This morning I made a post on Reddit attempting to clarify some questions which came up after my first post. As Hikaru said Chess GMs are not necessarily geniuses we’re just good at moving pieces on the board. I made the post in an emotional state. I had expected my initial statement to clear my name and wasn’t prepared for some of the more malicious comments made in response. Although I am not new to chess, as my son pointed out today I am way too new to internet culture.
I would like to take this opportunity to fully clarify all my statements made one by one hopefully this statement can lay these questions to rest.
2017 cheating:
From 2016 through to April 2017, I would sometimes use titled Tuesdays as a teaching opportunity with my class. During this time I played a total of 9 tournaments. I played 2 without student involvement, winning one of them. In the remaining 7, I severely underperformed in 5 of them, which was the result I expected with the handicap I was giving myself. In two of the tournaments, I suspect the student in question was using engine assistance, although even this is really just speculation on my part as I did not catch him cheating until much later.
If one wants to claim that involving anyone else in a tournament is cheating, under that definition, I cheated. However, the definition of cheating is - “to act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage.” In my view, if you’re giving yourself a disadvantage as I believed I was doing, this is not cheating.
My statements on the events around 2017 may seem vague or hard to believe and that is a symptom of a comment on the Vice article about the event. In the emails, I explained the exact circumstances under which I began to suspect that the student was using engine help and offered to give the name of this student so their account on chess.com could be placed under higher scrutiny as I suspected this student’s cheating wasn’t limited to my classroom.
In the article, the details are censored as the editors of the article decided the information could lead to the student’s identity being made public. I am trying to keep this in mind when discussing the events as I don’t want to have a hand in revealing this person’s identity to the public.
I do want to paint a clearer picture of how exactly these classes looked as maybe my description of a “democratic process” created more questions than answers.
During the games, I would mostly make my own moves and comment on them out loud as many have pointed out that the time controls in a blitz tournament don’t really allow for a fully crowdsourced game. At critical junctures that I felt could be instructive, I would think out loud 2 or 3 Ideas and poll the class on what they felt was best, the class only had a few seconds to yell out their ideas. When the cheating student was involved, the likelihood that the best move would be chosen was far higher as one of the votes would be a confident and persuasive vote for the best engine move. Between playing, commenting, and teaching the game I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to analyze the relative strength of these moves compared to the student’s own ratings. The idea that one of my students was using engine assistance was the furthest thing from my mind.
Considering that in most of the tournaments I consistently underperformed. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong, as I felt that the handicap of involving students in my play was only making any rare positive result more impressive to me. On the one occasion when I won a tournament during a class, I simply thought I was having an especially good day, and when I was banned during the April 2017 tournament, I thought it was a mistake.
As I explained above I really cannot get deep into the full details of how and when I caught the student cheating in class, but I was shocked when I did. I realized that although in most of the cases where I involved my class in titled Tuesday events I was playing at a disadvantage, in 2 of them I was playing with an unfair advantage and chess.com’s banning of my account was justified. I reached out at this point to Danny Rensch with my full account and made an attempt to return the prize money for the January tournament that I believed I did not deserve. To those who doubt this story, please think about the timeline. My account was banned in April, what other reason could I have for admitting to wrongdoing only in August?
Why a money tournament?
Title Tuesday coincided with these classes, If I wanted to show my students live high-level play during the class this was the only way to do it. This was not about trying to win prize money. This was something we would do on rare occasions and not the primary focus of the lessons.
Why not ask the students to corroborate my story?
Most of them are still minors and it would be ridiculous to ask them to step forward in my defense.
Unequivocally stating that I did not cheat:
A number of comments asked me to unequivocally state that I did not cheat.
I must add the equivocation of the events surrounding my 2017 play.
If you take the stance that my involving weaker players at what I believed to be my disadvantage was cheating, then I cheated on 7 occasions.
If you take the stance that only when engine assistance was given was I cheating, then I cheated twice.
If you take the stance that If I had no reason to suspect that I had an advantage then I didn’t cheat, then I never cheated.
With that equivocation out of the way, In my 40+ year career in chess. With the sole exception outlined above, I never cheated in online or over-the-board play.
2020:
As many have pointed out, I only took 7 minutes to respond to chess.com and give a false admission of guilt. To many, this is somehow suspicious although my reasoning was given in my initial post I would like to address it again here.
I was very busy during this period and had few rare opportunities to sit down in peace and play in a Titled Tuesday event. A year earlier my account was improperly flagged and reinstated, a few months earlier technical difficulties with chess.com’s side had wasted hours of my time in a tournament that I wouldn’t be able to complete. Getting falsely flagged for cheating again was the last straw and in a sense, I “took my ball and went home.”
I didn’t want to spend the energy or time fighting with chess.com’s all-knowing algorithm, I didn’t want to participate in any more Titled Tuesday events and since they claimed it was all confidential anyway, I didn’t see the harm in giving a false admission to have access to a 3rd account with which I could simply play for fun and at my leisure.
It doesn’t take more than 7 minutes to make a decision like this. I have given my analysis of these games. If anyone cares to look through them, they’ll find that if anything, my play during this event was too human.
Hikaru:
Throughout the events surrounding the Hans-Magnus affair although I felt that I needed to take some time and reflect on how exactly I should make my initial statement, I have been following the commentary closely.
Hikaru and I have had multiple run-ins throughout our respective careers and I always felt some animosity from him. Although my dealings with Sunil were mostly cordial and respectful I did take his comments about me made to Mark Kurzman somewhat personally.
If I am wrong in claiming that Hikaru has an interest in his step-father’s business I am willing to admit and apologize for the insinuation, it does, however, rub me the wrong way the apparent glee Hikaru has for dragging my name through the mud. This morning when I was putting together the post on Reddit, I was similarly a bit too gleeful in attempting the same to him.
I don’t particularly like Hikaru, but much like how Magnus should not have brought my name into this affair, I should not have brought Hikaru's name into it. My issues with Sunil and my issues with Hikaru are separate and not really part of this larger scandal.