Chess.com alleges that 19-year-old grandmaster Hans Niemann has cheated in additional than 100 video games.
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Chess.com alleges that 19-year-old grandmaster Hans Niemann has cheated in additional than 100 video games.
Pongkiat Rungrojkarnka/EyeEm/Getty Photos/EyeEm
The trickle of details about the dishonest scandal wracking elite chess was a deluge Tuesday evening, when Chess.com mentioned it believes Hans Niemann, a 19-year-old grandmaster, cheated in additional than 100 video games.
The report — which runs to 72 pages with supporting paperwork akin to electronic mail conversations — is sending a recent jolt via the chess world. It is intensifying curiosity within the U.S. Chess Championships that start in St. Louis on Wednesday, the place Niemann and 13 different gamers are vying for the title.
The match, streaming video games on YouTube and Twitch, has $250,000 in prize cash at stake. Play begins every day at 2 p.m. ET and can run for the subsequent two weeks. In his first match, Niemann is slated to face 15-year-old Christopher Woojin Yoo.
When contacted by NPR, neither Neimann nor match organizers supplied a touch upon Wednesday.
It is the most recent growth in a scandal that has gripped folks past the chess world since a month in the past, when world champion Magnus Carlsen abruptly withdrew from a match after dropping to Neimann and hinted at foul play. Two weeks later, Carlsen resigned a game against Neimann after one move fairly than play in opposition to him once more, after which accused him of dishonest.
Niemann will play for the U.S. title regardless of suspicions
Regardless of the web site’s damning report, Niemann ought to nonetheless be allowed to play within the in-person U.S. Chess Championships, says Ken Regan, an authority on dishonest in chess who’s a professor of laptop science and engineering on the College at Buffalo.
“Cross-jurisdiction issues between on-line chess and in-person chess haven’t been resolved,” Regan advised NPR.
Regan additionally notes that Niemann stays in good standing with the three related organizations behind the championship match, referring to the St. Louis Chess Membership (which is internet hosting the competitors), the U.S. Chess Federation and FIDE, the world governing physique.
The Chess.com report cites Regan as an impartial professional, saying he agrees with its conclusions that Niemann cheated in a number of cash-prize on-line occasions in 2015 and 2017, and in addition in “quite a few matches in opposition to different skilled gamers in 2020.”
Dishonest in chess typically takes the type of secretly getting transfer suggestions from a pc program, often known as a chess engine.
Whereas the Chess.com findings incriminate Niemann’s play in on-line video games, the report acknowledges “a scarcity of concrete statistical proof” that Niemann has cheated in any in-person or “over-the-board” (OTB) video games.
Nonetheless, the report suggests additional evaluate is required to check “how Hans grew to become the quickest rising high participant in Classical OTB chess in trendy recorded historical past a lot later in life than his friends.” It additionally notes that Niemann’s ranking soared after the location quietly suspended him in 2020, when it confronted him with proof of dishonest.
What Niemann has mentioned about dishonest
On Sept. 6, Niemann publicly admitted utilizing digital units to cheat — however he insisted he solely did so when he was 12 and 16 years outdated. Within the first occasion, Niemann mentioned, he was “only a baby.” He referred to as the second “a fully ridiculous mistake.”
Aside from when he was 12, Niemann mentioned, he had by no means cheated in a match with prize cash. It was “the worst factor that I may ever do,” he mentioned.
Niemann additionally mentioned he hadn’t cheated when he was streaming video games (many high gamers run profitable video accounts on Twitch and different providers).
The report clashes with Niemann’s statements
However the brand new Chess.com report states, “Hans has possible cheated in additional than 100 on-line chess video games, together with a number of prize cash occasions. He was already 17 when he possible cheated in a few of these matches and video games. He was additionally streaming in 25 of those video games.”
That is excess of the handful of video games that had been seemingly referenced in 2020, when the location initially suspended Niemann for six months. Based on the report, different gamers and Chess.com employees had lingering doubts about Niemann that solely grew after his 2020 suspension, as his rating soared and he was poised to compete in high-profile occasions with massive payouts.
Chess.com says its anti-cheating expertise discovered quite a few issues when it performed a deep evaluate of Niemann’s profession. It says its system can “detect patterns of affect from engines that quantity to a certainty that we are able to stand behind.”
When requested for his view of Chess.com’s anti-cheating measures, Regan referred to as it a “multifaceted” system that features info gathered via the web site’s interface.
Whereas Regan hasn’t tried to breed each one of many web site’s findings independently, he mentioned, “Basically I’ve no quarrel with their strategies; mine could also be sharper within the vein the place we overlap.”
The case has put a vibrant highlight on dishonest in chess
Worldwide Chess Federation Director-Normal Emil Sutovsky recently said that within the chess neighborhood, “we want a social contract, agreeing that dishonest, particularly on-line, will typically stay within the grey zone.”
When requested how prevalent dishonest is on the elite stage, Regan mentioned, “In on-line chess, a number of different elite gamers have been sanctioned, even aside from Chess.com and what they are saying within the report.”
As for in-person dishonest, he added, “I have no idea of any over-the-board case involving somebody rated 2700 or above, i.e. high 50-60” on the earth that had been vital.
