#wesley so

[magicalnicole]

Magnus eating before his his match with Wesley So

July 21, 2024

[the-end-of-art]

Made a quiz. If you need to know Hikaru's spirit animal, which Disney princess would fall in love with Anish, or the D&D class of Rapport...

Which Elite Chess Player Are You?

"Maybe people don't know me so well. Even I don't know me." -Ding Liren. Take this quiz and know yourself better than Ding Liren!

[niche-drama]

Chess Drama: The PIPI Saga

Part 1: Setting the Stage

It’s September of 2020, half a year into the pandemic. It’ll be months before there’ll be vaccines for COVID-19, and all the “normal”, “respectable” chess tournaments have been on hiatus, because they dare not meet IRL and they’re too set in their ways to go virtual.

Online chess events with less clout but bigger prize pools have stepped forward to fill this gap, including the “PRO Chess League” (PRO being an acronym for Professional Rapid Online), a team-format championship where teams from different places compete against each other for a title.

This year, the winners of the tournament are a shock: the Armenia Eagles, a lesser-known team even in this lesser-known format for pro-level chess. Their all-star for the tournament is GM Tigran Petrosian (no, not the former World Chess Champion by that name, but another guy whose dad named him after the former champion), who won three of the four games he played and tied the fourth - an almost unbelievably good result at the top level of chess.

In fact, it was so unbelievable that even one of the other players in the tournament started to imply that he didn’t believe it.

GM Wesley So (a top-10-in-the-world grandmaster who was playing for the St Louis Archbishops in this tournament, who won 2nd place) commented on the chess.com article announcing the Eagles’ win with this:

The “secret gin” was a reaction to Petrosian’s joking interview comment that he’d achieved his results in this tournament because he’d had a glass of gin to drink as he played.

The second part of the comment, though, is a deeper cut. On chess.com, often instead of publicly banning titled players who’ve been found to cheat, they’ll just contact those players and ban them privately.  Basically “your account won’t show that you’re banned, but never log in again if you want it to stay that way”. In other words, Wesley was implying that:

Andriasian and Sargsyan had been cheating in a previous event and were quietly told to leave town, and

Petrosian had possibly achieved this result by committing the same sin.

Part 2: Wait, cheating at chess?

Yes, it’s possible. To oversimplify... it’s like copying the answer to a hard test question off your genius deskmate, except the “deskmate” is your desktop computer. Chess programs have been better at chess than humans for decades now; in theory, all you need to do to beat a human is enter the game into Stockfish and see what it thinks is the best move.

In practice, it’s much harder than that. Try logging into a chess website and rocketing up the ranks by copying the computer’s homework, and you’ll be banned pretty quickly. It turns out that computer moves don’t look like human moves, and people playing computer moves don’t behave like people playing their own moves either; the big chess websites all have secret sauce to try to detect cheaters, or to investigate games where they think cheating has occurred.

Of course, in an officially organized, professional event, the most straightforward way is just for the players to be watched while playing, so that it’s clear whether or not they have Droidfish open on their phones - whether by a live tournament rep in the player’s house, or just by setting up enough cameras that the judges can see what’s going on. That’s the “proctoring” that Wesley mentions in his followup comment to the thread:

The PRO Chess League finals, despite being an online-native event, only requires the players to set up a single facecam - not the multi-camera setup that would be necessary to see what the contestants are actually doing. And the “single facecam” video from the event does show Petrosian repeatedly glancing down at... something... during the tensest moments of his games.

Part 3: Classics of Post

Early the next morning, Tigran Petrosian catches wind of the conversation going on in the article comments, and decides to reply to Wesley’s accusations. But the way he chooses to do it, well... take a look for yourself.

This pretty much instantly ascended to copypasta status in the chess fandom. The /r/chess subreddit had to install an automod to remove reposts of it. Meanwhile, /r/AnarchyChess installed a bot to automatically post it whenever any of the main characters or catchphrases of this story were mentioned.

Wesley accepts the offer for an IRL money match, with a final snide remark: “You are clearly the king of online chess, man. But I will dare fight you over-the-board.”

Unfortunately, the “PIPI Invitational”, as GM Hikaru Nakamura called it in a Twitch stream, ends up not happening. Later that day, chess.com and the Pro Chess League make a joint announcement that, after conducting an investigation, they determined that Tigran Petrosian was, in fact, cheating in the semifinals and finals of the tournament. Petrosian is banned from the PCL for life, the Eagles get tempbanned, and the prizes get redistributed... thereby proving Petrosian right that, one way or another, “liers will kicked off”.

[quotesfrommyreading]

The computer takeover of chess occurred, at least in the popular imagination, 25 years ago, when the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeated world champion Garry Kasparov. Newsrooms at the time declared the match a “Greek tragedy,” in which a silicon “hand of God” had squashed humanity. Yet 1997, despite its cultural resonance, was not really an inflection point for chess. Deep Blue, a nearly 3,000-pound, one-of-a-kind supercomputer, could hardly change the game by itself. Its genius seemed reliant on then-unthinkable processing power and the grandmasters who had advised in its creation, to the point where Kasparov, after losing, could accuse IBM of having cheated by supplying the machine with human assistance—a dynamic that today’s accusations of foul play have reversed.

By the mid-2000s, though, upgrades in chess-engine software and commercial hardware made overpowering algorithms more accessible; in 2006, an engine running on a standard desktop computer defeated then–world champion Vladimir Kramnik. Players had already been using engines to evaluate individual tactics. But Kramnik’s loss kicked off the first era of computer-chess superiority, in which even chess elites would rely on software to help evaluate their strategies, Matthew Sadler, a grandmaster who has written multiple books on chess engines, told me.

As engines became widespread, the game shifted. Elite chess has always involved rote learning, but “the amount of stuff you need to prepare, the amount of stuff you need to remember, has just exploded,” Sadler said. Engines can calculate positions far more accurately and rapidly than humans, so there’s more material to be studied than ever before. What once seemed magical became calculable; where one could rely on intuition came to require rigorous memorization and training with a machine. Chess, once poetic and philosophical, was acquiring elements of a spelling bee: a battle of preparation, a measure of hours invested. “The thrill used to be about using your mind creatively and working out unique and difficult solutions to strategical problems,” the grandmaster Wesley So, the fifth-ranked player in the world, told me via email. “Not testing each other to see who has the better memorization plan.

  —  Chess Is Just Poker Now

[k-i-o-s-k]

[4 of 5] Immortal Carbon by Wesley So is about the future of humans, more specifically, transhumanism. Dark visuals and custom type by Wes printed with grey and fluro orange riso on black paper, each zine is heat sealed in an anti-static bag. Launching at #LAABF2019 at booth P50.

[magicalnicole]

Magnus has a losing position against Wesley So but comes back and wins the game!

December 17, 2024 Champion Chess Tour Finals

[k-i-o-s-k]

New Editions Launching at Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair:

Scratching the Itch by Tim Lahan Reflexion by Tyrone Williams Travel Zines — Seoul by Cory Schmitz Immortal Carbon by Wesley So There There There by Andrés Vargas, Sarah Pannell & TJ Tambellini

#LAABF runs from April 12–14 at The Geffen Contemporary at MOMA, with a preview night on April 11. Kiosk will be at Booth P50!

[chessityao3]

Checkmate! (xReader) [part 2 - links]

Compilation of Professional Chess Players X Reader created by chessity_ao3

This fanfiction one-shots are all created by Cheche, any significant or famous person, living or dead are all coincidental and fictional version. This book has been reviewed and making sure that no one will be offended. Read at your own risk. Thank you.

LINKS:

Alexander Donchenko - Cold Nights

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Arjun Erigaisi - Invitations

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Vincent Keymer - Consolations

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TBD FOR MORE ONESHOTS

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LINK FOR PT. 1 ONESHOTS.