Kramnik Has Been Talking About Cheating for Years. Now Comes the Math.

Vladimir Kramnik — World Champion 2000–2007, the man who took the title off Garry Kasparov — has spent the past several years as online chess's most persistent voice on the subject of cheating. He has named names. He has picked fights with platforms and players. What he had not, until now, done is share the methodology that he is developing.

Today, World Chess runs Part One of Kramnik's "Fair Play Detection," the conceptial core of an argument he has so far made mostly in fragments: that detecting computer assistance is fundamentally a benchmarking problem, that the only honest reference set for short time controls is over-the-board play under supervision, and that no 2400-rated player sustains a 2700 performance across forty consecutive games without help. Part Two is on the way.

Kramnik worked with World Chess on fine-tuning the fair-play system on worldchess.com. "Vladimir helped our team on tuning the fair-play system that runs on worldchess.com, and his expertise was phenomenal," said Ilya Merenzon, CEO of World Chess. "There are very few people who combine his level of chess understanding with a real appetite for the math underneath it. We're glad to be publishing his paper."

Read Part One of Vladimir Kramnik's "Fair Play Detection"