Biggest chess scandal in history is currently occurring

On the contrary, ruSSian army is ready to go home. They aren't gaining much ground after 6 months and Ukraine is reclaiming lost territory. Should have learned better strategy through chess

I told y'all the Brits were dirty, y'all wouldn't believe me! I wonder how Lord Coeverup wil cover this one up? Asthama inhalers and TUEs, my big Texan behind! That Magnus dude is doped to the max like all the Norwegian limeys! We should never have bailed their limey butts out at Hastings!

Exactly! I won a chess game once by sacrificing my queen for a rook, next move Check Mate!

Knowing in advance your opponents first move can be advantageous, but you still have to cover the opening and play defense on black. It's not as easy as it sounds. Someone playing white shouldn't be given more credit for a win than the guy who plays black and gets a draw or stalemate.

I'd like to see a game with good/great chess players, who get to make their opening moves, simultaneously. ie. written on paper before before the match, handed to the judge who moves the two pieces. Then the judge could flip a coin to see who moves first. Or the two players could play rock, paper, scissors to determine who moves first.

What do you guys think?

You should maybe post this on letschess.com instead?

I was somewhat following the live game (with commentary and the provided engine analysis) while it was going on. At the point I started watching (in the middle game, didn't see the opening) Magnus had a slightly worse position but with fairly accurate play shouldn't have had any major issues to draw. Then he made some inaccuracies and gave to Hans what should have been a winning advantage, but Hans didn't manage to capitalize and made his own inaccuracies (suggesting he definitely wasn't using some form of move-to-move cheating with a strong engine).

Magnus could have still salvaged a draw in the end game, but made one or two decisive mistakes after which the evaluation bar went from slightly better to winning for black (Hans). After that point, it was more of a matter for technique for Hans to win (at the 2700 GM level).

While I get there are some suspicious circumstances and Hans has a record (albeit some time ago) of cheating, my gut tells me Magnus just got outplayed and is bitter about losing to someone like Hans, especially with white. If anything, maybe somehow Hans got Magnus' opening prep, but Magnus still got outplayed from that point on.

Don’t Magnus me. THIS LITTLE RAT IS GUILTY!!

I wouldn’t call this a chess scandal on Hans. I would call it as a conspiracy. I’m still waiting for someone to show or prove exactly how this cheating was done. And if it’s not able to be proven , the chess organizers of this competition should release a message saying “we have thoroughly investigated all cheating and bribery allegations during the competition and found Hans Niemann to compete in accordance with the rules”.

Is that Jack Harlow?

I completely agree with you.

I'm part way through the Hans Niemann video and he certainly looks like he knows what he's doing. Of course he doesn't know everything but neither does anyone else, and he's quite open minded which is good.

This^^^

Magnus essentially played his worst game against a much lower rated player and lost. Rather than having that loss on the books, Magnus scrubbed the whole tournament and insinuated Hans used foul play. That's some petty ego shift right there.

In my view he very clearly didn’t cheat. Many many GMs have come to his defense and attested to Hans’ strength being 2700+ level, including some of Magnus’s inner circle. Hans has already demonstrated this strength in numerous classical tournaments this year, as well as in person blitz tournaments and impromptu blitz matches over the board where you play with 3-5 minutes on the clock and where it is impossible to cheat from a practical standpoint. His blitz rating has shown a similar rapid rise as his classical (slow) chess rating. So while beating Magnus (2860 rated and number 1 in the world) is of course an upset, Hans (2700 and number 40 ranked) is by every means an elite player capable of beating the top players on any given day. And an analysis of the game in question by other GMs as well as computers indicates that Hans’ play in this game was certainly good, but very far from superhuman or above 2700s level quality.

A real scandal occured at Corus 2008.

Ivan Cheparinov refused to shake the hand of Nigel Short before their match.

Auto DQ.

Cheparinov protested saying he didn't understand the rules. The TD bought it. They played the game on an off day and Short won with a sweet tempo.

OMG, they didn't shake hands!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(rule says handshake isn't required, but if one is offered the opponent must accept)

The one thing that stuck out in his post-game analysis was that after super-fast accounts of where everything was and what was wrong and what he should have done, he starts to be absolutely tongue-tied around 5:20 and on for the short amount after that where he's asked to explain what to do in the bad position he then had. So, I don't know how he could have cheated (a watch relaying moves, someone signaling like on who wants to be a millionaire (but they're in a sound proof room for these matches, right?), a tiny speaker in his ear?), but it was odd that he couldn't explain what he did at that point.

Russia is in no hurry with the Ukraine, the USA and especially the EU are being destroyed economically by their own sanctions.

It’s the lip balm I tell ya! Look at the lip balm!

I'm glad you started a thread about this. I considered doing so, since I've had some good discussions about chess on this site in the past, but the story was still developing, and Niemann hadn't yet addressed the accusations publicly.

I'll start with a few quibbles and clarifications. First, although Magnus has been the top-rated player in the world for about eleven years, he isn't a "10x reigning world champion and the consensus greatest ever player." Rather, he has won five world championship matches -- the first two against Anand, the third against Karjakin (which Carlsen barely salvaged after Karjakin blundered away a one-point advantage in the eleventh game, allowing Carlsen to win in tiebreak), the fourth against Caruana (also won in tiebreak), and the fifth against Nepomniachtchi (in which Nepo crumbled after losing a tortuous, and torturous, sixth game). And although younger players might see Carlsen as the greatest ever, Carlsen himself still puts Kasparov on top, while acknowledging that both he and Fischer have significant claims to the top spot.

I think that the overwhelming consensus among serious players is that Carlsen withdrew because he believed that Niemann had cheated in some way, although I believe that Carlsen may also have withdrawn largely because Niemann's significant history of cheating had been kept under wraps, primarily by chess.com, whose chief arbiter on cheating (whose name escapes me right now) allowed Niemann to be silently banned for six months. In addition, although Niemann didn't mention it in his public confession of past cheating, Niemann had also been quietly removed from a series of tournaments hosted by chess.com. I don't know the timing of that particular incident, but keep in mind that it's undisputed that Niemann was cheating with chess engines online within the past three years, after he had left his family to go out on his own as a professional chess player.

Another point: Players at the international level follow one another very closely, and rumors about certain players are passed about and scrutinized carefully. One thing that catches eyes is a sudden increase in rating (and strength) that is an extreme outlier. Of course, some extreme outliers turn out to be once-in-a-generation prodigies, like Fischer and Carlsen himself. But Niemann's history is especially unusual. Five years ago, he was barely rated above 2200, and not (as far as I know) on the radar of any top players. He had one or two sudden, massive jumps in rating, but even then, he did not break into the top 100 until about four months ago. It is not uncommon for a relatively low-rated player to get an invitation to a top tournament, usually because the player is a local star, or a woman, or an exceptionally promising prodigy, but I don't doubt that there were questions about whether Niemann was a legitimate wild-card selection for this tournament, especially in light of his history.

Finally, about the game with Carlsen and some of Niemann's post-game comments: Carlsen has a history of taking some opening gambles against much weaker opponents, because he simply can't maintain his dominance by allowing too many draws against inferior players. In this case, Carlsen flew too close to the sun, and must have been devastated by Niemann's thirteenth move (Be6), which virtually guaranteed that Carlsen would have to fight for a draw from then on. Carlsen's thirtieth move, declining the opportunity to go into a rook-and-pawn ending, also seemed to reflect undue optimism about his ability to create complications by keeping minor pieces on the board. I don't really see that Niemann's game was spectacularly above his then-current rating. But Niemann's post-game comments, about both the Carlsen game and (especially) the next game against Firouzja, were not at all in line with what one would expect from a legitimate 2700 player, and Firouzja's own post-game comments about why he turned down a very questionable sacrifice offer from Niemann also suggested that a concern that Niemann had access to some analysis that was not at all apparent to a top player.

To summarize: I think it's wrong to say, as many have, that there was no evidence of cheating in this game by Niemann, or that Carlsen assumed too much about Niemann's ability. Niemann's history, comments, and personality seem highly probative here. It's also wrong to say, as many have, that "direct" rather than merely "circumstantial" evidence is required to voice concerns and even accusations about cheating; in fact, most engine-related cheating in chess is detected by "circumstantial" rather than "direct" evidence of cheating, although some cheaters are banned only after "direct" visual evidence (for example, of cellphone analysis or other electronic aids) is discovered during the game. I haven't made up my mind about this case yet, but I do believe that Niemann is a very shady character.

I believe you’re missing a key element which I alluded to in my post above. Hans is indisputably a 2650-2700 level player at minimum, i.e. an elite, top 50-100 player, even setting aside his performance in this Sinquefield tournament as confirmed by (1) his many, many results in blitz tournaments over the board (which are almost impossible to cheat) including the World Blitz Championship last year and an impromptu in-person match against world blitz champion MVL that was quite close, (2) his classical performances this year, including several tournament wins against 2600+ fields and overall performance rating over his last 50 games well above 2700, and (3) various training sessions and such with other GM coaches that have confirmed his strength and general reliance on intuitive play. I mean, even Laurence Fressinet, a close member of Magnus’s team and his friend, said in a podcast today that Hans crushed him in a random blitz match at a local Paris club and was no doubt 2700+ strength.

Given the above premise, Hans’s apparent inability to fully explain his thought process in a interview right after a grueling, multi hour game, or misstating/misjudging variations in an off the cuff discussion, are essentially irrelevant and useless as evidence in drawing a conclusion that Hans cheated in the game against Magnus or Alireza. Many critics have done just that, using this as a “gotcha” moment and saying Hans’s post game interview analysis wasn’t even close to that of a 2700 player and that he was making fairly elementary mistakes.

In his interview/monologue yesterday, I believe Hans credibly addressed these points. He explained his decision to sac against Alireza and his thinking was consistent with how top GM coach Jacob Aagard described Hans’s play from a one week training camp they conducted together (intuitive player to the point of overconfidence even when miscalculating).

forum.killerchesstraining.com

Paranoia and insanity – by Jacob Aagaard

I believe a lot of you will have seen the crazy events in St Louis over the last 48 hours. I felt an obligation to share facts and thoughts with you, and then allow you to make up your own mind. The background is that Magnus...

Link:forum.killerchesstraining.com/t/parano...

I'm not a "chess people" but I know everyone at that level has already scrutinized every opening to death a million zillion times. He'd have to know a whole lot more than just the first couple moves.

I also know this Carlsen guy is supposed to be pretty invincible, so why should he "prep" for a match against some American kid? Is Hans the Jakob Ingebrigtsen of the chess world?

i suppose it's possible that you can have someone in your ear or someone in the audience fake coughing to tell them optimal moves, but unless if magnus actually has examples of these occurring, he's just salty that he lost