International chess federation sanctions Kramnik

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• He basically pushed a player going through a crisis to suicide with his baseless accusations. Proceeded to make public derogatory remarks right after they passed while the family barely started grieving. This is a slap on the wrist.
  by _factor
• Just an editorial note here, it's not clear that it was a suicide. The official diagnosis was some heart thing
  by alex1138
• Kramnik was accused of pushing Naroditsky to suicide and defended himself by saying that it was far more likely that Naroditsky died due to a drug overdose.

  Toxicology reports later showed that Naroditsky did die due to the combination of an abnormal heartbeat, sarcoidosis and drugs, specifically methamphetamines and kratom.

  Now if you want to speculate that he took those drugs due to the harassment that's a possibility, but claiming he died due to suicide is entirely unsubstatiated and uncalled for.

  by Maxatar
• That’s a lot of words to say very little. What is this about?
  by ungreased0675
• Kramnik has a habit of accusing people of cheating without evidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Kramnik#Anti-cheating..., he has also done this to many many individuals without evidence (and cheating is taken very seriously), this is in connection to that - he's being penalized for accusing people (repeatedly) without evidence.

  Just to be clear – this is an event where he has been doing so repeatedly, accusing people of cheating without evidence in-and-of itself isn't forbidden - since cheating in chess is difficult to verify, it's the manner and fashion to which Kramnik has done this that has led to his suspension

  by adityashankar
• I find it funny that "échec" also has the meaning of "failure" in French, so FIDE could be read as the "International Failure Federation"...
  by rob74
• Cold comfort I would say. We can only wonder if things would be different if this had happened a year earlier.
  by janalsncm
• > In addition, the Chamber imposed 12 months of unpaid service for the benefit of the chess community as a supplementary sanction.

  I wonder how this is enforced.

  by cubefox
• I would imagine by withholding some privilege until the service has been fulfilled
  by shh_labs
• Is there a summary of what he actually did? Since I didn’t follow the initial news item I feel like we are seeing the result before understanding the problem.
  by daft_pink
• For anyone new, Kramnik has been accusing players left and right of cheating without any proof. His accusations have done huge harm to the chess community as a whole. Daniel Naroditsky was harrassed so much, that he eventually went into depression and committed suicide. And he had proven ability as one of the best chess players out there, and probably the best chess teacher on YouTube. These are facts.

  Now onto my probably crazy conspiracy theory: Russian players like Danil, Nepo and Kramnik have accused American and Indian players baselessly of cheating multiple times over the past few years. They have went to podcasts and implied that their opponents have cheated. Idk if it's some lost national pride in chess or something but accusing others does more harm than good. We've seen how it hurt Hans when he was accused by Magnus of cheating without any evidence. Multiple top level tournaments stopped calling him due to magnus throwing a tantrum cuz he lost.

  by amrit3128
• Are we talking about online chess cheating? Aren't players eventually need to show up and play in-person?
  by tinyhouse
• What about the famous case of Carlsen claiming that his opponent cheated and even forfeiting to draw attention to it?
  by EGreg
• > Daniel Naroditsky was harrassed so much, that he eventually went into depression and committed suicide.

  Not according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Naroditsky ? (Still a tragedy, though; any death is.)

  by JoshTriplett
• Any normal human should have stopped and thought about their actions after Daniels passing.. Daniel will be missed and Kramnik hopefully forgotten.
  by V__
• Kramnik undeniably pushed Naroditsky into developing an addiction which ultimately contributed to his death. Whether it was intentional suicide or accidental overdose(both are possible) seems to me to be completely irrelevant.

  Kramnik engaged in a dedicated bullying and a smear campaign against Danya for a prolonged period, without substantive evidence, and never let up. When Danya explicitly stated in multiple interviews that Kramnik was seriously affecting his mental health, Kramnik persisted in his harassment. When Danya's mental health ultimately led to his death, Kramnik tried to put the blame on everyone but himself, including Danya, his friends and family, even the entire chess community. According to Kramnik, it seems like he is the only one who's completely blameless. It's good that he's being punished, but I think the punishment is too mild. In my opinion he should be stripped of all his titles, including his world titles.

  The sad fact is that Kramnik is a pathetic narcissist, who because he's a shadow of his former strength, and a slow old man, gets easily beaten in online blitz, and then accuses people of cheating to protect his wounded ego, because he wants to pretend he hasn't declined.

  by mtlmtlmtlmtl
• Stripping him of his titles doesn't do much good to be honest. In the history books he will still simply be someone who won and became world champion, whether stripped of the title or not. What would do us good, is to realize, that even someone in that position is not necessarily a saint or even a good person. To realize that supposed contrast and keep it in mind would be better for us than stripping him of titles, that he did in fact truly earn. Also it would only give him more ammunition.
  by zelphirkalt
• Kramnik is an asshole and this action is far too little far too late. His actions have possibly already led to the loss of a life.

  At the same time, FIDE also needs to look back at the behavior of some of the most powerful people in the sport in the whole Hans saga. What Hans was put through was ridiculous even if all the allegations were true, given how many actions were simply the result of the most powerful player in the sport throwing his weight around.

  I’m not a fan of Hans but I absolutely admire how he managed to continue and grow his career despite the top 2 biggest individuals in the sport, and a whole other set of powerbrokers (for example, the wealthiest tournament in the Sinquefeld cup) teaming up to destroy his career.

  by adjejmxbdjdn
• Hans did plenty to damage his own career - eg, his 2024 ban for trashing a hotel room.
  by zmgsabst
• For those of us who have no idea who this guy is and what he said, what did he do? Did he say something unapproved?
  by g42gregory
• Hans admitted to cheating. It's no wonder his career suffered. Incidentally, he is also a complete asshole.
  by t0mpr1c3
• For those who don't follow chess, what were the allegations? This article is intentionally vague on all the details.
  by Arainach
• I’m not a follower either, but inference from the article tells me: Krammik has come up with some sort of cheat detection method, has loudly accused some others of cheating, and FIDE are both unconvinced of the truth of the allegations and very unhappy he didn’t do this through proper channels. He also doesn’t appear to have co-operated with the investigation.
  by moomin
• He posted mathematically unsound methods that accused online players of cheating. Including Naroditsky, who is no longer with us (draw your own conclusions).

  This is a case of a Kramnik being a crank whom most people did not take seriously, but he still had an impact on the victims.

  Fro Kramnik this is a mild penalty.

  by lvRa
• He basically accused many players of cheating without any real evidence. His proofs are notoriously bad. The most notable examples are Daniel Naroditsky who was under immense psychological stress due to the allegations and died due to an accidental kratom overdose (kratom is used to self-medicate anxiety). Another prominent example are his allegations against Jose Martinez (aka Jospem) which resulted in them playing a grudge match which Jospem won. Kramnik was struggling with the tech in the online portion of the game. Basically he cannot accept that younger players beat him in quick formats and flings around ridiculous stuff. He's also feuding with Hikaru who is obviously really good at blitz.
  by kriro
• For non-chess players - imagine if Geoffrey hinton used AI detectors (GPT zero, pangram etc) to accuse and punish people of using AI in their writing and bad mouth them publicly. That's what kramnik (former world chess champion) did to Danya and other players. I miss Danya.
  by dwa3592
• To my knowledge, Pangram has a very low false positive rate approaching zero. (False negative is another matter.) I’m not sure that’s what you want to use as the analogy here? (I don’t know much about this Kramnik situation.)
  by nopinsight
• How did he punish them?
  by wilbur_whateley
• So Kramnik, being a chess player and not a statistician, invented various methods of "detecting" cheating which seemed convincing for for a layman but questionable mathematically.

  Then he started attacking Daniel, Hikaru and some other players online. This all led to pretty tragic consequences.

  Kramnik still believes that he's in the right.

  The only good thing out of this is numerous funny videos by chess players trying to figure out intricacies of statistics and math.

  by manvel_hn
• A lot of people imagine chess players to he smart, but there's a video of asking grandmasters very simple (imho) general knowledge questions that they did absolutely abysmally at. It's probably safe to assume that someone who is really good at chess is actually bad at anything that isn't chess
  by IncreasePosts