[tjwhitaker]

I don’t think he necessarily has to be god level. This has been talked about ad nauseum but it’s not that hard to cheat just a little to gain significant advantage. Security has been lax at these events and there are numerous examples of cheating at the top level of many sports and throughout chess history. It’s definitely not that outrageous to see the possibility. Rapid and classical are different games that require different skill sets. He is definitely strong regardless which I think most people agree on. So you may have a point that he should still be able to have better analysis than what he showed. Especially if it’s a classical game where you have been thinking and calculating deeply for 2 hours. Perhaps the analysis was whack exactly because he wasn’t thinking and calculating deeply in these critical positions as magnus suggests in his statement.

None of us know for sure and it’s all speculation at this point. He could be trolling. He could be cheating. At some level he lied in his apology interview. He has not acknowledged the statement chess.com made in which they accused him of lying and cheating more often and more recently than he admitted. There’s just a lot of suspicion and sometimes where there’s smoke there is fire. My guess is he is a strong grandmaster that desperately wanted to be a super gm and took some shortcuts to get there.

[roflyear]

My point is the argument "he can't even do analysis" does not match up with the argument "it’s not that hard to cheat just a little to gain significant advantage"

To do the second, you need to still be extremely good at chess. Way beyond the level required to do any type of analysis.

"Perhaps the analysis was whack exactly because he wasn’t thinking and calculating deeply in these critical positions as magnus suggests in his statement."

You'd still need to calculate, if you're "just cheating a little"