That’s specifically in response to the question of whether or not Niemann has played a statistically anomalous number of “near perfect games”, based on analysis

That’s specifically in response to the question of whether or not Niemann has played a statistically anomalous number of “near perfect games”, based on analysis of on-board moves. But as they note earlier: > Hans is consistently above many contemporaries in strength increases, even though he has only recently shown the same caliber of play. Likewise, as set forth in Figures A and B below, Hans had the fastest and biggest increase in his score over time in comparison to his peers and other notable players, when considering all of their known Classical OTB games played from age 11-19. Which should raise a lot of red flags given the nature of the “peers” (Fischer, Magnus) and its very sudden occurrence after being banned from online tournaments. It’s much harder to detect computer-aided cheating in classical time control moves than in speed chess (where they detected it in his online play) — not least because, as they note, they have no access to time-usage data for the OTB events, which would be critical to any such analysis. Nevertheless they do flag 6 OTB events that their FairPlay team believes merits further analysis by FIDE, in Appendix X.3. Reading between the lines I think that’s about as strong a statement as they can make without fully creating political issues with FIDE, who they’re probably hoping will work more closely with them going forward. All that said, it makes more sense to look at the anomalous nature of his OTB outcomes rather than searching individual OTB moves trying to find a smoking gun given chess.com’s relative lack of data there, and the political entanglements involved. And as for that > While we don’t doubt that Hans is a talented player, we note that his results are statistically extraordinary.