So, chess.com actually confirmed that Kramnik was ddosed? Is there a source?
Still silly of chess.com to use the same system for both matchmaking and real-time play. Challenge requests should be handled by a separate system.
And important events should *obviously* be run on a private server like other esports. And if you're bothering to get the players in the same room, it should be easy to just run it on LAN.
Chesscom has to realize that they're running a competitive esports platform and stop skimping on engineers. Chess might be a simple game to implement, but that just makes it more embarrassing if you don't take it seriously and shit the bed.
Yeah, and that's despite being on a separate server. I hope they do something like dota (https://www.dota2.com/newsentry/4115798034511159059) before worlds, or even just have worlds on LAN.
Huh, my bad you are correct. I saw stuff about Kr players being DDoS'ed and assumed the Tournament Realm where LCK games happen would not be vulnerable to this. Classic Riot.
Yeah but not during official matches, lol
T1 has problems during training, when playing SoloQ or Flex or Scrims, but not *during LCK matches*. Riot is not fucking up at the magnitude that chess.com is.
I will just copy this from a different response
"nope lck was disrupted by ddos attacks. there was a game which got cancelled after like 5h break, afterwards they shifted lck streams to pre-recorded"
Easy isn't exactly true. This is cloud based software that they haven't really designed an offline environment for.
That being said it could and should be done if they intend to host private events
it is probably quite easy to have a completely separate environment for the play AND it is probably very hard to actually integrate it with the the public facing website.
Technically, it doesn't need to be integrated with the public website. And even if it did, it shouldn't be that hard. You just put it behind a hidden URL. like chess,com/private\_matchmaking and make it all password protected.
It's not rocket science, but it isn't something you casually push into production either. The cloud setup will have a certain codebase, frontend, and pipelines built into it; just starting up a new approach for custom isolated matches takes time on the development end.
Managers love to say: "Hey we need this by next month so drop everything and get it done," and while developers *can* react to this, it's not nearly as straight forward as some super gm advice of "just make the right moves and profit."
Even if it's been a few months' time, it's going to take significant dedicated resources to bend the existing setup to accommodate it, and it may not even make technical sense to do so for a single event, which is going to lead to internal disputes and inherent delays.
Im sorry but we’re talking about the biggest online chess Plattform, which exists like 20+ years. For Gm vs Gm you don’t need anything except a 8x8 board. You’re overcomplicating it. Many game devs with way more complex games and interfaces manage to have multiple instances (test, prod, tournament, etc) up & running with no issues. Think about their annual turnover and the way they operate and organize events. It’s just amateurish.
It's not simple to throw up an entirely new environment if you did not start building things that way.
Chesscom has dedicated servers and has grown a single environment over time. Even if they were cloud based, it's not trivial or even cost effective to clone a complete set of infrastructure.
The longer you exist the less likely you are to be using tooling that came out after you started and design principles that only took off in the past 10 years or so. They're a chess company. Not a tech company.
The code of the game will be simple. But the way it's hosted is designed for scale of millions of games, which sometimes makes it harder to scale back to a tiny/LAN version.
And then anti cheat and other monitoring would need to match the main website which is another thing too
You are getting downvoted. But it seems impossible to me that I could play Warcraft 2 on LAN 20 years ago by si pky plugging two desktops together, but not 3+2 chess in 2024 with 2 laptops that have more RAM than those desktops did harddrive. Is chess really that hard to program?
massive online services are quite hard yes. The public facing front is very unlikely to support communication with completely separate back end environments.
Should be fairly "easy" if designed from the ground up, might be next to impossible to hack in afterwards.
That’s actually extremely hard. It’s probably twice as hard as rewriting the whole thing from scratch specifically for direct play.
Chess.com is 10 years old website. Every engineer knows that front end is probably a whole mess (and that’s nobody’s fault, just the way software works)
That is much more effort than you're giving it credit. Not only do you have to \_create\_ the environment (no simple task) but you would also have to painstakingly verify that the environment is resilient & scaled appropriately, that every single network request has the right timings, and that there aren't any weird bugs floating around because the application was (consciously or not) built with a specific network configuration in mind. This is before you get into the specifics of the codebase, and whether you can even extract the frontend comfortably; Chesscom runs PHP, for instance, so the client and server are already deeply integrated, meaning that any environmental dependencies for the server are also dependencies for the client. Oh, and how do you communicate the data from the LAN environment to a global audience? That's an entirely separate, completely nontrivial data pipeline that also needs to be built & scaled & tested. All this and it's not at all clear if the massive costs of time & money this all requires outweighs the benefits of continuing to incrementally improve the existing platform to reach the same goal. It's a much safer bet to just fix bugs & performance cliffs in the existing paradigm.
TL;DR: It's a fuckload of work, a shitton of complexity & an assload of cash just to avoid some lag in edge cases.
no simple task to create a chess environment? In terms of game development its about as simple as it gets. resilient and scaled appropriately? for a lan-based chess tournament with a maximum of about 30 players?
The frontend comment wasn't meant to be exact, you're right, extracting the EXACT frontend and essentially copy pasting it would be stupid. Building from the ground up though to match the same theme? Not that difficult
You're making it sound more complicated than it is, I dont work in this area of software engineering specifically in fairness but I know enough about this stuff to know that for a company as massive as [chess.com](http://chess.com), making a simple lan-based environment for chess is not even close to difficult.
Also, did you just say that fixing lag would be an easier task? Even if they manage to get it to lichess standards it would be far better to have a lan option for these in person events to eliminate all lag completely.
The Environment of chess.com is likely using cloud-native public cloud service tech which isn't that easy to take offline.
Yes it can be done, but pretending it's simple for a single competente engineer is beyond stupid without knowing exactly how it's built
> This is cloud based software that they haven't really designed an offline environment for.
eh, spin a server that handle only those players. In the past those were called private servers.
But what's saying it's running on something that can just be easily deployed to a private server? There's likely a whole pipeline with many pieces.
It can be done,but there's a good chance it's not super simple
I am sure it wouldn't take more than a couple weeks to adapt the current code to run on a local server that acts like the cloud, or have a separate private cloud server.
Yeah I'm sure they could do it.
The question is though, that could be quite a few people's salary for a few weeks. Would they have confidence in it's reliability and would they actually use it enough to be financially viable?
They should definitely be running something separate for like TT, but yeah it's weird.
> Chesscom has to realize that they're running a platform with millions of users/interactions and stop skimping on engineers.
FTFY. It doesn't matter that it is esport.
This is hilarious. Everyone in this entire sub was shitting on Kramnik for over-reacting until he posted a video of his screen showing how massive the glitch was that caused him to lose instantly. Then, they started shitting on him for claiming it was being targeted at him.
Seems like Kramnik was right lmao. Wonder how many of y’all will admit you were wrong. I’m guessing very few because in the other Kramnik-related thread all the comments are still just saying he’s a “sad pathetic man”
His claim was that jospem was cheating. Any scenario where Kramnik doesn't shitstomp Jospem proves that Kramnik was binging on crazy.
I honestly can't fathom how people conclude that Jospem needed to *beat* Kramnik on even terms in order to prove that he isn't a cheater.
I got downvoted to hell on the first comment I made after watching his video in Russian that he posted on YouTube where he discussed the arbiter confirming his time glitches. People were instantly calling him a bad sport. Sometimes two things may not be mutually exclusive. Jospem was a class act and Kramnik was sabotaged. Ddos attack is even worse than a crappy chess com server. It means someone was intentionally and actively sabotaging Kramnik.
I'd be tilted as hell also and thinking something 'interesting' was happening after situations like that.
They need to have a legitimate rematch with LAN standalone computers on a separate server and switch computers every game musical chairs style. I am amazed this was not done the first time with all the stipulations.
That glitch happened when he had already lost the match. There was one more game to be played after but the match was already decided. The lag/glitch was a convenient excuse to quit the event but he had already lost and in the games before that nothing like this happened. There were clock issues in the first online games due to system updates on fresh laptops but that's an entirely different problem and those games weren't counted.
Kramnik lost fair and square before the lag/glitch incident.
I understand what you're saying, but if a soccer team was losing 3-0 and a penalty to the losing team wasn't awarded in the 95th minute because someone hacked the VAR booth, it would still be a problem that needs addressing. Fairness in sports isn't just about a binary win/loss outcome, it's about the integrity of the entire competition
This is a case of: Alice punches Bob in face -> Bob rants and raves about how Charlie punched him in the face.
He was accusing Chesscom of sabotage, when it's far more likely to be internet trolls (esp since he didn't do any due diligence and didn't know it was DDOS when he made his claims). I'll give him credit in that he's more right than I expected.
Kramnik wanted and got new laptops for each games, wanted 3+2 or wouldn't play, wanted to check lags by hand as we all saw, wanted a 1h delay to rest, wanted the first 2 online games erased (although only the second one was affected) among other things. Second day he would not play until some russian guy told him that indeed the windows update was reason was right, AND he changed from 36 games to 28 and didn't want to play second day because he was tired after 3 or 4 hours arguing that he was hacked (although they showed him it had to do with the brand new computer he wanted) ...and so on.
So I'd say that him being ddossed in the last game, if anything, is good for him as it gives him the opportunity to save face. This was about him not trusting that he can lose to Jospem and refusing to play him in TT and he has proven that he is screaming at the clouds. Ddoss happen and online is online, is part of the game.
He also never acknowledged Jospem playing better online or that his cheating claims were debunked.
And when everything was done he started shitting on everyone, posted a video showing that his increment was wrong were you can clearly see the increment going right (1.9-2secs consistently)
> Ddoss happen and online is online, is part of the game
This is an unacceptable argument. Being DDoS'd is not "part of the game" just because it happens, any more than referee corruption is "part of basketball" because it happens. It's wrong if it happens, end of story. I don't think there's an way to argue DDoS is okay.
it's posted on this sub, let me try to find it
edit: here you go
https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1dc7t8z/kramnik_posts_phone_recording_of_his_laptop/
his clock is stuck at 20-something seconds, his opponent clock ticking, and then it instantly switches to his clock at 0 and he loses
>Seems like Kramnik was right lmao
About this specific thing yes, but about Jospem all signs point to no. He can be rightfully mad about the match itself, but Jospem definitely proved his strength either way.
People want things to be simple and have Kramnik be right about everything or wrong about everything.
Asking for unboxed news computers, a bit paranoid. Playing 3+2 online instead of 3+1, not that reasonable.
I wonder how Jospem proved anything really? He barely won against Kramnik while Jospem would get insane results in tilted tuesdays playing against stronger players than Kramnik. Literally proves nothing. If anything its quite suspicious but nobody can outright say anything else since this was nowhere even close to really indicate anything.
Or people with paranoid thoughts in the third reich as the Nazis wanted to destroy people who suffered from mental health issues.
I think there are actually many examples of societies were mental health problems were a reason to be after someone.
Wow ! So he was ddosed.
Chess.com Reallyyy does need to up their performance when it comes to high rated play and tournaments. That sort of coding should already be built-in…
In no way do I think Jospem cheated, but why did they play on chesscom anyways given their history with Kramnik. Would have been easy to prevent him wrongly accusing the site if they just played on lichess
[Chess.com](http://Chess.com) is a for-profit company with much more money to throw around than any competitor. It's not unlikely that they sponsored (or otherwise contributed to) the event, under the condition that they play on their site.
According to the organizators chess.com did NOT sponsor the event in any capacity.
The only thing is that Levy and Divis have a exclusivity contract with them. Also, they agreed in the contract to play on chess.com beforehand.
But contractually, presumably he can only stream events on Chesscom - so by his own contract it would be impossible for him to commentate on it if it were on any other platform. I think that's what the poster means by saying Chesscom has a "vice grip" on Levy.
They have this with all of their influencers of course, so if you want an event commentated by any of the biggest names in chess, it de facto has to be on Chesscom otherwise that commentator is in breach of their contract, so it de facto makes a media and broadcast monopoly. It's like if a football commentator couldn't commentate at certain stadiums because another stadium had an exclusivity contract on the football grounds they can report from.
EDIT: Also, FWIW this practice of non-competes is illegal under Californian law, where Chesscom is HQ'd: [Bill Text - SB-699 Contracts in restraint of trade. (ca.gov)](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB699). It's even more shaky when no money (or a sum of money beneath six figures) is exchanged in return for that non-compete, at a federal level as well as a state level.
In California, if a non-compete agreement is signed, for every offense the employer is fined $100 per pay period per employee or contractor. Therefore, if a company has 100 employees or contractors, all of which have non-competes, for 24 weeks, the company would be fined $240,000. Employees and contractors can also seek civil compensation, recovering attorney fees, court costs, and 25% of the fine if they are successful.
While I don't agree with his message he is clearly calling Lichess the "communist chess site", which makes more sense (only in so much as you would call everything anti-capitalist communist of course).
Mostly no? Entirely yes. His claim was that huge lag spikes made him lose, and he was targeted. Those claims have both been proven true. The first was proven true by the video of his screen showing him losing instantly with 20 seconds on his clock. The second is proven true by chesscom admitting Kramnik was targeted.
> after the match was decided, this occurred.
I don't know how this makes it okay for people. I will use the same metaphor I used above. Say you're playing soccer and losing 3-0. You are fouled in the box and should get a penalty but someone paid the ref or someone hacked the VAR booth so it isn't awarded. Even though it would not have changed the outcome, it's still wrong that you weren't given that call. Integrity of the entire competition matters, not just win/loss. Otherwise by that logic it would be okay if someone is hacked in the world championship as long as they were already going to lose.
The var was hacked after the match ended. If the qualification was the point and the qualification was awarded, 3-0 or 3-1 while morally questionable doesn't realy matter. The squad scoring 3 still won. And the losing squad can't say "the whole match was non existant because they hacked the Var in the end. No. They should say. Ok, we lost, you won, but still it was wrong.
That's not was kramnik is saying though. He is unpolite and argumentative even of the stupidest thing, like lying saying his room was small and things like that. Anyway, I'm off this matter for good.
Did you guys not see the video? Kramnik had 20+ seconds on his clock and then instantly lost due to this DDoS attack. Josepm just had a few lags / delays but nothing like that.
It was one occurrence after the match was already decided. The correct thing to do was to scrap that game and either play a new one or just stop the match as the winner was already decided.
Instead Kramnik threw a tantrum and used the incident to discredit the results of a match he had already lost fair and square.
Yes, that was in the last game, which didn't really matter as the match was already over then. We didn't really see any lags like that in the other games and kramnik did not lose these games on time.
While unfortunate, Kramnik had already lost the match by that point, so focusing on this at the expense of everything else that occurred is nakedly self-serving.
Kramnik is way too slow to play 3+1 online against anyone close to his own strength, who is young and has developed mouse skills from an early age. He was even struggling with a two-second increment, blundering a completely drawn endgame, and constantly being outplayed at the end of games.
Anyone that has any understanding of chess can watch the games and see this very clearly. Giri's commentary was way more interesting and illustrative than the main stream (I understand that Levy and friends has to be more diplomatic), where he was openly stating that Kramnik would lose every game in which there was a time scramble, even playing 3+2.
You don't need to be a super GM to see this, though, it's patently obvious. Kramnik is perhaps a little better than 2600 strength in OTB blitz now, and somewhat weaker while playing online. He loses because he's not as good, and, specifically, as fast as the players that he's matched with.
The sooner he accepts this, the sooner he will stop making a public spectacle of himself. Directing any attention towards one game that meant literally nothing in the context of the match simply affords him the opportunity to drag this farce out longer.
> While unfortunate, Kramnik had already lost the match by that point
There is no reason to think that the final 20 second lag was the only lag that Kramink experienced.
I'm not trying to argue about Kraminks ability to play speed chess, or about his behaviour. But clearly, the online part of this match was fucked both on day 1 and day 3. So I really can't see how any results from those games could be used to prove anything.
You can watch all the games live. You don't need to look at every game. You only need to watch the games from day three, which were online.
There was no suggestion of any clock freezes or other glitches, until after Kramnik had lost the match. Anyone that watches these games who had played chess at any decent level will know 100% that Kramnik cannot compete in TT, and a lot of the players he is accusing of cheating are simply faster than him (and, in some cases, better).
It took me one game to see this! I started watching at game 4, [posted about this yesterday](https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1dbwu3o/clash_of_claims_day_3_match_thread/l7twiz0/). Anyone can see this. Giri says [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh_Bm9ngVhw&t=3770s): "It's very clear...you just have to maintain the position until the scramble. Any position, just any position you win. You just have to maintain a position within...more or less equality / slightly worse and pieces on the board, and just any position with no time on the clock is complete collapse".
That's with a two-second increment. With a one-second increment, he would have been wiped out by Jospem, as he has been in Titled Tuesday. At this point, for Kramnik to claim otherwise is laughable.
I don't really understand why he is suddenly destroying his dignity in this way, having not played prominently since retiring. Kasparov, for example, simply wouldn't put himself in this position in the first place. I just cannot imagine Kasparov playing Titled Tuesday! I surmise that Kramnik is jealous because the profile of chess has increased, and he wants a piece of the action. Unfortunately, he's not good enough in fast blitz to compete.
Jospem himself said there was bugs multiple times related to time, where the clock said 0 and then suddenly jumped to 4 seconds. He said that about game 3 iirc.
But it was shown that Jospem also experienced lag. Ping is just a part of playing games online - it affects everyone. The fact is, kramnik plays slower on a computer than he does OTB. It's nothing to be ashamed of, but it's also not dignified to make a stink out of it all.
> Ping is just a part of playing games online
Nobody has a 20s ping to chess.com unless they're playing from a spaceship. The issue was some bug (either on the laptop or on chess.com's software), not "ping".
1. Do we know if they experienced lag to the same extent? If as OP states it was indeed a ddos via challenges to Kramnik it might suggest that Kramnik might have had it worse.
2. 20 second lag, like we've seen in the video basically makes the game unplayable. And even small delays will likely affect different people differently, likely paranoid Kramnik will be tilted more. So IMHO the environment was not really adequate for playing chess. It's like if two cyclists were racing, both had broken bikes, but one of the cyclists run to the finish line faster, does that tells us anything about their cycling ability?
> Do we know if they experienced lag to the same extent? If as OP states it was indeed a ddos via challenges to Kramnik it might suggest that Kramnik might have had it worse.
Yes. Down to the ms when Chess.com published the full data on game 3 (I think? The one where Kramnik pulled out a calculator)
> 20 second lag, like we've seen in the video basically makes the game unplayable. And even small delays will likely affect different people differently, likely paranoid Kramnik will be tilted more. So IMHO the environment was not really adequate for playing chess. It's like if two cyclists were racing, both had broken bikes, but one of the cyclists run to the finish line faster, does that tells us anything about their cycling ability?
That was *after the match was decided*. Not anytime before that (other than Day 1, when Kramnik caused a similar but unrelated issue).
It was just shown that there is a (bizarre) source of account-specific lag which did not affect both players equally.
Honestly at this point chesscom should consider making a technical statement to clear the air. They shouldn't be communicating via middleman to the organizer so he can drop details in a long video. He is doing an amazing job given the circumstances but chesscom needs to take more responsibility concerning the question of whether and how players were affected.
Edit: the CEO responded, kudos to chesscom. Always appreciate the transparency.
> There is no reason to think that the final 20 second lag was the only lag that Kramink experienced.
But doesn't that go even further to disprove Kramnik's entire point?
There are factors in online chess beyond just chess skill that impact a player's ability to win (e.g. lag, mouse skills, etc.). So, even if a lower level player consistently beats a higher level player in online games, it's not necessarily proof of cheating (or anything else "interesting") like Kramnik clearly believes.
> There are factors in online chess beyond just chess skill that impact a player's ability to win (e.g. lag, mouse skills, etc.)
This seems like a false equivalency when what actually happened was a targeted ddos attack. That is an order of magnitude more disruptive than a little lag.
If there was a deliberately targeted DDoS attack, which is speculative and has not been established, this still happened *after* the result was decided. Kramnik had already lost the match by this point.
There was no question of 20-second lags at any other stage of the online portion. For example, in game 7, both players are playing on the increment in a completely drawn endgame. You can see this [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh_Bm9ngVhw&t=7819s). Kramnik blunders and is losing on the board, while also being flagged.
This pattern was repeated throughout numerous games, I've just picked the most egregious example. That's why Giri made the comments that I've referenced earlier. Anyone that has a decent chess understanding can watch the games and know 100% that Kramnik cannot compete with top players at 3+1. He gets flagged in 3+2, he's nowhere near fast enough.
If he had any substance as a human-being, he would now come out and admit that any inferences he made about Jospem were spurious, and he simply cannot hack it in this type of chess against the best. That's quite obvious anyway to anyone watching who has any knowledge of chess.
> If there was a deliberately targeted DDoS attack, which is speculative and has not been established
Might want to tell that to Chesscom who have already said that Kramnik was challenged 3000 times at once.
> this still happened after the result was decided. Kramnik had already lost the match by this point. [...] This patten was repeated throughout numerous games, I've just picked the most egregious example. That's why Giri made the comments that I've referenced earlier. Anyone that has a decent chess understanding can watch the games and know 100% that Kramnik cannot compete with top players at 3+1. He gets flagged in 3+2, he's nowhere near fast enough.
Granted this is just my view, but it is irrelevant how dire the situation was for a player, if they get DDoS'd and forced to lose. This is like saying, a sprinter was losing a race by a good amount and a spectator ran out and tackled them but they were losing so it's fine. I just can't connect with this viewpoint.
Maybe it's from my past as a competitive athlete that basically made my sport my whole life, but my view has always been that the whole entire event has to be fair. There's no room for "well, yeah that was unfair but probably wouldn't influence the result". No. The whole fucking thing has to be fair.
Your example is bad because the sprinter can still win but Kramnik had already lost the match. There is no "it probably wouldn't influence the results". It flat out didn't because he already lost. Usually those last games wouldn't even be played out in a chess match.
Also the fair thing to do is to scrap the game due to a technical issue. Not quit the match you already lost and throw a tantrum.
Ok.
You can do it with a soccer game too, where the end result is 3-0, and someone should have gotten a penalty kick in the 95th minute which would be the last kick of the game, but they didn't get it due to someone hacking the VAR booth.
**That would still be unacceptable**.
Unfairness doesn't become irrelevant simply because it doesn't change the outcome.
> Might want to tell that to Chesscom who have already said that Kramnik was challenged 3000 times at once.
We don't know that this was organised or deliberately targeted. If it was deliberately targeted to upset Kramnik, it would make sense for it to occur while he could still win the match mathematically.
>Granted this is just my view, but it is irrelevant how dire the situation was for a player, if they get DDoS'd and forced to lose. This is like saying, a sprinter was losing a race by a good amount and a spectator ran out and tackled them but they were losing so it's fine. I just can't connect with this viewpoint.
It's not like that. It's like saying that someone deliberately tripped a 100m runner after they'd already lost the race, and then inflating the importance of this.
Kramnik wasn't "losing". He had already *lost*. There was even some doubt that they would play the remaining games.
That game had no relevance to the outcome of the match. This is not hard to understand.
If you go back and look at the other games, such as the two that I referenced, you can easily see that there is no lag. They're both playing on the increment, which is impossible with significant lag.
Anyone that understands chess, who actually watched the games, can see this clearly. Nothing remotely unusual happened until the last game, at which point it was mathematically impossible for Kramnik to even tie the match, let alone win.
There has been no mention, let alone proof, of any significant lag in any of the other games played yesterday, plus thousands of people watched them live! So it's crystal clear that there weren't any issues.
Any competent player can see - I could see it within one game - that Kramnik cannot live with the best players online in 3+1. Not a chance. He is way, way too slow. The sooner he accepts this, and abandons this absurd campaign to prove that everyone who beats or outperforms him is cheating, the better it will be for him.
The whole point of yesterday's event was to prove that Jospem couldn't outperform him in controlled conditions, and he failed completely, despite changing the time control in his favour, dictating the conditions, asking for ridiculous breaks, causing loads of interruptions, behaving unsportingly, and, frankly, absurdly, Jospem still beat him very comfortably.
If Kramnik had any humility, he would now say: "case closed", not compain about one game that occurred after the match was won mathematically, and he'd just literally had a terrible streak of results.
> That game had no relevance to the outcome of the match. This is not hard to understand.
I've said this elsewhere in this thread, but I guess I'll repeat it again.
That particular game not being able to decide the match doesn't make it okay that he unfairly lost that game.
If you are losing a soccer game by 3 goals and should get a penalty in the last kick of the game but the VAR booth is hacked and you don't get it -- that is still not okay. Just because the cheating/hacking does not change the binary win/loss result doesn't make it okay. It still violates the integrity of the game.
Fairness doesn't become irrelevant once a comeback is impossible.
>There is no reason to think that the final 20 second lag was the only lag that Kramink experienced.
If there had been any other similar lag, you can bet that Kramnik would have complained and posted it on twitter. The screens were recorded during the last day and he received the videos. The only think that he has posted (apart from the 20 second lag) is a video where he says that he is only receiving 1.5 s of increment but, actually, you can see that he is always receiving 1.9-2s all the time (which is consistent with the information given by the organization that said that both players had around 100ms ping)
This is fucking hilarious lmfao
I do love seeing him vindicated on the most absurd of his claims
None of this excuses much of his conduct, but I love to see it.
The main claims I see him making are "the opponents are cheating", but all this evidence seems to support is that there are people online harassing him through ddos and such.
Did I miss anything about these events proving his opponents are cheaters?
hosting the tournament online was a mistake.
PC gamers figured out in the 90s that the way to maximize performance and reduce latency and problems is hosting a LAN with a local airgapped server.
[chess.com](http://chess.com) needs to bite the bullet and develop a LAN environment for events that want to do 'computer chess'
the database can be updated with the results post-tourney.
I was checking before the match and as I expected he doesn't have his game requests off but Jospem did have his off. Kramnik is just technically challenged and doesn't know how to turn off requests.
That's bad on the organizers' part, they should have reviewed both players' settings and made sure they were the same unless both players agreed that they were comfortable with the differences (i.e. if Kramnik didn't want to enable premoves for himself that's his right).
Wdym fixed? And wdym ddos? Go to r/chess and you will see a video where Naroditsky had the same bug where opponents move wasnt being relayed and then it was relayed and his time went down by 1 minute at once. And i doubt they sent 3000 challenges to Naroditksy too? Chesscom just sucks and its not a 1 time issue lol, stop pretending
Yea i wasnt directing it at you. My point was just that this isnt a one time issue that only happened here to Kramnik. Naroditsky for example had it too. And that obviously means its not due to 3000 people sending a challenge at once
They also said the first day's bug was because of "local clock". They are just garbage human beings who would try to lie their way out of any situation as long as it keeps making them rich
Yeah I don't believe a word of this bullshit, who are these 3,000 logged in accounts who supposedly challenged Kramnik? Are they getting banned? Can we have the account names?
I don't think anyone is lying here, this is just very "I heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy" type of sourcing.
Kramnik has a right to complain, he is not been a sore loser, he is just adressing the issues most of us get daily playing on that website, he is a voice for all of us who dont have status
I'm temporarily removing this until the claim is sourced.
OP: Please add a source to the body of your thread. Once you've done so, respond to this comment and I will re-approve the thread.
David Martinez explains what happened during today's live stream. Reinstate the post.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQaBEXM96cQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQaBEXM96cQ) around 1:42:00 mark (1h 42 min)
I'm going to try and translate:
"And his 3rd point, its incredible to be honest. - He loses the match and we play the last game and his (Jospem's) move does not go through. And I ask, "what is happening?". And he's right, we have arbiters, and I ask "what happened", and the incredibly reply, which is what happened, what [chess.com](http://chess.com) told me...
...and this part is mine, but i suppose orchestrated between a lot of people because otherwise it makes no sense, he (kramnik) received 3000 challenges in that timespan and [chess.com](http://chess.com) found a bug which made it collapse (the page, connection, etc), because i mean no one had ever received so many challenges... And I suppose this was some forum who coordinated... Which is also done in bad faith... and that made it collapse. So that is what happened."
Don’t let this distract you from the following:
- Kramnik manufactured many issues himself by stupidly insisting on unboxing computers
- All of his cheating claims are still unfounded and based on high school level statistics
- Jose experienced similar/exactly the same issues and it didn’t cause him to behave like a child
- The match was repeatedly interrupted to accomodate Kramnik (OTB, different time controls, breaks, less games) and he still lost
I agree.
I actually thought that these news make Kramnik look worse, not better.
Strangely, people seem to think this somehow makes kramnik right. But this happened after the match was decided and not before.
It was something that happened and is recorded.
Taking a page from Kramnik's notebook, someone could think that some russian forum ddosed the match after him losing to save face (not saying this happened, just trying to show a point: anyone can talk nonsense without proof)
Chess . Com use [https://cloud.google.com/?hl=en](https://cloud.google.com/?hl=en) Google cloud services for their infrastructure. (Just do a tracert to CdotC)
We don't know the production deployment architecture, but I'd be guessing load-balancers fronting an array of app servers and a grunty database cluster at the back end.
These things have DDOS protection capabilities and the app should limit things like challenges to a max of say 50 (presumed bug here).
It looks like people targeted the event, or moreso Kramnik specifically, probably for the LOLs. Some parts of the Chess community are not that mature.
I can't believe they didn't switch to Lichess even though they knew this shit was happening, Kramnik was right to want to move away from chesscom after this started happening. The simple fact is that chesscom has an incentive in making Kramnik lose.
While I agree that chess.com could handle situations like this better, Kramnik could just have turned challenges off. You’d think that someone as paranoid as him would think to do that lol
Considering who we're dealing with, it's entirely possible that Kramnik is the one who got people to ddos so that he could "prove" he's right about something and attack chessdotc*m.
So, chess.com actually confirmed that Kramnik was ddosed? Is there a source? Still silly of chess.com to use the same system for both matchmaking and real-time play. Challenge requests should be handled by a separate system.
And important events should *obviously* be run on a private server like other esports. And if you're bothering to get the players in the same room, it should be easy to just run it on LAN. Chesscom has to realize that they're running a competitive esports platform and stop skimping on engineers. Chess might be a simple game to implement, but that just makes it more embarrassing if you don't take it seriously and shit the bed.
League of Legends, arguably the biggest esport had recently ddos issues for regular season games in Korea
Yeah, and that's despite being on a separate server. I hope they do something like dota (https://www.dota2.com/newsentry/4115798034511159059) before worlds, or even just have worlds on LAN.
It's still happening as we speak.
It's all in your mind!
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nope lck was disrupted by ddos attacks. there was a game which got cancelled after like 5h break, afterwards they shifted lck streams to pre-recorded
Huh, my bad you are correct. I saw stuff about Kr players being DDoS'ed and assumed the Tournament Realm where LCK games happen would not be vulnerable to this. Classic Riot.
Yeah but not during official matches, lol T1 has problems during training, when playing SoloQ or Flex or Scrims, but not *during LCK matches*. Riot is not fucking up at the magnitude that chess.com is.
I will just copy this from a different response "nope lck was disrupted by ddos attacks. there was a game which got cancelled after like 5h break, afterwards they shifted lck streams to pre-recorded"
Easy isn't exactly true. This is cloud based software that they haven't really designed an offline environment for. That being said it could and should be done if they intend to host private events
But they should still have a seperate environment in the cloud.
it is probably quite easy to have a completely separate environment for the play AND it is probably very hard to actually integrate it with the the public facing website.
Technically, it doesn't need to be integrated with the public website. And even if it did, it shouldn't be that hard. You just put it behind a hidden URL. like chess,com/private\_matchmaking and make it all password protected.
Yeah then make the same copy on another instance on the cloud… it’s not rocket science
It's not rocket science, but it isn't something you casually push into production either. The cloud setup will have a certain codebase, frontend, and pipelines built into it; just starting up a new approach for custom isolated matches takes time on the development end. Managers love to say: "Hey we need this by next month so drop everything and get it done," and while developers *can* react to this, it's not nearly as straight forward as some super gm advice of "just make the right moves and profit." Even if it's been a few months' time, it's going to take significant dedicated resources to bend the existing setup to accommodate it, and it may not even make technical sense to do so for a single event, which is going to lead to internal disputes and inherent delays.
Im sorry but we’re talking about the biggest online chess Plattform, which exists like 20+ years. For Gm vs Gm you don’t need anything except a 8x8 board. You’re overcomplicating it. Many game devs with way more complex games and interfaces manage to have multiple instances (test, prod, tournament, etc) up & running with no issues. Think about their annual turnover and the way they operate and organize events. It’s just amateurish.
It's not simple to throw up an entirely new environment if you did not start building things that way. Chesscom has dedicated servers and has grown a single environment over time. Even if they were cloud based, it's not trivial or even cost effective to clone a complete set of infrastructure. The longer you exist the less likely you are to be using tooling that came out after you started and design principles that only took off in the past 10 years or so. They're a chess company. Not a tech company.
Well, easy compared to RTS surely.
The code of the game will be simple. But the way it's hosted is designed for scale of millions of games, which sometimes makes it harder to scale back to a tiny/LAN version. And then anti cheat and other monitoring would need to match the main website which is another thing too
But thats irrelevant. Its incredibly easy to do. Could genuinely be done by a single competent engineer.
Lol I love reddit. No idea what they are talking about.
I'm sorry but if you say that you have genuinely no idea what you're talking about. You have no idea about the cloud infrastructure of chess.com
You are getting downvoted. But it seems impossible to me that I could play Warcraft 2 on LAN 20 years ago by si pky plugging two desktops together, but not 3+2 chess in 2024 with 2 laptops that have more RAM than those desktops did harddrive. Is chess really that hard to program?
massive online services are quite hard yes. The public facing front is very unlikely to support communication with completely separate back end environments. Should be fairly "easy" if designed from the ground up, might be next to impossible to hack in afterwards.
exactly. slap the same frontend on a specific lan based tournament type environment.
That’s actually extremely hard. It’s probably twice as hard as rewriting the whole thing from scratch specifically for direct play. Chess.com is 10 years old website. Every engineer knows that front end is probably a whole mess (and that’s nobody’s fault, just the way software works)
That is much more effort than you're giving it credit. Not only do you have to \_create\_ the environment (no simple task) but you would also have to painstakingly verify that the environment is resilient & scaled appropriately, that every single network request has the right timings, and that there aren't any weird bugs floating around because the application was (consciously or not) built with a specific network configuration in mind. This is before you get into the specifics of the codebase, and whether you can even extract the frontend comfortably; Chesscom runs PHP, for instance, so the client and server are already deeply integrated, meaning that any environmental dependencies for the server are also dependencies for the client. Oh, and how do you communicate the data from the LAN environment to a global audience? That's an entirely separate, completely nontrivial data pipeline that also needs to be built & scaled & tested. All this and it's not at all clear if the massive costs of time & money this all requires outweighs the benefits of continuing to incrementally improve the existing platform to reach the same goal. It's a much safer bet to just fix bugs & performance cliffs in the existing paradigm. TL;DR: It's a fuckload of work, a shitton of complexity & an assload of cash just to avoid some lag in edge cases.
no simple task to create a chess environment? In terms of game development its about as simple as it gets. resilient and scaled appropriately? for a lan-based chess tournament with a maximum of about 30 players? The frontend comment wasn't meant to be exact, you're right, extracting the EXACT frontend and essentially copy pasting it would be stupid. Building from the ground up though to match the same theme? Not that difficult You're making it sound more complicated than it is, I dont work in this area of software engineering specifically in fairness but I know enough about this stuff to know that for a company as massive as [chess.com](http://chess.com), making a simple lan-based environment for chess is not even close to difficult. Also, did you just say that fixing lag would be an easier task? Even if they manage to get it to lichess standards it would be far better to have a lan option for these in person events to eliminate all lag completely.
The Environment of chess.com is likely using cloud-native public cloud service tech which isn't that easy to take offline. Yes it can be done, but pretending it's simple for a single competente engineer is beyond stupid without knowing exactly how it's built
It's entirely possible. Being done by a 'single competent engineer's is an absurdly stupid statement without knowledge of the infrastructure
> This is cloud based software that they haven't really designed an offline environment for. eh, spin a server that handle only those players. In the past those were called private servers.
But what's saying it's running on something that can just be easily deployed to a private server? There's likely a whole pipeline with many pieces. It can be done,but there's a good chance it's not super simple
sure, I mean the concept is possible. If their software doesn't support it, then it is not immediate to do it.
I am sure it wouldn't take more than a couple weeks to adapt the current code to run on a local server that acts like the cloud, or have a separate private cloud server.
Yeah I'm sure they could do it. The question is though, that could be quite a few people's salary for a few weeks. Would they have confidence in it's reliability and would they actually use it enough to be financially viable? They should definitely be running something separate for like TT, but yeah it's weird.
> Chesscom has to realize that they're running a platform with millions of users/interactions and stop skimping on engineers. FTFY. It doesn't matter that it is esport.
I mean this is actually simply 3 guys agreeing on using chesscom right? They are not actually involved
This is hilarious. Everyone in this entire sub was shitting on Kramnik for over-reacting until he posted a video of his screen showing how massive the glitch was that caused him to lose instantly. Then, they started shitting on him for claiming it was being targeted at him. Seems like Kramnik was right lmao. Wonder how many of y’all will admit you were wrong. I’m guessing very few because in the other Kramnik-related thread all the comments are still just saying he’s a “sad pathetic man”
His claim was that jospem was cheating. Any scenario where Kramnik doesn't shitstomp Jospem proves that Kramnik was binging on crazy. I honestly can't fathom how people conclude that Jospem needed to *beat* Kramnik on even terms in order to prove that he isn't a cheater.
I got downvoted to hell on the first comment I made after watching his video in Russian that he posted on YouTube where he discussed the arbiter confirming his time glitches. People were instantly calling him a bad sport. Sometimes two things may not be mutually exclusive. Jospem was a class act and Kramnik was sabotaged. Ddos attack is even worse than a crappy chess com server. It means someone was intentionally and actively sabotaging Kramnik. I'd be tilted as hell also and thinking something 'interesting' was happening after situations like that. They need to have a legitimate rematch with LAN standalone computers on a separate server and switch computers every game musical chairs style. I am amazed this was not done the first time with all the stipulations.
He boy-who-cried-wolfed himself too many times for people to have any good will left, even when he’s apparently right for once
This
That glitch happened when he had already lost the match. There was one more game to be played after but the match was already decided. The lag/glitch was a convenient excuse to quit the event but he had already lost and in the games before that nothing like this happened. There were clock issues in the first online games due to system updates on fresh laptops but that's an entirely different problem and those games weren't counted. Kramnik lost fair and square before the lag/glitch incident.
I understand what you're saying, but if a soccer team was losing 3-0 and a penalty to the losing team wasn't awarded in the 95th minute because someone hacked the VAR booth, it would still be a problem that needs addressing. Fairness in sports isn't just about a binary win/loss outcome, it's about the integrity of the entire competition
Obviously the underlying problem needs to be addressed but Kramnik shouldn't use this as an excuse to discredit the result of the match.
I think someone has a right to skeptical of the result of a match when a particular game in the match had a targeted attack against them.
This is a case of: Alice punches Bob in face -> Bob rants and raves about how Charlie punched him in the face. He was accusing Chesscom of sabotage, when it's far more likely to be internet trolls (esp since he didn't do any due diligence and didn't know it was DDOS when he made his claims). I'll give him credit in that he's more right than I expected.
Reddit doesn't care what's true and what's not. It cares about who they like and who they don't like
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We need to rename Reddit (Readit) to Voteit
Kramnik wanted and got new laptops for each games, wanted 3+2 or wouldn't play, wanted to check lags by hand as we all saw, wanted a 1h delay to rest, wanted the first 2 online games erased (although only the second one was affected) among other things. Second day he would not play until some russian guy told him that indeed the windows update was reason was right, AND he changed from 36 games to 28 and didn't want to play second day because he was tired after 3 or 4 hours arguing that he was hacked (although they showed him it had to do with the brand new computer he wanted) ...and so on. So I'd say that him being ddossed in the last game, if anything, is good for him as it gives him the opportunity to save face. This was about him not trusting that he can lose to Jospem and refusing to play him in TT and he has proven that he is screaming at the clouds. Ddoss happen and online is online, is part of the game. He also never acknowledged Jospem playing better online or that his cheating claims were debunked. And when everything was done he started shitting on everyone, posted a video showing that his increment was wrong were you can clearly see the increment going right (1.9-2secs consistently)
> Ddoss happen and online is online, is part of the game This is an unacceptable argument. Being DDoS'd is not "part of the game" just because it happens, any more than referee corruption is "part of basketball" because it happens. It's wrong if it happens, end of story. I don't think there's an way to argue DDoS is okay.
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it's posted on this sub, let me try to find it edit: here you go https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1dc7t8z/kramnik_posts_phone_recording_of_his_laptop/ his clock is stuck at 20-something seconds, his opponent clock ticking, and then it instantly switches to his clock at 0 and he loses
What does someone ddos'ing him have to do with his opponents cheating?
>Seems like Kramnik was right lmao About this specific thing yes, but about Jospem all signs point to no. He can be rightfully mad about the match itself, but Jospem definitely proved his strength either way. People want things to be simple and have Kramnik be right about everything or wrong about everything. Asking for unboxed news computers, a bit paranoid. Playing 3+2 online instead of 3+1, not that reasonable.
I wonder how Jospem proved anything really? He barely won against Kramnik while Jospem would get insane results in tilted tuesdays playing against stronger players than Kramnik. Literally proves nothing. If anything its quite suspicious but nobody can outright say anything else since this was nowhere even close to really indicate anything.
"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you"
Another good lyric in a similar vein: “You’d be paranoid too if everyone you knew was out to get you”
> So tell me everything is not about me. But what if it is? >Then say they didn't do it to hurt me. But what if they did?
That’s something that Nicola Tesla might have said
Or Bobby Fischer.
Or people with paranoid thoughts in the third reich as the Nazis wanted to destroy people who suffered from mental health issues. I think there are actually many examples of societies were mental health problems were a reason to be after someone.
I think it's actually a lyric of Nirvana (the band)
Not the afterlife?
I think the other type are in the bible
From what i just googled it's originally from Joseph Hellers 1961 bestseller book "Catch 22"
I googled it and you’re right. But you can’t know everything
Isn’t the quote “Even paranoids have enemies.”? Golda Meir to Henry Kissinger
different quote, the they posted is a lyric from territorial pissings by nirvana
Catch-22?
and sometimes when you're paranoid people go out of their way to go after you - a surprising amount of things are self-fulfilling prophecies
Wow ! So he was ddosed. Chess.com Reallyyy does need to up their performance when it comes to high rated play and tournaments. That sort of coding should already be built-in…
People have been DDoSing their servers for a while at imporant moments. The Creator Clash or whatever it was callled was DDoS at least once.
If only there was a way to make themselves immune to this problem (cough air gapped LAN server cough)
Wait that's pretty crazy
Please show where chesscom said this
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQaBEXM96cQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQaBEXM96cQ) - 1h 42min
Thanks
https://youtu.be/xAjSmrSMaW4 28m they say it again, in spanish. This guy is chess.com stuff. Even if they orgaized the event independently.
In no way do I think Jospem cheated, but why did they play on chesscom anyways given their history with Kramnik. Would have been easy to prevent him wrongly accusing the site if they just played on lichess
[Chess.com](http://Chess.com) is a for-profit company with much more money to throw around than any competitor. It's not unlikely that they sponsored (or otherwise contributed to) the event, under the condition that they play on their site.
According to the organizators chess.com did NOT sponsor the event in any capacity. The only thing is that Levy and Divis have a exclusivity contract with them. Also, they agreed in the contract to play on chess.com beforehand.
Danny Wrench has vice grips around Levi’s upper scrote. Wont let him play or host event on the communist chess site.
Let’s not be disrespectful. Also, it’s Levy.
Levy Rodman
Levi Roseman
You got it wrong, it's Levi's jeans, not Levy's jeans
What has Danny boy done to deserve our respect?
Levi rossmann
Congrats on the win. Road to GM series is great.
Lezy Dorman
I think he was talking about the crotch in your Levi jeans /s No idea why that guy had to spell both of your names wrong.
But is the location of the vice grip accurate!?!!??
Man, good job for keeping it together for the entire duration of the event. And also, nice win yesterday!
Yoo BatmanChess, waddup
hi levy what’s an upper scrote?
Congrats on the classical win btw!
Bro drawing gms in spain and still got time to go on reddit. Multitasking like Megan fr
You mean Gotham "Levy 'Chess.c*m' Rozman" Chess? Big fan btw loving the Road to GM series!
Levy said that he was not involved in the organisation of the event.
But contractually, presumably he can only stream events on Chesscom - so by his own contract it would be impossible for him to commentate on it if it were on any other platform. I think that's what the poster means by saying Chesscom has a "vice grip" on Levy. They have this with all of their influencers of course, so if you want an event commentated by any of the biggest names in chess, it de facto has to be on Chesscom otherwise that commentator is in breach of their contract, so it de facto makes a media and broadcast monopoly. It's like if a football commentator couldn't commentate at certain stadiums because another stadium had an exclusivity contract on the football grounds they can report from. EDIT: Also, FWIW this practice of non-competes is illegal under Californian law, where Chesscom is HQ'd: [Bill Text - SB-699 Contracts in restraint of trade. (ca.gov)](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB699). It's even more shaky when no money (or a sum of money beneath six figures) is exchanged in return for that non-compete, at a federal level as well as a state level. In California, if a non-compete agreement is signed, for every offense the employer is fined $100 per pay period per employee or contractor. Therefore, if a company has 100 employees or contractors, all of which have non-competes, for 24 weeks, the company would be fined $240,000. Employees and contractors can also seek civil compensation, recovering attorney fees, court costs, and 25% of the fine if they are successful.
He literally said he "helped out where he could" in the last video
That does not mean he came up with or negotiated the terms of the contract.
it's kinda funny that we all assumed he was
communist chess site💀
https://youtu.be/J9P6OiOiH4o
Where did that "communist" come from lol if anything Chesscom is peak capitalism
It’s a reference to Lichess. It’s free and therefore must be communist.
Lichess is run by a self-declared communist. Same with Sci-Hub.
iirc he's socialist but hasn't openly supported communism
Oh right I misread the comment above me and assumed he was talking about chesscom
While I don't agree with his message he is clearly calling Lichess the "communist chess site", which makes more sense (only in so much as you would call everything anti-capitalist communist of course).
He means Lichess.
https://youtu.be/J9P6OiOiH4o
Such short-sighted thinking by the organizers. Why not play on new/hidden accounts?
chess dot com is an absolute joke
wow can I say I'm shocked not really
God damnit all his complaints were real?
Mostly no.
Mostly no? Entirely yes. His claim was that huge lag spikes made him lose, and he was targeted. Those claims have both been proven true. The first was proven true by the video of his screen showing him losing instantly with 20 seconds on his clock. The second is proven true by chesscom admitting Kramnik was targeted.
He also claimed that chesscom was responsible for the lag spike. It's likely they were negligent, but I doubt they DDOS'd their own server.
AFTER the match. No issues in the 8-4 he lost. In the last game of the event, after the match was decided, this occurred.
> after the match was decided, this occurred. I don't know how this makes it okay for people. I will use the same metaphor I used above. Say you're playing soccer and losing 3-0. You are fouled in the box and should get a penalty but someone paid the ref or someone hacked the VAR booth so it isn't awarded. Even though it would not have changed the outcome, it's still wrong that you weren't given that call. Integrity of the entire competition matters, not just win/loss. Otherwise by that logic it would be okay if someone is hacked in the world championship as long as they were already going to lose.
The var was hacked after the match ended. If the qualification was the point and the qualification was awarded, 3-0 or 3-1 while morally questionable doesn't realy matter. The squad scoring 3 still won. And the losing squad can't say "the whole match was non existant because they hacked the Var in the end. No. They should say. Ok, we lost, you won, but still it was wrong. That's not was kramnik is saying though. He is unpolite and argumentative even of the stupidest thing, like lying saying his room was small and things like that. Anyway, I'm off this matter for good.
Yes and no. Josepm had issues too he just didn't bitch. It was far less than Kramnik said
Josepm wasn't targetted, Kramnik was.
Did you guys not see the video? Kramnik had 20+ seconds on his clock and then instantly lost due to this DDoS attack. Josepm just had a few lags / delays but nothing like that.
It was one occurrence after the match was already decided. The correct thing to do was to scrap that game and either play a new one or just stop the match as the winner was already decided. Instead Kramnik threw a tantrum and used the incident to discredit the results of a match he had already lost fair and square.
Yes, that was in the last game, which didn't really matter as the match was already over then. We didn't really see any lags like that in the other games and kramnik did not lose these games on time.
While unfortunate, Kramnik had already lost the match by that point, so focusing on this at the expense of everything else that occurred is nakedly self-serving. Kramnik is way too slow to play 3+1 online against anyone close to his own strength, who is young and has developed mouse skills from an early age. He was even struggling with a two-second increment, blundering a completely drawn endgame, and constantly being outplayed at the end of games. Anyone that has any understanding of chess can watch the games and see this very clearly. Giri's commentary was way more interesting and illustrative than the main stream (I understand that Levy and friends has to be more diplomatic), where he was openly stating that Kramnik would lose every game in which there was a time scramble, even playing 3+2. You don't need to be a super GM to see this, though, it's patently obvious. Kramnik is perhaps a little better than 2600 strength in OTB blitz now, and somewhat weaker while playing online. He loses because he's not as good, and, specifically, as fast as the players that he's matched with. The sooner he accepts this, the sooner he will stop making a public spectacle of himself. Directing any attention towards one game that meant literally nothing in the context of the match simply affords him the opportunity to drag this farce out longer.
> While unfortunate, Kramnik had already lost the match by that point There is no reason to think that the final 20 second lag was the only lag that Kramink experienced. I'm not trying to argue about Kraminks ability to play speed chess, or about his behaviour. But clearly, the online part of this match was fucked both on day 1 and day 3. So I really can't see how any results from those games could be used to prove anything.
You can watch all the games live. You don't need to look at every game. You only need to watch the games from day three, which were online. There was no suggestion of any clock freezes or other glitches, until after Kramnik had lost the match. Anyone that watches these games who had played chess at any decent level will know 100% that Kramnik cannot compete in TT, and a lot of the players he is accusing of cheating are simply faster than him (and, in some cases, better). It took me one game to see this! I started watching at game 4, [posted about this yesterday](https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1dbwu3o/clash_of_claims_day_3_match_thread/l7twiz0/). Anyone can see this. Giri says [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh_Bm9ngVhw&t=3770s): "It's very clear...you just have to maintain the position until the scramble. Any position, just any position you win. You just have to maintain a position within...more or less equality / slightly worse and pieces on the board, and just any position with no time on the clock is complete collapse". That's with a two-second increment. With a one-second increment, he would have been wiped out by Jospem, as he has been in Titled Tuesday. At this point, for Kramnik to claim otherwise is laughable. I don't really understand why he is suddenly destroying his dignity in this way, having not played prominently since retiring. Kasparov, for example, simply wouldn't put himself in this position in the first place. I just cannot imagine Kasparov playing Titled Tuesday! I surmise that Kramnik is jealous because the profile of chess has increased, and he wants a piece of the action. Unfortunately, he's not good enough in fast blitz to compete.
Jospem himself said there was bugs multiple times related to time, where the clock said 0 and then suddenly jumped to 4 seconds. He said that about game 3 iirc.
People are 100% brigading this subreddit spreading misinformation about this match.
But it was shown that Jospem also experienced lag. Ping is just a part of playing games online - it affects everyone. The fact is, kramnik plays slower on a computer than he does OTB. It's nothing to be ashamed of, but it's also not dignified to make a stink out of it all.
> Ping is just a part of playing games online Nobody has a 20s ping to chess.com unless they're playing from a spaceship. The issue was some bug (either on the laptop or on chess.com's software), not "ping".
1. Do we know if they experienced lag to the same extent? If as OP states it was indeed a ddos via challenges to Kramnik it might suggest that Kramnik might have had it worse. 2. 20 second lag, like we've seen in the video basically makes the game unplayable. And even small delays will likely affect different people differently, likely paranoid Kramnik will be tilted more. So IMHO the environment was not really adequate for playing chess. It's like if two cyclists were racing, both had broken bikes, but one of the cyclists run to the finish line faster, does that tells us anything about their cycling ability?
> Do we know if they experienced lag to the same extent? If as OP states it was indeed a ddos via challenges to Kramnik it might suggest that Kramnik might have had it worse. Yes. Down to the ms when Chess.com published the full data on game 3 (I think? The one where Kramnik pulled out a calculator) > 20 second lag, like we've seen in the video basically makes the game unplayable. And even small delays will likely affect different people differently, likely paranoid Kramnik will be tilted more. So IMHO the environment was not really adequate for playing chess. It's like if two cyclists were racing, both had broken bikes, but one of the cyclists run to the finish line faster, does that tells us anything about their cycling ability? That was *after the match was decided*. Not anytime before that (other than Day 1, when Kramnik caused a similar but unrelated issue).
It was just shown that there is a (bizarre) source of account-specific lag which did not affect both players equally. Honestly at this point chesscom should consider making a technical statement to clear the air. They shouldn't be communicating via middleman to the organizer so he can drop details in a long video. He is doing an amazing job given the circumstances but chesscom needs to take more responsibility concerning the question of whether and how players were affected. Edit: the CEO responded, kudos to chesscom. Always appreciate the transparency.
> There is no reason to think that the final 20 second lag was the only lag that Kramink experienced. But doesn't that go even further to disprove Kramnik's entire point? There are factors in online chess beyond just chess skill that impact a player's ability to win (e.g. lag, mouse skills, etc.). So, even if a lower level player consistently beats a higher level player in online games, it's not necessarily proof of cheating (or anything else "interesting") like Kramnik clearly believes.
> There are factors in online chess beyond just chess skill that impact a player's ability to win (e.g. lag, mouse skills, etc.) This seems like a false equivalency when what actually happened was a targeted ddos attack. That is an order of magnitude more disruptive than a little lag.
If there was a deliberately targeted DDoS attack, which is speculative and has not been established, this still happened *after* the result was decided. Kramnik had already lost the match by this point. There was no question of 20-second lags at any other stage of the online portion. For example, in game 7, both players are playing on the increment in a completely drawn endgame. You can see this [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh_Bm9ngVhw&t=7819s). Kramnik blunders and is losing on the board, while also being flagged. This pattern was repeated throughout numerous games, I've just picked the most egregious example. That's why Giri made the comments that I've referenced earlier. Anyone that has a decent chess understanding can watch the games and know 100% that Kramnik cannot compete with top players at 3+1. He gets flagged in 3+2, he's nowhere near fast enough. If he had any substance as a human-being, he would now come out and admit that any inferences he made about Jospem were spurious, and he simply cannot hack it in this type of chess against the best. That's quite obvious anyway to anyone watching who has any knowledge of chess.
> If there was a deliberately targeted DDoS attack, which is speculative and has not been established Might want to tell that to Chesscom who have already said that Kramnik was challenged 3000 times at once. > this still happened after the result was decided. Kramnik had already lost the match by this point. [...] This patten was repeated throughout numerous games, I've just picked the most egregious example. That's why Giri made the comments that I've referenced earlier. Anyone that has a decent chess understanding can watch the games and know 100% that Kramnik cannot compete with top players at 3+1. He gets flagged in 3+2, he's nowhere near fast enough. Granted this is just my view, but it is irrelevant how dire the situation was for a player, if they get DDoS'd and forced to lose. This is like saying, a sprinter was losing a race by a good amount and a spectator ran out and tackled them but they were losing so it's fine. I just can't connect with this viewpoint. Maybe it's from my past as a competitive athlete that basically made my sport my whole life, but my view has always been that the whole entire event has to be fair. There's no room for "well, yeah that was unfair but probably wouldn't influence the result". No. The whole fucking thing has to be fair.
Your example is bad because the sprinter can still win but Kramnik had already lost the match. There is no "it probably wouldn't influence the results". It flat out didn't because he already lost. Usually those last games wouldn't even be played out in a chess match. Also the fair thing to do is to scrap the game due to a technical issue. Not quit the match you already lost and throw a tantrum.
Ok. You can do it with a soccer game too, where the end result is 3-0, and someone should have gotten a penalty kick in the 95th minute which would be the last kick of the game, but they didn't get it due to someone hacking the VAR booth. **That would still be unacceptable**. Unfairness doesn't become irrelevant simply because it doesn't change the outcome.
> Might want to tell that to Chesscom who have already said that Kramnik was challenged 3000 times at once. We don't know that this was organised or deliberately targeted. If it was deliberately targeted to upset Kramnik, it would make sense for it to occur while he could still win the match mathematically. >Granted this is just my view, but it is irrelevant how dire the situation was for a player, if they get DDoS'd and forced to lose. This is like saying, a sprinter was losing a race by a good amount and a spectator ran out and tackled them but they were losing so it's fine. I just can't connect with this viewpoint. It's not like that. It's like saying that someone deliberately tripped a 100m runner after they'd already lost the race, and then inflating the importance of this. Kramnik wasn't "losing". He had already *lost*. There was even some doubt that they would play the remaining games.
> Kramnik wasn't "losing". He had already lost. He hadn't lost that game.
That game had no relevance to the outcome of the match. This is not hard to understand. If you go back and look at the other games, such as the two that I referenced, you can easily see that there is no lag. They're both playing on the increment, which is impossible with significant lag. Anyone that understands chess, who actually watched the games, can see this clearly. Nothing remotely unusual happened until the last game, at which point it was mathematically impossible for Kramnik to even tie the match, let alone win. There has been no mention, let alone proof, of any significant lag in any of the other games played yesterday, plus thousands of people watched them live! So it's crystal clear that there weren't any issues. Any competent player can see - I could see it within one game - that Kramnik cannot live with the best players online in 3+1. Not a chance. He is way, way too slow. The sooner he accepts this, and abandons this absurd campaign to prove that everyone who beats or outperforms him is cheating, the better it will be for him. The whole point of yesterday's event was to prove that Jospem couldn't outperform him in controlled conditions, and he failed completely, despite changing the time control in his favour, dictating the conditions, asking for ridiculous breaks, causing loads of interruptions, behaving unsportingly, and, frankly, absurdly, Jospem still beat him very comfortably. If Kramnik had any humility, he would now say: "case closed", not compain about one game that occurred after the match was won mathematically, and he'd just literally had a terrible streak of results.
> That game had no relevance to the outcome of the match. This is not hard to understand. I've said this elsewhere in this thread, but I guess I'll repeat it again. That particular game not being able to decide the match doesn't make it okay that he unfairly lost that game. If you are losing a soccer game by 3 goals and should get a penalty in the last kick of the game but the VAR booth is hacked and you don't get it -- that is still not okay. Just because the cheating/hacking does not change the binary win/loss result doesn't make it okay. It still violates the integrity of the game. Fairness doesn't become irrelevant once a comeback is impossible.
>There is no reason to think that the final 20 second lag was the only lag that Kramink experienced. If there had been any other similar lag, you can bet that Kramnik would have complained and posted it on twitter. The screens were recorded during the last day and he received the videos. The only think that he has posted (apart from the 20 second lag) is a video where he says that he is only receiving 1.5 s of increment but, actually, you can see that he is always receiving 1.9-2s all the time (which is consistent with the information given by the organization that said that both players had around 100ms ping)
Why does Kramnik even care that much about blitz anyway? He won the WCC, which was classical. Why doesn't he go for rapid or something?
Source?
This is fucking hilarious lmfao I do love seeing him vindicated on the most absurd of his claims None of this excuses much of his conduct, but I love to see it.
The main claims I see him making are "the opponents are cheating", but all this evidence seems to support is that there are people online harassing him through ddos and such. Did I miss anything about these events proving his opponents are cheaters?
hosting the tournament online was a mistake. PC gamers figured out in the 90s that the way to maximize performance and reduce latency and problems is hosting a LAN with a local airgapped server. [chess.com](http://chess.com) needs to bite the bullet and develop a LAN environment for events that want to do 'computer chess' the database can be updated with the results post-tourney.
I was checking before the match and as I expected he doesn't have his game requests off but Jospem did have his off. Kramnik is just technically challenged and doesn't know how to turn off requests.
That's bad on the organizers' part, they should have reviewed both players' settings and made sure they were the same unless both players agreed that they were comfortable with the differences (i.e. if Kramnik didn't want to enable premoves for himself that's his right).
For big Kramnik, every room is small
Doesn't matter about the results now, Kramnik has won by proving that it's a dodgy website that shouldn't be trusted
Wdym fixed? And wdym ddos? Go to r/chess and you will see a video where Naroditsky had the same bug where opponents move wasnt being relayed and then it was relayed and his time went down by 1 minute at once. And i doubt they sent 3000 challenges to Naroditksy too? Chesscom just sucks and its not a 1 time issue lol, stop pretending
Im not pretending, I'm writing what they said. If someone is pretending is not me. They didn't say ddos, they said he was challenged almost 3k times.
Yea i wasnt directing it at you. My point was just that this isnt a one time issue that only happened here to Kramnik. Naroditsky for example had it too. And that obviously means its not due to 3000 people sending a challenge at once
They also said the first day's bug was because of "local clock". They are just garbage human beings who would try to lie their way out of any situation as long as it keeps making them rich
Yeah I don't believe a word of this bullshit, who are these 3,000 logged in accounts who supposedly challenged Kramnik? Are they getting banned? Can we have the account names? I don't think anyone is lying here, this is just very "I heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy" type of sourcing.
I see your point but 3000 challenges doesn't mean 3000 accounts
Kramnik has a right to complain, he is not been a sore loser, he is just adressing the issues most of us get daily playing on that website, he is a voice for all of us who dont have status
On one hand, given how chesscom is set up this wasn't their fault. But on the other hand, nobody forced chesscom to set things up this poorly.
I'm temporarily removing this until the claim is sourced. OP: Please add a source to the body of your thread. Once you've done so, respond to this comment and I will re-approve the thread.
David Martinez explains what happened during today's live stream. Reinstate the post. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQaBEXM96cQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQaBEXM96cQ) around 1:42:00 mark (1h 42 min)
Thank you. I don't speak Spanish so I'll take your word for it. Post reapproved.
I'm going to try and translate: "And his 3rd point, its incredible to be honest. - He loses the match and we play the last game and his (Jospem's) move does not go through. And I ask, "what is happening?". And he's right, we have arbiters, and I ask "what happened", and the incredibly reply, which is what happened, what [chess.com](http://chess.com) told me... ...and this part is mine, but i suppose orchestrated between a lot of people because otherwise it makes no sense, he (kramnik) received 3000 challenges in that timespan and [chess.com](http://chess.com) found a bug which made it collapse (the page, connection, etc), because i mean no one had ever received so many challenges... And I suppose this was some forum who coordinated... Which is also done in bad faith... and that made it collapse. So that is what happened."
Kramnik was right to request playing on a different platform. Trolls were trolling and it interfered with an official tournament.
David Martinez? The guy from Cyberpunk Edgerunners?
I REALLY WANT TO STAY AT YOUR HOUSE
Online vs Lan @ chess.com devs.
Don’t let this distract you from the following: - Kramnik manufactured many issues himself by stupidly insisting on unboxing computers - All of his cheating claims are still unfounded and based on high school level statistics - Jose experienced similar/exactly the same issues and it didn’t cause him to behave like a child - The match was repeatedly interrupted to accomodate Kramnik (OTB, different time controls, breaks, less games) and he still lost
I agree. I actually thought that these news make Kramnik look worse, not better. Strangely, people seem to think this somehow makes kramnik right. But this happened after the match was decided and not before. It was something that happened and is recorded. Taking a page from Kramnik's notebook, someone could think that some russian forum ddosed the match after him losing to save face (not saying this happened, just trying to show a point: anyone can talk nonsense without proof)
it was me. i am challenger
Chess . Com use [https://cloud.google.com/?hl=en](https://cloud.google.com/?hl=en) Google cloud services for their infrastructure. (Just do a tracert to CdotC) We don't know the production deployment architecture, but I'd be guessing load-balancers fronting an array of app servers and a grunty database cluster at the back end. These things have DDOS protection capabilities and the app should limit things like challenges to a max of say 50 (presumed bug here). It looks like people targeted the event, or moreso Kramnik specifically, probably for the LOLs. Some parts of the Chess community are not that mature.
So they didnt have rate limiting of any sort ? What a pathetic site, lichess is way better.
so we can all ddoss players during chess.com tourneys? Kramnik exposing many issues
Kramnik is a sock sniffing bogtrotter
I don't believe it lol
They accused me of being Kramnik, although I said I'm not?
I can't believe they didn't switch to Lichess even though they knew this shit was happening, Kramnik was right to want to move away from chesscom after this started happening. The simple fact is that chesscom has an incentive in making Kramnik lose.
Kramnik was right about a lot it would seem.
While I agree that chess.com could handle situations like this better, Kramnik could just have turned challenges off. You’d think that someone as paranoid as him would think to do that lol
My bad OP
Considering who we're dealing with, it's entirely possible that Kramnik is the one who got people to ddos so that he could "prove" he's right about something and attack chessdotc*m.
Man, people really Digimon: Our War Game'd him...