07-02-2013, 11:26 AM
andyburnett Wrote:These Bulgarian 2100's are pretty strong! Top untitled player in the Masters was another youngish Bulgarian, rated 2126, playing at 2452 level for the tournament.
In the Challengers A played in the morning of the first week his stats were
Rating international 2126
Ratingperformance 2065
By the 2nd week, again the morning competition.
Rating international 2126
Ratingperformance 2536
Obviously warmed up by the 2nd week! By my reckoning he walked off with at least £3000.
Discuss
To be fair, it is possible. Some games you can just lob pieces, and a bad start gives you a bad mental frame. If he starts week 2 with a big win, confidence can grow. Personally speaking, I don't like the lynch mobs who try and seek out cheats based on people having good performances. The odds of these sorts of results are small, but then again, someone does win the lottery most weeks.
In the case of the now famous Mr Ivanov, I was pretty sure he was cheating, but not enough to condemn the man. The phrase "beyond reasonable doubt" springs to mind, and sometimes people can just streak huge runs in agreement with a machine. For example, I had a league game recently where my 1800 opponent played a near perfect game, and obviously there is nothing dodgy there, it just occasionally happens that people can play like that. The clincher for me though about Ivanov was when he claimed he had beaten Rybka and Houdini 10-0 each. That is ridiculous, and it is weird that a 2000+ can even say that and hope it would be believed. The easy way to disprove that is to give him a challenge game against Houdini, and I would be tempted to bet my life savings that he would get wiped out 10-0.