Hikaru can be a dick and still be right
Yes.
But you can be right without knowing and be wrong about how you handle it.
For example, if I accused someone on the street randomly of being a murderer, and police swatted their house and found a bunch of evidence of a murder, but I was just joking, I was right, but not because I knew what the heck I was talking about, and if I keep doing that, it's mostly going to hit innocent people.
Hikaru can be right about Hans cheating over the board, but how he's going about it is assuming the conclusion and looking for all evidence that can fit the crime, where "evidence" means anything he can use to smear the guy.
Even if Hans is a big fat cheat, or used to be, that's not how people correctly accuse people of a wrongdoing. It's irresponsible. It's ego-stroking, it's selfish. He's doing it for personal gain, clicks, donations. He doesn't have evidence. He doesn't know what he's talking about.
It's the difference between having a gut feeling and having reason. Hikaru doesn't have reason to believe Hans is cheating over the board right now, especially with enhanced security. But he doesn't want to back down, so he's just saying everything Hans does is evidence of cheating whether it be him playing good moves or bad moves.
When everything, no matter what it is, fits only one conclusion, maybe the conclusion is forced.
This person isn't a grandmaster purely because all they do is cheat. This guy is genuinely talented at chess. It's why in other sports when cheating happens, the person doing the cheating is usually a very talented person all on their own. Football players who use substances, or get info about the other team's plays, or what have you. Speedrunners online who are genuinely good and then cheat to get a world record that would otherwise take them 10,000 more hours of streaming.
That kind of deal.
Hans without cheating could easily wipe the floor with all of us scrubs talking about him. The theory is he's cheating so that he can get his ELO rating up, get invited to more tournaments, and win cash prizes. One doesn't sustain a chess career by being a player that never wins cash prizes.
He's definitely cheated during tournaments that had prizes before, according to chess.com.
Beating Carlsen over the board means more media attention, more tournament invites, more chances to win cash prizes. There's an incentive for him to try to speed up his ascension.
But, if you look at games where he probably isn't cheating and simply throw spaghetti at the wall and say this is why he's still cheating, by the way, donate now, give me bits, give me views, subscribe to my channel, that's not being an impartial investigator.
And it's really irresponsible to make unfounded allegations public, repeat them over and over again, until people think it is the truth, when there's no facts behind it.
Not to bring up real world events, but that's the same behavior that led some people to turn to violence over an election. Just lying to them over and over, forcing a conclusion where the evidence doesn't fit and in fact contradicts it, and that led to people dying.
Here, no one's dying, but Hikaru is profiting off of slander using unfounded allegations.
I tore Magnus one for naming Hans without proof. What Hikaru is doing is a thousand times worse. He's genuinely being a very bad person right now.
No offense to anyone here if you're a fan of Hikaru or disagree with me that what he's doing is wrong. I don't want to make it personal or contentious between us. I just want to underscore how grossly irresponsible Hikaru is being and how immoral it is what he's doing.
He's going to get away with it because Hans cheated in the past. But if I took someone fresh out of prison on a marijuana possession and accused them of trafficking meth, on zero evidence, and asked people to donate to me so I could keep "catching criminals", I'd be a genuinely sick individual.
I hope we can agree on this much.
read: acting out your belief) he cheats without evidence otb is imo very dishonorable to do from those chess influencers.
