Kramnik has a point

[BrendanJNorman]

The pre-moves are impressive, but so is something else: look how relaxed Hikaru looks! I'm nowhere near that relaxed when I'm playing at "game in 10 minutes" time.

Not that impressive imo.

Nakamura has only *ever* played chess and was already playing "kindergarten championships" at 5 years old, coached by his FM stepfather.

He has now had decades of coaching, training, tournament experience, computer analysis and one of the best learning environments on the planet (he was already playing in the Marshall Chess Club at age 10).

Chess is similar to languages in that if you gain fluency at a younger age, you will not have an "accent" - you will flow in and out of this language like a native speaker.

This is Naka's current chess situation.

31 years of dedication (he's now 36 years old) while still being relatively young - this makes him look very impressive to those who have only put in a portion of the time and effort.



Reminds me of the piano maestro who was once having her play admired by an onlooker.

When she finished the onlooker said "OMG I would do ANYTHING to play like you do".

To which the maestro responded "No you wouldn't."

The maestro was right.

[JohnWoe]

Becoming fluent in chess when you start as early as possible. I don't work on chess at all.
I should play longer games. But I don't have time.
I usually play 3+0 on lunch break on my phone. And still hold 2100+ Blitz lichess rating quite easily. Even win most of the time scrambles.

But all of a sudden I shot from 2100 bullet to 2350 in lichess overnight. Maybe rating inflation. Maybe I got better.
I just perfected tactics and just one stupid boring opening system. And being really fast was all it needed.

In 1+0 it's much better to practice 1 opening 10000 times than know 10000 openings.
KIA is kinda good bullet opening, you are already castled, your rooks are connected, your king has luft. You are looking to launch king side attack ... Even in Blitz it works very well.

[towforce]

The pre-moves are impressive, but so is something else: look how relaxed Hikaru looks! I'm nowhere near that relaxed when I'm playing at "game in 10 minutes" time.

Not that impressive imo.

Nakamura has only *ever* played chess and was already playing "kindergarten championships" at 5 years old, coached by his FM stepfather.

He has now had decades of coaching, training, tournament experience, computer analysis and one of the best learning environments on the planet (he was already playing in the Marshall Chess Club at age 10).

Chess is similar to languages in that if you gain fluency at a younger age, you will not have an "accent" - you will flow in and out of this language like a native speaker.

This is Naka's current chess situation.

31 years of dedication (he's now 36 years old) while still being relatively young - this makes him look very impressive to those who have only put in a portion of the time and effort.



Reminds me of the piano maestro who was once having her play admired by an onlooker.

When she finished the onlooker said "OMG I would do ANYTHING to play like you do".

To which the maestro responded "No you wouldn't."

The maestro was right.

Very good point.

I remember when Karpov would play in world championships (classical time control), he would lose a lot of weight, and this was likely due to stress. You seem to be telling me that high level chess at very short time controls is basically reflexive response.

[BrendanJNorman]

The pre-moves are impressive, but so is something else: look how relaxed Hikaru looks! I'm nowhere near that relaxed when I'm playing at "game in 10 minutes" time.

Not that impressive imo.

Nakamura has only *ever* played chess and was already playing "kindergarten championships" at 5 years old, coached by his FM stepfather.

He has now had decades of coaching, training, tournament experience, computer analysis and one of the best learning environments on the planet (he was already playing in the Marshall Chess Club at age 10).

Chess is similar to languages in that if you gain fluency at a younger age, you will not have an "accent" - you will flow in and out of this language like a native speaker.

This is Naka's current chess situation.

31 years of dedication (he's now 36 years old) while still being relatively young - this makes him look very impressive to those who have only put in a portion of the time and effort.



Reminds me of the piano maestro who was once having her play admired by an onlooker.

When she finished the onlooker said "OMG I would do ANYTHING to play like you do".

To which the maestro responded "No you wouldn't."

The maestro was right.

Very good point.

I remember when Karpov would play in world championships (classical time control), he would lose a lot of weight, and this was likely due to stress. You seem to be telling me that high level chess at very short time controls is basically reflexive response.

Yup. High level human chess at fast time controls is 99% intuition built up by learning thousands of chess patterns over years of study.

The last 1% is pausing for a sec as a position becomes tactical to quickly check/calculate whether something "works", or to calculate a response when faced with an unpleasant surprise from your opponent.

In CC terms, humans are 99% NN eval with a very slow search and tons of pruning.

[BrendanJNorman]

Becoming fluent in chess when you start as early as possible. I don't work on chess at all.
I should play longer games. But I don't have time.
I usually play 3+0 on lunch break on my phone. And still hold 2100+ Blitz lichess rating quite easily. Even win most of the time scrambles.

But all of a sudden I shot from 2100 bullet to 2350 in lichess overnight. Maybe rating inflation. Maybe I got better.
I just perfected tactics and just one stupid boring opening system. And being really fast was all it needed.

In 1+0 it's much better to practice 1 opening 10000 times than know 10000 openings.
KIA is kinda good bullet opening, you are already castled, your rooks are connected, your king has luft. You are looking to launch king side attack ... Even in Blitz it works very well.

Definitely. It makes sense that your rating climbed as you gained experience in the KIA/KID setups, familiarity with the plans and associated patterns.

Works great for bullet (is probably deadly in 1+0!), but playing like this in standard make you a sitting duck for anyone who does decent prep.

I once prepared one of my students for a "KIA vs everything" player and they did quite well. Got the exact setup we wanted and ended up winning.

Was years ago, so I can't remember the black setup we went for, but it was more psychological than chess.

A setup that makes the position as far from KIA positions as possible, forcing the opponent to "play chess" and solve problems as early as possible.

[BeyondCritics]

My take on this.
For any one with common sense let us simple inspect what chess.com has written, copied from [1]:

In the case of the recent accusations against Hikaru Nakamura by Vladimir Kramnik, we can say that we have generated nearly 2,000 individual reports on Hikaru’s games in our Fair Play system and have found no incidents of cheating. As to the allegations about Hikaru’s incredible performance streaks (including winning 45.5 games out of 46), we have also looked at the statistics behind this. Our team has done the math and various simulations of streaks for a player like Hikaru who has played more than 50,000 games. We have found that not only is a 45 game winning streak possible, it is in fact likely given the number of games played. We have confirmed these results with external statisticians, including a professor of statistics at a top-10 university.

Note the last sentence. And their conclusion:

With the deepest respect for former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik, in our opinion, his accusations lack statistical merit.

This should also our conclusion, end of discussion.
But of course Kramnik is not stopped by this, he simply sweeps anything away with some rhetoric trick [2], or maybe he even believes his own nonsense. And later he simply repeats his accusations [3], this time all is neatly made up in a spreadsheet, garnered together with some very impressive low probabilites at the right side.
The hallmark of a critical mind is, that he first and foremost admists having no clue about anything. And then he can start to improve on that. And little be little he will be smarter and smarter and after some time he can tell others but not before.

[1] https://www.chess.com/blog/CHESScom/reg ... ccusations
[2] https://www.chess.com/member/vladimirkramnik
[3]

[swami]

Fast chess is just about speed. I'm 2300+ on bullet on lichess fairly easily. All I do is play KIA + KID super duper fast and win 90% of games in time. Ofc that's total BS. I'm actually 2100+ in 3+0 while playing on my phone. I don't need a gaming mouse. 3+0 is slightly more chess than 1+0.

The trick in fast chess 1+0 is to play the same opening all the time.
You are familiar with setups but your opponent isn't. After the opening you've got a 15s time advantage.
In 1min chess that's lethal. Just move fast and think later.

It may work for first few games, but after repeated games with same opponent you will realise that this opening setup isn't sufficient and you need to go beyond that. In the end, it's how adept and quick you are at recognising the working tactics, strategy, sacrifices and so on that matter.

[swami]

The pre-moves are impressive, but so is something else: look how relaxed Hikaru looks! I'm nowhere near that relaxed when I'm playing at "game in 10 minutes" time.

Not that impressive imo.

Nakamura has only *ever* played chess and was already playing "kindergarten championships" at 5 years old, coached by his FM stepfather.

He has now had decades of coaching, training, tournament experience, computer analysis and one of the best learning environments on the planet (he was already playing in the Marshall Chess Club at age 10).

Chess is similar to languages in that if you gain fluency at a younger age, you will not have an "accent" - you will flow in and out of this language like a native speaker.

This is Naka's current chess situation.

31 years of dedication (he's now 36 years old) while still being relatively young - this makes him look very impressive to those who have only put in a portion of the time and effort.



Reminds me of the piano maestro who was once having her play admired by an onlooker.

When she finished the onlooker said "OMG I would do ANYTHING to play like you do".

To which the maestro responded "No you wouldn't."

The maestro was right.

Very good point.

I remember when Karpov would play in world championships (classical time control), he would lose a lot of weight, and this was likely due to stress. You seem to be telling me that high level chess at very short time controls is basically reflexive response.

Yup. High level human chess at fast time controls is 99% intuition built up by learning thousands of chess patterns over years of study.

The last 1% is pausing for a sec as a position becomes tactical to quickly check/calculate whether something "works", or to calculate a response when faced with an unpleasant surprise from your opponent.

In CC terms, humans are 99% NN eval with a very slow search and tons of pruning.

Exactly.

Faster, Smarter, Better.

[CornfedForever]

This should also our conclusion, end of discussion.
But of course Kramnik is not stopped by this, he simply sweeps anything away with some rhetoric trick [2], or maybe he even believes his own nonsense. And later he simply repeats his accusations [3], this time all is neatly made up in a spreadsheet, garnered together with some very impressive low probabilites at the right side.

Agreed. He also changes his targets, essentially naming them outloud. Notably Martinez...and now he's gone to Nihal Sarin.

[Peter Berger]

But of course Kramnik is not stopped by this, he simply sweeps anything away with some rhetoric trick [2], or maybe he even believes his own nonsense. And later he simply repeats his accusations [3], this time all is neatly made up in a spreadsheet, garnered together with some very impressive low probabilites at the right side.
The hallmark of a critical mind is, that he first and foremost admists having no clue about anything. And then he can start to improve on that. And little be little he will be smarter and smarter and after some time he can tell others but not before.

You have a point here.
Kramnik certainly believes what you call "his own nonsense" though. Else his actions would make zero sense.
Btw: the problem with Hikaru's streaks is not that they exist, but their frequency.