Cheating is a controversy in chess. A few years ago, 19-year-old twitch streamer Hans Niemann cheated twice on chess.com, getting banned from the site and ruining his reputation. On September 4, he defeated world champion Magnus Carlsen in a tournament. He left the tournament angry.
Why is the 19-year-old considered a cheater? 19-year-old Hans Moke Niemann is an American chess grandmaster and live streamer on Twitch. He streams under the name “GmHansN” and has 58,000 followers.
Niemann admitted he’s already been banned from chess.com twice for cheating:
Today, he says, he is embarrassed by these incidents, but has admitted them and is determined to right the wrongs and restore his reputation.
This reputation has apparently been ruined in the chess community for good.
Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura explains: Niemann was once banned from playing for money on chess.com for 6 months:
19-year-old beats chess god Carlsen
That was the controversy now: Niemann plays at a tournament in St. Lous against world champion and chess god Magnus Carlsen, who eliminated one of the best chess players in the world in the first round. Carlsen had previously gone 53 games straight.
Carlsen played with white against Niemann and the unbelievable happened: Carlsen lost in 57 moves.
Because he made a few mistakes at the beginning: Ultimately, Carlsen was so far behind with a bishop against a knight and 2 pawns that he had to resign. One thinks that Carlsen could have completely underestimated the opponent.
You can watch the game move by move here (via chessgame.com).
In any case, Niemann’s win over Carlsen was a real sensation. Niemann himself called it: “A ridiculous miracle”. He said he had speculated about how Carlsen would open and was preparing for it.
The best chess player in the world no longer wants to be world champion, he prefers to crack an unachievable high score
“If I tell the truth, I’ll get in trouble”
This was Carlsen’s reaction: Carlsen withdrew from the tournament a day later, on September 5. He posted a meme of soccer coach Mourinho saying: “If I tell the truth I’ll get in trouble, big trouble. And I don’t want to be in trouble.”
The statement in connection with the Mourinho clip was read as an allegation that Niemann cheated in the win against him. Although Carlsen didn’t make the accusation, others jumped in to do it for him.
Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, for example, said that Carlsen would never just walk out of a tournament unless he had very, very good reasons. After all, Carlsen is the “ultimate competitor”.
Carlsen must “suspect with great certainty that Niemann cheated,” speculates Nakamura.
Twitch is always good for a surprise:
Twitch: One of the most popular clips shows a sugar-sweet shock moment
Did Niemann cheat with sex toys?
How should he have cheated? No one really knows because the tournament had strong anti-cheat security measures in place.
A Canadian grandmaster speculates that Niemann could have cheated with anal beads: an assistant is said to have predicted moves for Niemann via the vibrations. But he’s no expert on that either.
How does the accused react? He says in a statement:
If you want me to strip completely naked, I will. ‘Cause I know I’m clean
According to Niemann, he never cheated on a board in his life. He just cheated in some online games.
I don’t want anyone to misunderstand me. I’m proud of myself that I’ve learned from my mistakes and now I’m subordinating everything to chess. I sacrificed everything for chess and did everything to improve.
He says the tournament featured the best technology in the world for detecting cheats. People would know for sure that he didn’t cheat.
I think it’s completely unfair. I’m not afraid to tell the world that I cheated in a few random games as a 12-year-old and as a 16-year-old because that’s who I am.
In any case, the encounter with Magnus Carlsen went very strangely for Niemann:
You spend your whole life looking up to someone and then you meet them and you know your dream will come true. I lived my dream for one day by beating Magnus and then this all happened.
Since the success of The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix, chess has taken off on Twitch. Individual chess players have become influencers, using the streaming platform Twitch to reach new audiences:
Chess grandmasters discover Twitch, talk fast, play faster