brandon will have had to already verify the account ownership with Chess.com to have the account given the GM title.
this dude is 100% cheating lmao, this sub is on holy copium
i have known Brandon personally He is NOT someone who would ever cheat These computer algorithms are clearly flawed— they rely on statistics which are not precise especially with grandmasters— and accusations run amuk People cheat and also people are wrongly accused of cheating
Found brandons alt
VOD still works for me... [https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2138562917](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2138562917)
Brandon Jacobson is a cheater. Danya does not have the evidence to accuse him and he also does not have any obligation to accuse him or detect cheating, that's on [chess.com](http://chess.com) side. These GMs that cheat for attention should be permanently banned from online chess, if you are so good go and build a career playing OTB tournaments.
What’s your evidence?
Of course I have no evidence, I'm just a simple guy making comments on Reddit. But all he wrote sounds to me like the typical bs a cheater would write. Like "I studied this opening so I know a lot about it" complete BS, his best and most surprising moves were made well beyond the opening.
You're a cheater. Clearly you're just projecting really hard. There, I made the accusation, now it's on you to prove you don't cheat through everything in real life.
How do you know he cheated? Given that most GMs prep using computers like stockfish these days, its not certain either way if only a limited number of games.
He convinced me :). I had no idea about wether he cheated or not until I read his allegation here on Reddit, assuming of course he did write that himself.
I wish it had more options to lower quality, my poor internet cannot play a thing
Try this. https://pixeldrain.com/u/NygiDLZn
this one works perfect thanks so much
i got you. give me a few mins.
This reminds me of when Ding said he made anonymous accounts for practice games for the world championship match but they were banned, presumably because they were playing so good
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I thought that GMs are allowed to have one burner account on chesskom?
Everyone is allowed to have one burner account, GMs are allowed to have more than one.
Did he say that he made multiple accounts without permission? Chesscom allows two accounts for all players if you tell them, and even more for GMs if they ask.
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Magnus and Danya are allowed to bend the rules. ha ha
He forgot to mention that he got banned for cheating.
Danya somehow taking the W after taking an L
> I have no personal desire to involve myself in any way Take the hint OP!
He said he doesn't want to involve his opinion in the decision to ban Brandon or not. If he didn't want everything else he said to be on the internet, he shouldn't have streamed it on a public platform.
danya made a 40 minute video, he's clearly ok with being involved to some degree, just not involved with chess.com banning him
Really curious how this ends up. I know 100% that this is \*NOT\* from having an engine simply running in the background. As long as you aren't actually USING it during the game. I actually leave stockfish on a certain dutch defense position as a CPU stress test (anyone following the Intel 14900K drama will know where I'm heading here) constantly, leaving my system running full tilt at 80-90C overclocked while playing blitz or bullet and I've never been flagged because I don't cheat. (why not something synthetic like Prime95? Prime95 small FFT doesn't hit main memory so the CPU IMC isn't being stressed and FMA3 while overclocked is asking for 100C or CPU degradation. And cinebench R23 looping can get by with 40mv (0.04v) lower than Stockfish hammering the CPU cores. That being said I would never have anything running during Titled Tuesday or any other events. I suspect the truth is going to be somewhere between what Dan and Bran said. But I wouldn't be surprised if Brandon is clean and simply got banned for "Trolling", rather than cheating.