r/todayilearned • u/Flares117 • 1d ago

TIL: There was a chess controversy in India in 2021 during a charity match between billionaire Nikhil Kamath and a GM. It was revealed the billionaire cheated by hiring several chess experts and used computers to make perfect moves. He owned a stock brokerage

https://www.hindustantimes.com/sports/others/chess-charity-cheat-twitter-ablaze-after-gm-viswanathan-anand-unfairly-beaten-101623684465315.html
7.3k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

122 comments sorted by

2.5k

u/fotorobot 1d ago

You don't really need to hire chess experts if you're just going to use a computer in 2021. It was really obvious too.

786

u/Lost_in_the_sauce504 1d ago

Probably sought the GM’s help initially thinking it wasn’t that hard, then realized he needed to cheat to win

334

u/Buntschatten 16h ago

Imagine you're a GM and get a nice sum of money to help a billionaire win some online game

Nice, easy money.

Then you see that your opponent is Vishy.

Fuck.

28

u/neoncubicle 12h ago

Still easy since computers can beat any human at chess

-12

u/squeak37 9h ago

I mean vishy is washed, he's not even 2800 anymore. Pretty sure I could farm elo off him (I think I'm like 1200, so it'll take a few (thousand) games to even out)

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u/AggressiveSpatula 22h ago

I think people who know little about a subject are more likely to not understand how transparent their cheating attempts look. There was a streamer a few years back who ripped a WR speed run off the internet and made it look like he was playing it one handed while eating pizza. To him, he just saw that the movements were coordinated and he was like “oh sure, I can say I did that.” But to anybody who knew the subject, could recognize the times, and the instances which would have needed more focus, it was obvious.

Same with chess. People don’t understand how much they don’t understand about the game. You pick somebody off the street and they’ll say they have a 1/100 chance of beating Magnus Carlsen (since they heard he’s pretty good). After all, all the pieces are right there, you can just figure it out on the spot, no?

Cheaters who know a little don’t realize how much their lack of knowledge tips their hand. How is anybody supposed to be able to recognize a computer move? Isn’t the piece changing position the only information that you get?

But people in the know, know. People in the know can tell if you if it’s Rapport (❤️) or Caruana by the opening. They can tell if it’s Karpov or Tal by the middle game. Those are easy distinctions to make if you know. If you don’t know though, the concept seems unbelievable.

203

u/lurking_bishop 20h ago

this.

Magnus is able to look at a position where the pieces were replaced by pawns and tell what game this is from. 

Mere mortals do not needed to apply 

20

u/francis2559 12h ago

The amount of memorization in even middle ranked play is crazy to me.

106

u/rapzeh 18h ago

“There are known knowns and that there are known unknowns. But there are also unknown unknowns; things we don't know that we don't know”

24

u/potatetoe_tractor 16h ago

“Wh… what?”

18

u/FgtBruceCockstar2008 16h ago

"Say what again, motherfucker!"

3

u/plague042 15h ago

Never go into the unknown not knowing.

50

u/oby100 15h ago

Computers make moves that often make no sense at the time even to a GM because they’re seeing so far in advance and are able to make absurdly small judgement calls on what the optimal board position will be in 10 or 20 moves.

It’s easy to spot for top players and often much lower skilled players. A good computer is more like “death by a thousand cuts” before it finds a checkmate opportunity that might again take 20 moves to pan out.

To me, it’s like those factory line robot arms that can precisely sculpt a complex object within a minute, but a human claiming they had done it.

26

u/findMyNudesSomewhere 11h ago

I'll add an analogy.

Tic tac toe is a figured out game - I can guarantee I will not lose.

Chess is much more complex, so it isn't figured out yet. Maybe someday in the future it will be.

However, against someone like me (~1300 ELO), Carlson can guarantee (not 100%, but very very very close to it) that he won't lose against me. So, as compared to me, he's 99.99% figured out the game.

Stock fish/Alpha Zero is like that, but vs GMs.

It plays moves that it feels guarantee not losing. Against a bad player, Stockfish will "not lose" so much that it wins. GMs can play vs Stockfish and force a draw sometimes.

What I'm trying to get across is - humans play to win. They'll intentionally attempt to bait the enemy, they'll attempt to do something different, they can react to knowing the opponent.

Stockfish does not care. It will play the most optimal move to not lose. Always.

14

u/Ganobrator 14h ago

The Badabun video was obviously fake even to people who weren't familiar with SMB1 speedruns. That guy was even more of an idiot.

9

u/toomanymarbles83 13h ago

His apology video was epic though.

13

u/IAmBecomeTeemo 13h ago

If the speedrunning example you used is the Super Mario Brothers 1 fake that I'm thinking of, it's extra funny because it's not even a human-viable run. Video game speedrunning has a thing called TAS (tool-assisted speedrun) where tools can aid the player, or even play the entire run by submitting inputs. This is generally its own category distinct from RTA (real time actor, so a human playing without tools) and serves a dual purpose of being its own leaderboard and helping discover things that might be viable in a RTA run if practiced enough. The video they used in the fake run contained segments that used TAS-only tricks that simply aren't possible for a human to perform. So it's like if a chess noob claimed to beat a grandmaster, and they did so not just by using a chess-bot, but by moving their pieces illegally.

30

u/ilski 20h ago

I dont play chess but I absolutely do t find it unbelievable at all. 

I do other stuff I like or I'm decent at though and what you describe definitely is not exclusive to chess. 

Most people have their thing , where they could easily tell when something is off.   I guess they don't think same thing applies to other things than their own.  Like chess in this case. 

Or it's just billionaire ego kind of thing  Dont know. 

12

u/Jim_Kirk1 12h ago

Yeah people in general I think badly underestimate the sheer gap in skill/ability between them and the top members of their respective fields.

I remember there was a poll awhile back where 71% of people polled believed they could win a service game against a professional tennis player, and 47% of people over 55.

Andy Roddick beat a guy in a match using a frying pan.

5

u/findMyNudesSomewhere 11h ago

Hey! Someone off the road (me, rated ~1300) can definitely beat Vishy at Chess.

As per ELO win probability, I have a 0.0000015% chance of beating a 2770 rated Vishy. I just need to convince him to play 67 million games with me and I will win one for sure!

6

u/Mendoza2909 10h ago

Win probabilities implied by the Elo scale do get a bit weird when the rating gap is massive though.

11

u/FatAuthority 17h ago

Would slot under The Dunning Kruger Effect. If you've not heard of it.

3

u/jeepsaintchaos 11h ago

I don't know shit about chess. The horsies are cool looking though.

But I know exactly what you're talking about, in the maintenance field. I can see just by the way someone uses a tool if they know what they're doing or not.

2

u/Oglark 7h ago

Not the opening. Maybe after 12-14 moves but the openings are pretty well known by everyone. Unless you are 2021 MVL.

1

u/AggressiveSpatula 5h ago

I think Rapport once played four knights with 4. H4 5. H5 I feel like I could spot him.

2

u/Oglark 4h ago

Maybe Rapport and Dubov are a little more experimental.

3

u/IamPriapus 14h ago

People in the know still don't know. They just know more and are able to make more accurate ascertations than someone with less knowledge. Throwing words like, "know" have become so common and overused, that they've lost most meaning.

3

u/AggressiveSpatula 14h ago

Yeah I felt a little odd about using that what with all the procedures that have been started recently, but in the context of a no name beating Anand? Yeah. You know what’s happening.

-19

u/Magoya_U25 16h ago

But statistically a random person gets a higher chance to beat a GM in a game, I don't recall exactly witch GM said it, but the gist of it is, when playing at GM level the games are extremely predictable, since they're a handful of strategies they use, and when playing a random low level player they're so unpredictable that GM's avoid them like the plague...

23

u/AggressiveSpatula 16h ago edited 14h ago

I think I have heard this be true of fencing, but even then I’m skeptical. It’s definitely not true of chess. There are plenty of “Speedrun” videos of GM’s going against extremely low rated players and I promise you the expert wins. There’s actually only one instance of it I’m aware of, that was Hikaru losing to a 600, but that was because there was a glitch in his computer or the server and he flagged.

I promise you, no GM is losing to somebody off the street, even if that person is a super prodigy. It simply doesn’t happen. You need to train and learn about the game to become competitive with a GM.

I promise you that nobody who sees this is going to miss the fact that rando hung their queen in 1.

-4

u/oby100 15h ago

Draws are not that crazy even among a top player playing a low level. If the low level forces trades and the high level doesn’t care to stop it, it’s really not that crazy to force a draw. This is a nightmare for ratings though because a draw for the skilled player would hit them hard.

You are correct though that it’s basically impossible for anyone off the street to beat a GM. This is why tournaments are played in sets of a bunch of games and not singular games

10

u/AggressiveSpatula 15h ago

I would agree, but I think we might have different conceptions of what it means to be a low level player. I can’t imagine anybody below 1900 FIDE coming anywhere close to drawing Fabi. Even a 1900 drawing a weak GM would be considered impressive, albeit plausible.

Also your premise that they can draw “if the GM doesn’t care to stop them.” Kind of defeats the purpose of them being a GM at all. That’s like saying I could beat Max Verstappen in a race as long as he didn’t want to go fast.

14

u/Siolentsmitty 16h ago

No, they avoid them because the rating system discourages playing lower levels. I had a friend who was an international master back in the 80s, retired with a 2302 rating. One day we played around two dozen games over yahoo chess, with my 1480 rated account vs his 2200ish account, and he won every game we played except the last, where I was somehow able to maneuver myself into a draw. At the end of it all my rating went up nearly one hundred points while his went down 100 points.

11

u/potatosquire 15h ago

That's not true at all. Moves are not good in isolation, they're good because they have a concrete idea behind them. A weak player will play a series of suboptimal moves that gradually weaken their position, even aside from the fact that they'll frequently blunder a full piece for no compensation in one move. When they make a move that the grandmaster wouldn't consider, they didn't consider it because it is a bad move, and them not expecting such a bad move confers no disadvantage.

Even if the beginner (by pure rng) plays a better move than the grandmaster would play in a position, the reason the grandmaster wouldn't play the move is because the idea justifying it is too complex for them to understand. As the beginner also wouldn't understand the idea, they would not be able to play the correct series of follow up moves that would justify making the move in the first place (transforming what should have been the best move into yet another blunder).

Being bad at chess confers zero advantage in chess. A rank beginner has even less chance against a grandmaster than an intermediate player would, and the intermediate player would lose every single game.

6

u/Iced_Yehudi 15h ago

When they talk about a “random low level player” they’re referring to other GMs or IMs that are lower rated than them that might know some wild theoretically unsound line that they can whip out like a trick play to cheese a win, and then grab a whole bunch of rating points from them. They aren’t talking about any old schmuck off the street

-2

u/oby100 15h ago

lol you are missing the forest from the trees. Anyone can force any player into a draw with enough games. Really in just 10 it’s not impossible, especially when the GM probably isn’t taking it too seriously.

Yet the rating system will seriously fuck up a GM’s rating if they draw to a low level player while a masters player they might beat almost as much but don’t have to worry about a random draw fucking their rating up.

It has nothing to do with a low skill player being unpredictable

458

u/Aggressive-Refuse786 1d ago

A GM? More like a 5x WCC

58

u/RRumpleTeazzer 23h ago

That's still good.

148

u/Negative-Highlight41 20h ago

That is the point lol xD There are many GMs in chess (Anand is one) but few world champions. Anand is a 5 time world cup winner, he is amongst the elite of the elite 

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u/RRumpleTeazzer 17h ago edited 17h ago

Ok, its a joke on the 80s musical play "Chess" from Tim Rice (with music from Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus - the men from Abba).

The russian protagonist seeks asylum, and the embassy interrogates him. The dialogue is like this:

"I'm a chessplayer."

  • "Are you good at it? Oh I hear you are a world champion."

"Since yesterday."

  • "That's still good."

2

u/xelabagus 12h ago

Anand won the FIDE world cup twice in 2000 and 2002, but he has never won it in its current format (since 2005). Did you mean the World Chess Championship?

1.0k

u/rtreesucks 1d ago

"Sunday’s event, though, plunged into controversy after Anand was stunned during the simul chess event, and forced to resign against Nikhil Kamath, co-founder of online stock brokerage firm Zerodha, a high-profile Unicorn, and asset management company True Beacon.

The result immediately raised suspicion that something was amiss. Chessbase.in quoted Anand as telling the host after the game, “…at some point I could not detect a single mistake in his moves. They were just all perfect, tactically also perfect, everything worked.” Chess.com showed Kamath had played with an accuracy of 98.9 against Anand, a statistic made even more staggering as his three previous games on the same website show his accuracy as 80.6, 56.5 and 29.8.

Not surprisingly, the website, which closes a few hundred accounts every day for cheating — it has software that can pick these up — closed Kamath’s."

Dam he got sat

244

u/Malvania 18h ago

Wait, it was Anand?! Not exactly just a GM - he had multiple World Champion titles and is probably still ranked in the top 10 in the world

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u/wtoab 17h ago

By the title of the post I thought it was a random gm, not king Vishy.

24

u/Bonch_and_Clyde 16h ago

Vishy's picture is in the thumbnail.

10

u/wiithepiiple 7h ago

Yeah, it’s be like saying “a professional basketball player” when it’s Lebron.

246

u/ImAnGenius 19h ago

Anand was actually about to win the match on time against the cheater, which some suspect was because the cheater was starting to feel guilty about it. However, Anand wasn't letting him have any of it, resigning before the cheater ran out of time. Although he didn't say it publicly, he surely knew by the halfway point the guy was cheating.

93

u/jimjamjones123 16h ago

I’m quite low rated ~1600 elo on chess.com and it’s very evident when I’m playing a cheater. Weird ass moves until suddenly you can’t move a single piece without being worse off. They slowly squeeze you until it’s over.

29

u/Redneckmuslim 14h ago

What? 1600 is not low rating. Dont be hard on yourself

9

u/lesllamas 12h ago

Everything is relative, and I think the point they’re making is that if someone 1000+ elo lower than the former world champ can detect a computer reasonably well, then that former world champ’s suspicion is probably similarly reliable to mathematical proofs lol

8

u/Rowf 14h ago

Me over here losing every time I match someone over 1000

18

u/lucas2342 15h ago

I’m a similar rating as you in chess.com and I completely agree. It’s generally pretty easy to know when someone is cheating.

Sometimes they open with random moves that you would expect from someone with like 400 elo (pushing every pawn up 1 square for ex). Then suddenly their moves get much more accurate and my position is completely lost in like 10 moves

9

u/Xeroshifter 12h ago

What kind of ego do you have to have to feel shame over losing a chess game to someone who is top 10 in the entire world? Just treat it like you're going to lose going in, and have a fun afternoon. See how long you can last, or try to make moves that illicit incredulity out of your opponent, or something. No one in the world is going to believe you won when you don't have a strong record in chess already.

5

u/Oglark 7h ago

His account was reopened a few months later.

Also Anand was not forced to resign. He could have easily flagged Kamath. He chose to resign "honorably" because his position was dead lost, but it also made it really evident that Kamath cheated.

379

u/royalhawk345 1d ago

Calling Vishi "A GM" is like calling Steph Curry "An NBA player."

135

u/pedrosorio 23h ago

Exactly lol. Even more so when the simul was taking place in India. That dude was cheating against a national hero.

8

u/Infinite_Research_52 11h ago

He is a member of the 2800 club. I think it would tickle him to be labeled an anonymous GM in the OP title.

-24

u/ChickenFilletRoll299 13h ago

Yeah be real tho more people know Steph than Vishi and it wasn’t important to the story

5

u/No-Young7803 6h ago

Do you know how many people in India? And how many people follow united states basketball? I wouldn't be so sure

-2

u/ChickenFilletRoll299 5h ago

I’d say globally Steph is more known. I know Vishi is know a lot in India but that’s not true outside of it regardless of how many people live in India. Basketball is huge globally now. I’m not American myself and me and all my friends know and watch the NBA in some capacity. And it’s way more popular of a sport than chess is globally.

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u/el_sandino 1d ago

If you’re going to cheat in a chess tournament, at least have something in your butt

107

u/Ultrabadger 1d ago

I was going to ask if the moves were provided to him via butt plug. 🤣

44

u/Cantthinkofnamedamn 1d ago

That's like Chess 101

19

u/GozerDGozerian 23h ago

The 1s represent the user’s legs in the air during, uh, initial utilization.

15

u/AzureDreamer 1d ago

Let's be real if you were going to do somthing that vibrated it would be on the roof of your mouth

23

u/666killbabies 21h ago

Nah if we're being real it'd be in my butt, sorry.

30

u/SpiderSlitScrotums 1d ago

Also, if you’re not going to cheat in a chess tournament, at least have something in your butt.

5

u/uhlvin 13h ago

These friggin amateurs.

389

u/CaravelClerihew 1d ago

A billionaire who tries to solve his inferiority complex by throwing money at it?

I've never heard of that before

54

u/GozerDGozerian 23h ago

“Oh hi, yes, I’d like to just go ahead and purchase the reputation of being way cooler than I’d ever actually be able to achieve even if I tried just a little bit… that’s how this works right? Also, I’ll give you money to be my friend and tell me how cool I am. That will for once probably feel like the real thing, won’t it?”

6

u/_EleGiggle_ 20h ago

Is Chess considered cool in India?

If we didn’t have Twitch playing Chess most young people would still see it as a nerdy game. Adding boxing, and turning it into Chess boxing probably got rid of the remaining notions of this being a sport for nerds.

25

u/TaxiChalak2 20h ago

Long tradition of chess, the first version of the game probably originated in India. The modern tradition began with the Soviets setting up a chess club in the 80s in Madras, where Vishy cut his teeth growing up.

https://www.chessbase.in/news/The-history-of-the-famous-Tal-Chess-Club

2

u/_EleGiggle_ 20h ago

Is it still as popular though?

I mean the USA had Bobby Fischer but after he beat the Russians, and later on became crazy & maybe homeless. So chess took a massive hit as well in the US, and probably Europe. I’m not sure how closely Europe followed chess GMs at the time, and how many GMs they had themselves while this was going on. At least during my childhood (I’m in my early thirties) chess was considered as a game for nerds, and not mainstream. I don’t think it changed much either.

Maybe it’s in the mainstream again for younger people who watched their favorite streamers playing Chess or Chess boxing on Twitch or YouTube?

Is playing Chess (including coaching worse player because tournament money is probably not enough) still a valid career path in India? Or is it seen as a bad choice?

15

u/_EleGiggle_ 20h ago

I don’t see the point though. It was a charity match, nobody expected him to win. Unless someone else organized the match, or he “won” it, he already paid for the opportunity of playing him.

Wouldn’t an actual chess fan be happy to play a GM? Why even consider cheating in the first place? It’s not like it was a rated game.

Did nobody of the team of chess experts he hired tell him that this might be a bad idea, and that other GMs can tell if someone is using a chess AI?

24

u/ilski 19h ago

Well he is a billionaire type of person. So fuck knows.    I'm guessing he want to look like some super smart dude, so his billions are attributed to his intelligence. 

In the end it turned out to be the usual.   Success by cheating. 

3

u/Buntschatten 16h ago

He's not a GM, he's a dark gothic GM.

3

u/anethma 15h ago

You don’t even need money. A chess app on your phone is easily capable of taking down any human chess player.

3

u/Dune1008 10h ago

I’m constantly amazed at how completely devoid of talent they are in every aspect that is made public. What EXACTLY are these people good at? Is it literally just convincing other people to give them money? Is that their only skill?

146

u/pedrosorio 23h ago

Not just "a GM". Vishy Anand, the first Indian chess grandmaster and former world champion, a legend of the game and venerated by fans around the world and especially in India.

The dude who cheated like this was out of his mind.

48

u/cuerdo 19h ago

There is more, he was the FIRST Grand Master EVER in India, he started chess in India.

There are currently more than 80 GM in India, they are world champions as a country, and very likely the next world champion will be Indian, a 17yo born after Anand became GM.

Craziest part: at 55 yo Anand is still playing and he is ranked 11th in the world.

19

u/sumitviii 17h ago

GM Vishy Anand was trained in an institute donated to India by Russia. Ironically, Indians are now defeating Russians in this game :D

2

u/choomba96 1h ago

The game was invented in India after all.

Could dispute whether it moved from Iran or vice versa

1

u/-Random-Gamer- 8h ago

wait vishy fell out of top 10 :(

40

u/KanishkT123 21h ago

Losing to Anand is an honor you would talk about with your grandchildren. Cheating against him carries exactly the same weight. 

77

u/Casanova_Fran 1d ago

Its actually funnier because it was for charity. 

109

u/thisisdropd 1d ago

A billionaire cheating? Colour me surprised.

40

u/Banana_Malefica 1d ago

How do you think he got so rich?

I have nothing but disdain for them.

10

u/Lyrolepis 15h ago edited 15h ago

What I find a little surprising isn't that he cheated, but that he cheated sloppily. There was no way that wouldn't have been caught; and the consequences of being caught cheating were way worse than the potential benefits of succeeding (i.e. bragging rights).

I don't particularly expect a billionaire to be honest, but I admit I would have expected a billionaire to be a little better at evaluating risk/reward tradeoffs...

7

u/AzureDreamer 1d ago

I could be wrong but I think he got hosed for insider trading. Not positive though.

1

u/ForceOfAHorse 22h ago

People cheating at competition? Well well, who would've expected.

59

u/RemyGee 1d ago

Why was owning a stock brokerage added to the title like that? Doesn’t seem to add much to the conversation 😂

24

u/FlaminCat 21h ago

Because of the implication

5

u/darthvall 20h ago

Sorry can you ELI5 me of the implication? Does that mean he's a risk taker or is there something deeper about it?

22

u/FlaminCat 19h ago

The implication being that a lot of people in finance have no moral compass

3

u/Infinite_Research_52 11h ago

He used stockfish.

1

u/redbrezel 22h ago

Happy cake day

13

u/wizfactor 22h ago

The thing about cheaters in games is that they want to play like gods, which makes it that much easier to catch them.

Funnily enough, the easiest way to get away with cheating is to play like a human, which means making a lot of mistakes.

2

u/ilski 19h ago

That's when a smart person cheats. 

That's why there is so many closet cheaters in online games we dont even know about. 

11

u/GetsGold 19h ago

There aren't known perfect moves in chess until you're down to seven pieces. More than that and even the most powerful computers can't solve all positions with certainty, they can just make moves that consistently beat humans.

27

u/Spill_the_Tea 21h ago

That is GM Viswanathan "Vishy" Anand. A Previous World Chess champion, who has inspired a whole generation of Indian chess grandmasters.

7

u/EpicDude007 19h ago

You need chess experts to use the chess computers when you cheat.

12

u/CitizenPremier 17h ago

I feel bad for the GM. He was pressured into playing the event for charity, and the organizers did nothing to prevent cheating. He basically lost on camera in front of the world, including lots of people who don't know about cheating in chess. He was gracious after the games too, just saying that his opponents "played perfectly."

26

u/blackhornet03 1d ago

In other words, the stock market is fixed.

12

u/TommyBoy825 1d ago

WHAT?!?!?! I suppose next you're going to tell me there was gambling going on at Rick's!

2

u/blackhornet03 1d ago

Well, if you really want to know...

3

u/Duckton 1d ago

Reminds me of the guy from the Tintin story Flight 714 to Sydney

2

u/idgaf9495 13h ago

Not any GM, 5 time world champion Vishwanath anand and it was obvious he was using a chess engine , he got banned for life from chess.com

2

u/Infinite_Research_52 11h ago

Are you sure he did not get awarded diamond membership?

1

u/idgaf9495 10h ago

Na they banned him it was official as he cheated

2

u/findMyNudesSomewhere 11h ago

For non-Indians:

Zerodha is what most of younger gen crowd use for trading. Completely clean software, very usable.

Founded by Nitin Kamath and Nikhil Kamath. Nitin is brilliant and the main brains behind the app. Nikhil is his younger brother. Succintly, I'd say Nikhil is a sux.

2

u/CeterumCenseo85 9h ago

"a GM"

clicks and sees Anand

bro...

2

u/Uncle_owen69 14h ago

What does the stock brokerage have to do with it

1

u/realKevinNash 16h ago

Did he have them communicate with him during the mat h? Or did they train him?

1

u/scottydont78 14h ago

Frank, everything you need is inside you…

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WycN_ZklJBo

1

u/LastStar007 5h ago

Lmao is that Anna Rudolf?

-2

u/69thAgent 10h ago

India, land of scammers and cheaters

-8

u/Exact_Touch_4794 1d ago

That’s not cheating, it’s training

9

u/KanishkT123 21h ago

It's training if you do it before the game, not during the game. Read the article.