[marcheradiuju]

For reference, chess skill has a function indicating likelihood to beat a player of another rank (I don't recall the ratios). This user's chess skill dwarfs mine (1400s), might be higher than anyone I've ever played with in person. I can stomp all my acquaintances easily, but this person might never lose a game to me, no matter how many we play. There's something deeply gratifying about the formalization of chess skill like this imo, it keeps everyone humble. It's good to meet other players, cheers.

That said, I'm only surprised that such a high-ranking player was caught so easily with cheating. I've been expecting for many years that the problem of catching cheating in chess is complicated by motivated cheaters being necessarily intellectual, therefore hiding it well. We may never know our best cheaters, at least during their professional careers, and it's a little disheartening knowing even top100 players can overtly toss away their prospects this way. It would be a surprise for anyone this high to not be invested in chess in multiple financial avenues, so this really is like shooting yourself in the foot.

[billforsternz]

Agreed. I've been taking the game seriously for 50 years, I'm recognised as a CM (Candidate Master) by FIDE the international chess federation. I devoted years of my life to writing my chess workbench Tarrasch https://triplehappy.com. I've beaten an IM and FMs in FIDE rated classical events (I've played 3 GMs and fallen short each time - highlight was Australian GM Darryl Johanssen telling me in our post-mortem "at least you got to play one fantastic move"). Yet this guy at 22 has chess skill that dwarfs mine. An 800 Elo gap means his expectation is something like 99.9%.