Accusations of cheating in the highest tournament levels of chess

[Joij21]

Plot twist incoming! It was Magnus who cheated all along!!!

 

[Snerk]

Why?

Same reason I've cheated at monopoly. Sweet sweet victory.

 

[Narz]

But it's not your victory.

 

[FriendlyFire]

Apparently Hans had his banana scanned.
Please wake me up.

Probably easier to hide a device in your shoes

 

[Sofista]

He also says that Magnus announced he won't play again in a tournament with Hans. Which brings the inevitable question: should such be possible as open blackmail of tournaments? (and with no repercussions).

Once he became world champion, Alekhine had enough clout that he never played a competitive game with Capablanca between 1927-1936 (when he wasn't, momentarily, the champion).

 

[Snerk]

But it's not your victory.

Yeah but it damn sure wasn't my sister's either

 

[Kyriakos]

Another draw for Hans:

He is doing ok (1 win, 2 draws), but looks saddened by the continuous checks on such a king.

 

[Moriarte]

Is there no case of Hans giving some (adequate for his level) analysis?

From where I sit, there’s just no way to answer this question unless your surname is Caruana, Nakamura, Carlsen or a small bunch of others. It very well may be the total count of people in the world, who have enough mental baggage to form constructive view on whether Niemann’s analysis is adequate for his level of play is < 40, the “2700 ELO club”. Furthermore, I doubt most of these people will be inclined to give a definitive answer by just watching a 5 minute post-game speech of a (understandably) nervous youngster, which we saw happen during Sinquefield Cup. Hikaru gave his negative opinion, throwing out “this is not superGM analysis”. But other sGM participants were more reserved when assessing the Niemann situation.

Hikaru can be putting the youngster down for reasons of his own, he can be misinterpreting the message in it’s complexity. Or, he could be right on the money. Point is, we might never know. That’s why I feel this analysis bit is too subjective to be used as proof of proficiency/proof of foul play. If a panel of 10 sGM’s came out and said: hey look, this is bullfeathers analysis - I’d take on faith there really is something fishy. But they didn’t, so I’m not feeling any attachment to Hikaru’s assessment.

As I understand @Narz is the highest rated chess player in this thread, closing in on Master level. It’d be great if he confirmed or denied my train of thought on whether only the highest rated can give out a fair assessment or if, on the contrary, the analysis is less esoteric than I think @ my level of understanding chess.

 

[Narz]

As I understand @Narz is the highest rated chess player in this thread, closing in on Master level.

Oh no, not even close. I reached my high water mark almost a decade ago now & have been slipping since then (for rapid improvement past a certain level chess is a young man's game like other sports).

It’d be great if he confirmed or denied my train of thought on whether only the highest rated can give out a fair assessment or if, on the contrary, the analysis is less esoteric than I think @ my level of understanding chess.

I would find it hard to notice the difference between 2400 level analysis and 2700 level analysis. More than 400 points above me all seems pretty impressive.

 

[Kyriakos]

Hopefully Magnus won't resign from the tournament and make a cryptic announcement about Pragg

Anyway, apparently everyone can blunder despite so few pieces on the board and the game being about the knight's position since forever.

Hans also lost, though (to Fabiano).
New interview was funny:

 

[TheMeInTeam]

i do appreciate the "speaks for itself" trolling, especially after they spent extra time checking him in the tournament line and such. there's basically nothing hans can do to dispel the doubt entirely, but trolling the apparent difference in treatment is at least good entertainment.

 

[Askthepizzaguy]

@Askthepizzaguy and @Moriarte Thanks for bring real chess knowledge to this thread. You both keep it from just being a thread about the Kardashians.

That's really all I have, and it's almost all secondhand. I am so bad at chess personally.

Spoiler :

My personal chess knowledge is... inadequate.

I do watch a lot of GMs or strong IMs play chess and I've learned their lessons. Why I cannot improve, I've narrowed it down to aphantasia. I literally cannot make images in my mind, which most people can do to some degree.

So I can see a move ahead at a time by "imagining" one piece moved, but I can't actually "see" it in my head. I'm moreso remembering that the board is different, kind of like remembering the lines to Monty Python as opposed to reading it off of a script. I cannot, absolutely cannot see the script in my head. I just remember which word comes after the others when prompted.

If I close my eyes, I cannot see anything, I cannot pretend to see anything, I cannot concentrate and conjure an image. I know what a chess board looks like, but even remembering it in my head, I do not get any images in my mind. None. I can describe it because I know by heart what features it has. I cannot picture the board in my head with my eyes closed, let alone where the pieces would be on it.

That severely damages my ability to think ahead. I can solve chess puzzles because I can remember chess principles, I know what forcing moves are, I know to think about all checks and captures and tactics before making the first move.

But if it's an endgame puzzle where I need to move my king in one of the 8 directions, I'm usually not solving it because I cannot remember each search tree in my head and I cannot picture the positions on the board after a move or two. I lose it, and just see the board in front of me. And if I close my eyes, I can't remember the position on the board.

That's absolutely stunting. There's no way I can improve except by rote memorization of tactical positions and patterns.

When I solve difficult chess puzzles it's largely because I didn't solve them ever, I remember similar puzzles and the solutions offered by grandmasters.

I remember that when the queen is here and the knight is here this is a smothered mate by dropping my queen next to the king and letting it be captured by a different piece other than the king. Then the knight does this and that and here's the checkmate.

It's not because I can picture it. It's purely because I remember that when x and y and z are happening on the board smothered mate is possible. I could not, without drawing the position turn by turn on a piece of freaking paper, be able to solve a mate in seven without having already memorized that specific mating pattern.

That makes it incredibly difficult to gain strength over the board.

I am one of those people who, with an engine, could probably teach chess. But I can't play it. I remember things and can explain things. Performing them over the board with zero prompting and no engine help, I'm limited to understanding tactics and checking all one move checks and captures.

That said, something I can pick up on a single scan of the board, like king safety? That I am excellent at. It's rather obvious how many moves it takes for each piece to come to the defense of a king, you can count the squares. You can count the number of pieces available for king's defense duty by X many turns from now.

Because it's counting and looking at the board in front of me instead of some imaginary board, it's really rare that my king is ever unsafe.

Long term strategic concepts and things like pawn structure, weak pawns, undefended pieces, overloaded pieces, all tactical concepts, I get those. That's stuff you can understand just by looking at the board in front of you.

But given I can't analyze much further ahead than a move or two, I'm really at my peak. I can never really improve. You absolutely have to be able to picture the board in 3 moves from now to be able to tell if that's a good position for you, or a bad one.

If you gave me a string of 16 numbers I wouldn't be able to retain it in my head at all unless I turned it into a song I could repeat on a loop and memorize. Otherwise I cannot picture the string visually. To be able to analyze a chess position you need to have spatial awareness of where all the pieces are in relation to one another.

Put those 16 numbers on a page and there's zero chance I'd ever be able to remember where they were on the page. Straight impossible for me. I'll never be above 1500 or 1600 because of that. I think my peak was 1600 like a decade ago.

Aphantasia - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Mine is so bad I may actually be in the 0.8 percent, absolute worst category. The 1st percentile, which is the worst in terms of percentiles.

 

[Narz]

That's really all I have, and it's almost all secondhand. I am so bad at chess personally.

Spoiler :

My personal chess knowledge is... inadequate.

I do watch a lot of GMs or strong IMs play chess and I've learned their lessons. Why I cannot improve, I've narrowed it down to aphantasia. I literally cannot make images in my mind, which most people can do to some degree.

So I can see a move ahead at a time by "imagining" one piece moved, but I can't actually "see" it in my head. I'm moreso remembering that the board is different, kind of like remembering the lines to Monty Python as opposed to reading it off of a script. I cannot, absolutely cannot see the script in my head. I just remember which word comes after the others when prompted.

If I close my eyes, I cannot see anything, I cannot pretend to see anything, I cannot concentrate and conjure an image. I know what a chess board looks like, but even remembering it in my head, I do not get any images in my mind. None. I can describe it because I know by heart what features it has. I cannot picture the board in my head with my eyes closed, let alone where the pieces would be on it.

That severely damages my ability to think ahead. I can solve chess puzzles because I can remember chess principles, I know what forcing moves are, I know to think about all checks and captures and tactics before making the first move.

But if it's an endgame puzzle where I need to move my king in one of the 8 directions, I'm usually not solving it because I cannot remember each search tree in my head and I cannot picture the positions on the board after a move or two. I lose it, and just see the board in front of me. And if I close my eyes, I can't remember the position on the board.

That's absolutely stunting. There's no way I can improve except by rote memorization of tactical positions and patterns.

When I solve difficult chess puzzles it's largely because I didn't solve them ever, I remember similar puzzles and the solutions offered by grandmasters.

I remember that when the queen is here and the knight is here this is a smothered mate by dropping my queen next to the king and letting it be captured by a different piece other than the king. Then the knight does this and that and here's the checkmate.

It's not because I can picture it. It's purely because I remember that when x and y and z are happening on the board smothered mate is possible. I could not, without drawing the position turn by turn on a piece of freaking paper, be able to solve a mate in seven without having already memorized that specific mating pattern.

That makes it incredibly difficult to gain strength over the board.

I am one of those people who, with an engine, could probably teach chess. But I can't play it. I remember things and can explain things. Performing them over the board with zero prompting and no engine help, I'm limited to understanding tactics and checking all one move checks and captures.

That said, something I can pick up on a single scan of the board, like king safety? That I am excellent at. It's rather obvious how many moves it takes for each piece to come to the defense of a king, you can count the squares. You can count the number of pieces available for king's defense duty by X many turns from now.

Because it's counting and looking at the board in front of me instead of some imaginary board, it's really rare that my king is ever unsafe.

Long term strategic concepts and things like pawn structure, weak pawns, undefended pieces, overloaded pieces, all tactical concepts, I get those. That's stuff you can understand just by looking at the board in front of you.

But given I can't analyze much further ahead than a move or two, I'm really at my peak. I can never really improve. You absolutely have to be able to picture the board in 3 moves from now to be able to tell if that's a good position for you, or a bad one.

If you gave me a string of 16 numbers I wouldn't be able to retain it in my head at all unless I turned it into a song I could repeat on a loop and memorize. Otherwise I cannot picture the string visually. To be able to analyze a chess position you need to have spatial awareness of where all the pieces are in relation to one another.

Put those 16 numbers on a page and there's zero chance I'd ever be able to remember where they were on the page. Straight impossible for me. I'll never be above 1500 or 1600 because of that. I think my peak was 1600 like a decade ago.

Aphantasia - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Mine is so bad I may actually be in the 0.8 percent, absolute worst category. The 1st percentile, which is the worst in terms of percentiles.

My girlfriend has this, she generally describes it as prospagnostia (inability to recognize faces) but she can't really keep an images in her head at all.

She can still see people in dreams tho and has quite vivid ones.

The brain is interesting.

 

[Askthepizzaguy]

I can recognize faces, but I can't remember them visually. If I try to picture someone's face that I've met, I can describe features about them that I recall. What I can't do is draw the face. I can draw anything I look at almost photo realistically. I can't conjure an image to draw.

When I see someone's face, I recall the pattern. But it's purely because I am getting visual help by having their face in front of me at the time.

It's like earlier when I was describing the queen knight king king stalemate, it wasn't because I could picture it in my head, I had to describe it by remembering the patterns of stalemates where a piece is immobile due to pin and the king cannot move.

I had to describe the circumstances of the pattern, but while I was pretty sure of generally how it would be positioned, I couldn't imagine all 4 pieces in my head at once.

I just knew the knight had to be rendered immobile because otherwise the knight can always move when there's only one other same color piece on the board.

And the king had to be rendered immobile due to walking too close to the enemy king.

What I couldn't do is reverse engineer that and know for sure if there was a legal sequence of moves that could lead to that stalemate. Kind of like how checkmating with 2 knights versus a lone king sorta requires help from the enemy side. Any series of forcing moves puts the enemy king in stalemate for at least a turn, so the actual checkmating position of 2 knights versus a king doesn't come up over the board even though it's technically a legal position.

I couldn't remember if there was a legal move sequence because I can't remember if the act of pinning the knight to the king while moving your king closer involved illegal moves from the side trying to get stalemated.

I think there's something wrong with it because pinning the knight to the king is a queen move, but then it's the other side's turn. So it has to be stalemate on that move if it is a stalemate at all.

So what makes it a stalemate is like, trying to checkmate the enemy king which is already trapped in a corner, and the knight has to defend the king from checkmate before the queen delivers check, and then the queen pins the knight and there's no legal move.

But because I can't picture it, all I know is that the stalemate is possible. Engineering the sequence of moves to get there requires like, logical deductions for me.

If I could just see the freakin' pieces in my head that's a trivial endgame to talk about. It's like one step above a king and rook mate in terms of complexity.

 

[Kyriakos]

^There are (basic) exercises to help with that, if you are interested (not that you have to be, it's rather not needed in most fields). Virtually anyone can imagine (say) an immobile image of something without much detail, such as a letter. You can also (quickly) find out how many letters you can imagine concurrently, and complications from there (how many sensed as distinct groups etc).
Visualization helps with art, certainly, but also with some types of math (geometry being a very good example).
With chess, yes, most players of GM level are said to be able to visualize at least 3-4 moves ahead (obviously after the openings which are a different study), which tends to mean a couple of tens of different progressions, I suppose.
But have heart, in the video I posted you saw Magnus blunder a knight who was central to his game, and all that in the absolute endgame ^_^ He said he didn't think that the opponent would take his pawn, so was left with king and bishop (so automatic draw).

PS: Hans now lost two games in a row, which isn't good (has 1 win, 2 draws and 2 loses in the tournament).

 

[FriendlyFire]

PS: Hans now lost two games in a row, which isn't good (has 1 win, 2 draws and 2 loses in the tournament).

Either Hans will prove himself in the next few years by increasing hes rank and winning tournaments or it will become very clear that he cheated

 

[Birdjaguar]

I suspect he is a cheater.

 

[Askthepizzaguy]

Either Hans will prove himself in the next few years by increasing hes rank and winning tournaments or it will become very clear that he cheated

Absolutely.

I mean, it's clear he's cheated and that he's cheated for prize money, which is far worse. It's clear he lied about it. It's clear he's not even remotely remorseful about it given his arrogance when he discussed these matters.

What isn't clear is that he's cheated over the board. But, I suspect if he wants to get that sweet prize money again, he's got to place well in prize money tournaments. At some point he will cheat in a detectable manner, or he will try to become like a chess streamer. He's got enough fanbois that it might work out for him.

He's being made sort of an example, but according to chess.com cheating is actually fairly common among even GMs. I forget if it was like 10 percent or 20 or something but it was a significant amount of cheating.

Likely GMs getting frustrated with online cheaters and then resorting to it themselves, similar to how pro athletes learn how little consequences there are for doping so they take steroids and try to even the score.

I think it's especially egregious to cheat in rated games and very egregious to cheat for prize money. But unfortunately there's a lot like Hans, and it's also probable that Hans can be in that camp where he cheated because he feels others are cheating. Who knows.

I don't think he's the devil. I do think he's unrepentant and arrogant, which is a bad combination for someone who is trying to turn over a new, honest leaf.

We will see if his heel face turn is legit when he stalls out at 2680 and continues placing near the bottom in GM tournaments, or if he tries to go for real prizes in places where he feels the cheat detection is worse.

I also think that this drama may impact his future invites to big name big money prize tournaments and frankly, it should. If you're known to cheat for rated games and prize money, and you've done it even after being caught cheating before, there's zero expectation you will ever improve.

I think all of that is completely fair. If you rob a bank you can't work in a bank. It's a no brainer. Doesn't make you irreparably evil, but reputation matters.

 

[Kyriakos]

It is a bad lapse, but as you said there are many others who cheat online, to boost their rating. That he is only 19 makes this brutal, imo, since it is clearly taking a toll on his playing (now 3 loses in a row, and although it is a very long tournament, it will be hard to get back from that).
Besides, if it can't be established he has cheated over the board, this all started from a false premise already (Magnus throwing a fit because he lost over the board to him). And regardless of what is true or not, he is being searched all the time, so isn't cheating (and won some good games prior to this losing streak).

 

[Moriarte]

The attention to Hans’ persona is off the charts at the moment. That became part of the equation, whether by design or by accident. Anyone talks about Alireza Firouzja any more? They should. The man is also 19, briefly touched 2800 ELO , which is unprecedented. He also plays daring, attacking chess, always intriguing to watch. Clearly the next big man in chess. This Niemann business is not even in the same ballpark, with Hans stalling at 2700 at 19. So, he won against Carlsen. Big deal. Judith Polgar won against Carlsen in some park in Madrid few weeks ago. To be the chess champion one needs consistency - stellar physical and mental form and the ability to win against most people all the time, which translates to the highest rating. Niemann, self-admittedly, lives a recluse in hotels around the world, alone. Eats garbage delivery food. And tries to stir up controversy around himself, on occasion, and that is not a recipe for longevity.

Hans isn’t a natural contender for Carlsen’s throne, he might think he is, but he’s not. A strong 2700. I doubt his current strength is sustainable given the extremely hectic circumstances of Niemann’s life.