Vladimir Kramnik is the most boring person in the chess world

Former world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik is very concerned about people using engines to cheat at chess. He has accused or insinuated that countless players, including Daniel Naroditsky and Hikaru Nakamura, have cheated online or over the board. His accusations raise awareness of the potential of people to get their chess moves from apps, rather than coming up with them on their own.

Here’s the thing, though. Awareness doesn’t need to be raised about that possibility, because everyone already knows about it. After learning the rules and the name of the current world champion, the next thing beginners probably learn about chess is the fact that freely available engines are capable of beating any human.

So when Kramnik leveled his latest baseless accusation, against English IM Tom Rendle, it didn’t contain any new information. It was boring.

Rendle had defeated Kramnik in an online blitz game. Kramnik went to Twitter and called Rendle a cheater (and an amateur, for good measure). He didn’t have evidence. What he had was the fact that engines are easy to access, a fact that everyone already knows.

Ironically, the person whose catchphrase of aspersion-casting is the word “interesting” is the most boring person in the chess world.

Most serious chess players use engines to analyze our games, and everyone watching any major chess event sees the engine-powered evaluation bar on the side of the board. The potential for abuse with this tool is extremely obvious. Chess.com does a ton of work to detect and punish cheaters. Much of it is surely done in secret, to keep cheaters from knowing and evading their methods. They definitely don’t catch everyone. It’s a really hard problem. But they take it seriously, and there’s little one could reasonably expect them to do differently as a result of Kramnik’s random insinuations.

His tweet about Rendle earned Kramnik his second ban from prize money tournaments on Chess.com, this one for for six months. I expect this won’t deter him from continuing his accusatory ways, and it will be very uninteresting to see his next baseless accusation when it happens.

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In other news, I’ve stopped using Twitter (for non-Kramnik related reasons, mostly) and am now doing daily chess posting on the Twitter clone Bluesky. Connect with me there!