[seanhunter]

One of my favourite of these is the Professor of Mathematical Statistics from U. Waterloo who is a reasonably strong amateur chess player and was engaged by chess.com after Kramnik’s accusations about Hikaru and did a video with the chess.com “chief chess officer” (IM Danny Rensch) explaining how Kramnik’s theories about how unlikely various streak lengths were were completely wrong (based on the most basic beginner errors in misunderstanding probabilities of dependent vs independent events) and long streaks were highly likely to occur especially for players like Hikaru who play very large numbers of blitz and bullet matches.

Kramnik responded with “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about”. OK Vlad. You know more about stats than a professor of math stats at uw. Sure…

Kramnik’s behaviour throughout has been despicable. I’m pretty sure it’s grounded in the fact that he is bitter about how chess has changed and he has got older and more stuck in his ways and the modern generation of players (I’m thinking people like Danya, Jospem[1] and Lazavik[2]) play/played a brand of chess that is entirely based on deep engine analysis and is totally alien to guys like him with an old-school Russian chess background. So they must be cheating (as far as Kramnik is concerned). The way he hounded Daniel Naroditsky in particular really disgusted me and I say that as someone who used to be a fan of Kramnik’s chess.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mart%C3%ADnez_Alc%C3...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Lazavik