The Chess.com report -- for all it's reported length -- is a little bit light on details. One thing that they claim to have access to is toggle data, which means evidence that during the game there was toggling with another screen or program. Not sure how granular it is, but I suppose if you could time toggling between moves that showed a high degree of accuracy that could be pretty compelling. Beyond that, my read of the chess.com report was that it seemed to be trying to create an appearance of significant statistical robustness, but it was tough to parse it out.
What was pretty telling to me was a segment of one of Danya's twitter streams where Hikaru called him and they broke down several of the 10 games that chess.com said Hans cheated against Danya in. It is hard to find because they just put up all 4 hours of a twitch stream and it was in the middle of one. But you could kind of tell that they went in expecting to see something that was pretty compelling and really they found that Hans wasn't overly accurate and that neither of them could really see occasions of moves that did not seem like human moves. Danya did not remember the games as remarkable. But in the end they were kind of stuck concluding "well, chess.com must have some info we don't have." (That's not an actual quote.) If the guy you cheated against can't even see where it might have been, and your accuracy was merely above average, that to me starts to call into question the entire "100 games" narrative, and once you start asking questions about why chess.com made such a public splash about these allegations -- selectively leaking them to the WSJ -- when its whole MO is to kind of resolve this stuff quietly in the past, you do start to get a sense that Hans is not just a conspiracy theorist. There does seem to be some attempt by chess.com to carry Magnus' water here though I'm not entirely such it's as nefarious as the lawyers want to make it sound.
As an aside, one of the interesting things in the chess.com report is the bombshell that they had quietly banned a 2700 level player (not Hans) and got him to admit cheating. From the emails you can tell the guy's first language is not English, but the other thing that's kind of telling is the way that the guy sort of admits it and also tries to rationalize it. It's kind of a non-apology apology. I was struck when reading the report how differently they treated that guy from how they treated Hans. Their story is that once he gave an interview that minimized his cheating on chess.com, it was all gloves off and they were justified doing whatever they pleased. I find that interesting, when coupled with a quiet allegation in the complaint that gets no notice -- that chess.com simply lied when they said they had provided Hans with evidence of his cheating in these other games. That should be easy to prove or disprove. That would matter a lot to me if I were on a jury.
The rest of the chess.com report reads like gobbledygook to me. Lots of stuff in there about how Hans' rise in over the board rating is not commensurate with other prodigies and that he seems to have excelled too late in life. Agadmator has been careful not to pick sides, but he has been taking swipes at this kind of thinking and I tend to agree with him. My baseline assumption is that Hans is a cheating cheater who cheats, but he also is brash and kicked the crap out of the world champion with the black pieces in over the board where everyone has now said there was no evidence of cheating. But the idea that if someone comes along who had dramatic jumps at 14 instead of 12 we can't let him beat the world champion with the black pieces without taking him down kind of bums me out.
The lawsuit has some serious procedural problems that will need to get worked through before the merits. Some of the defendants might have to be sued outside Missouri, and that could create problems for Hans. Missouri is pretty generous about defamation suits and more plaintiff friendly than places like New York. But if Hans gets through those, and the case goes far enough along to be asking questions like "how destructive was this of Hans' career," he's going to be in pretty good shape. That's usually jury stuff, and once it gets to that point it's not good for the defendants.
The complaint lays out opportunities that Hans has lost because of this. He's basically been banned in over the board tournaments, according to the complaint, and lost out on the ability to play in Tata Steel -- a very important tournament. I have no knowledge of any of that, though, other than what he alleges.
