A hammer blow

Different people enjoy different things

Grandmaster Kramnik has recently published another controversial tweet on cheating in Titled Tuesdays.

Source: GM Kramnik’s Twitter / X

I did not enjoy it at all. When I saw it first, I felt shocked, as if someone had hit me into the head with a hammer. I quickly wrote an official complaint to FIDE and only slept for 3 hours the following night.
Several days have passed, and I still feel unwell about it and find it hard to focus on other topics properly. I find the post pretty offensive, given the context (“Cheating Tuesdays”, some tacit assumption that this statistic is substantially linked to cheating, other statements of GM Kramnik on Titled Tuesdays).

Whom exactly is Mr Kramnik accusing? And if he accuses just a few players from the list, why does he mention the others in connection with “Cheating Tuesdays”, which is insulting?
Not being on Twitter, I found it reasonable to present my objections here.

The tweet is somewhat puzzling. Grandmaster Kramnik speaks of centipawns (or cantipawns, to use his own word), yet I am not sure what the numbers on the right mean. Are they percentages?
There are also other inaccuracies. It is good that GM Kramnik at least takes player’s approximate strength (approximately measured by FIDE ratings) into account, but he is inaccurate in this respect, mentioning GM Frederik Svane, rated 2636 in classical chess, as an international master. Frederik has not played much FIDE-rated blitz so his blitz rating is too low, yet he participated in several OTB (over-the-board) blitz tournaments in December 2023 and performed well there.
When one accuses people publicly, one should at least try to be as precise as possible.

My results
As for myself, I have been playing similarly well and similarly quickly in my OTB rapid and blitz events, with slightly better results over the board than online. There are also many OTB games where I played well with less than 10 seconds left. If my precision is slightly higher in Titled Tuesdays than in OTB blitz tournaments, it is because I only play Titled Tuesdays when feeling moderately well or very well, while I agree on participation in OTB events much in advance and usually do not withdraw even if I suddenly fall ill or feel unwell for other reasons.
Here are my results from the Titled Tuesdays since January 2024:

January 2 8/11
January 9 8/11
January 16 8.5/11
January 30 9/11
February 6 7/11
March 12 7/11
March 19 8/11
March 26 7.5/11
May 14 8.5/11

My average in this period was very slightly below 8/11. It is a decent score, yet nothing special, and I did not win a single prize.
All of those are Early Titled Tuesdays, as I am mostly too tired in the evening, and even more on the day after an evening online tournament. I do not play Titled Tuesdays when feeling unwell, when playing an OTB tournament, before important events and so on.
Altogether I played Titled Tuesdays for 25 times in my life, always finishing between 7 and 9 points out of 11 games, with an average very slightly below 8 points. I once won $200 for the 4th place, and that is all. As for OTB chess, I am a three-time European Blitz Champion. I was extremely lucky once, and in exceptionally good form twice, but these results are still better than those in Titled Tuesdays.
It is true that I had a very good period in Titled Tuesdays from November 2023 to February 2024, possibly because I played more blitz and less standard chess then. There was no breaking point, no accusation, no warning, no call to Zoom between January 30 and February 6, nor elsewhere.
It is not unusual to have fluctuations of form like this.

Here are GM Kramnik’s ratings in classical chess:

Source: Kramnik, Vladimir (fide.com)

And those are his blitz ratings:

Source: Kramnik, Vladimir (fide.com)

It is normal for sportpeople to have ups and downs. Even grandmaster Kramnik had better and worse periods in his great career. Given that he knows very well how unpleasant and insulting it is to be accused without proper evidence, I think that he should be more careful in his statements, especially when he publishes them on social media.

Kramnik’s metric does not work

Grandmaster Kramnik does not explain his methods in his tweet, yet they somehow seem to indicate that a very low ratio of blunders made with 10 seconds or less left can be very suspect, especially in case of lower-rated players. (This interpretation is mine and might be inaccurate. A blunder can be defined in various ways and I do not know the details of his analysis.)
The metric chosen by GM Kramnik looks very strange. I guess that we all know the cheaters who make every move in 2-5 seconds, play like a strong GM and when getting low on time, start playing quickly, dropping pieces left end right. Such abusers would end up at the opposite end of GM Kramnik’s table, at its very bottom rather than at the top!
Given that there are quite some such players in online chess, I think that GM Kramnik’s metric is pretty bad at determining cheaters.
It is actually even worse. Imagine a hypothetical situation that you invite 9 such cheaters and 1 honest player (who has an average time consumption) for a 3+1 blitz event. The only honest player will be placed first (= most suspect) according to GM Kramnik’s metric, way ahead of the others who drop pieces left and right with a few seconds left. Absurd!
Perhaps GM Kramnik is trying to detect players who are using bots on their computers, thus being able to get hints in 1 second or less. But these players can simply escape his statistics by playing their games quickly enough to avoid severe time troubles!

Fight against online cheating is necessary and we should use programs like Zoom as well as good statistics to determine better who is playing fair and who is not. To prevent or at least reduce both cheating and ungrounded accusations.
Public accusations based on highly problematic statistics do not make the situation any better and can also cause unnecessary pain.
Thank you for reading this!

P.S.: The author is a grandmaster with a master degree in logic.
UPDATE: I have corrected the number of TTs played after publishing this blog. I played in 25 tournaments (not 30, as I guessed), starting in November 2020, with the last tournament so far played in mid-May 2024. (A tournament played on the 2nd January 2024 was subsequently discarded for technical issues, as too many players had suffered from disconnections.) My average score was very slightly below 8 points.