Chess.Com/WSJ: Niemann has cheated over 100 times in past 5 years

Magnus believes he did.

Is that guy more of an expert on chess than Magnus?

There's always the good old fashion method of hiring a thug with a bat to threaten a judge to help you cheat. It's the tried and true method before technology came along.

You're confused. Magnus believes that Niemann cheated often, but not necessarily in their recent over the board game.

Wut? Yes Magnus thinks he cheated in that game.

Where do you guys come up with this stuff?

Yes, the guy is the top expert on cheating in chess!

Magnus is biased! He's mad he lost!

This guy is is an expert at catching cheating in chess Magnus is an expert at playing chess

2 very different things! Come on your a smart guy stop posting dumb stuff!

Niemann won first game at us open today! Defeating GM Yoo! Boss style!

That's exactly what Grandmaster Ben Finegold states in this video.

Probably the great majority of chess played online is for practice, not online games.
Everyone practices, and practice is not cheating. Personally I don't ever play online games.

Ummm, have you read carmine9's posts in other threads?

you ultimately can't prove that someone is a cheater. niemann is not obligated to play by methods in which humans have come to accept. if he somehow plays like a computer, then let him play like a computer. if he's beating all your online tournaments, then stop hosting online tournaments. and if he is somehow cheating in in-person tournaments, then improve your anti cheating methods. unless if you have proof of him cheating against magnus that even a judge who doesn't play chess can understand, you will need to let niemann go.

Here is what Carlsen himself says about this point:

“Had I started cheating in a clever manner, I am convinced no one would notice. I would have just needed to cheat one or two times during the match, and I would not even need to be given moves, just the answer on which move was way better, or here there is a possibility of winning, and here you need to be more careful. That is all I would need in order to be almost invincible. Which does frighten me.”

– World Chess Champion and GM Magnus Carlsen (translated)

Here is what five-time world champion Vishy Anand has said:

“one bit per game, one yes-no answer about whether a sacrifice is sound, could be worth 150 rating points.”

– Chess Life, June 2014

Here is what GM Susan Polgar has to say:

"1-2-3 hints per game would be more than enough for some to become IMs, GMs, or win big tournaments."

Here is what IM Levy Rozman says:

"Top players know so much about the position that if you even insinuate that they might be better or worse, they might find the right move. But they really only need to cheat one or two times."

All of this is discussed in the chess.com report, and anyone at a certain level of the game gets it. You wouldn't need more than one or two seconds of help during a whole game to take your playing strength to a significantly higher level.

Not true. We have the Patriot Act that we can use to hold Niemann indefinitely, with no trial, and do whatever we want under guise of "national security".

He's obviously a cheater and should be banned. However, just for clarification, why does it matter whether someone uses chess engines and so forth while playing online? I can see that being a means of improvement, since online seems like it is just practice. Is it in reference to online games against the computer or against real-life opponents online? Is it because the ranking # you can on chess.com is somehow relevant to real world seeding?

"cherryontop" was incorrect to say that Niemann's "questionable games have been pretty much engine perfect." In fact, in games where there were at least twenty moves not already recognized within known theory, Niemann has almost never come anywhere close to "engine perfect," as chess.com itself has pointed out.

Nevertheless, if Ken Regan has "concluded that [Niemann] did not cheat in his victories over Magnus" (and I recognize that Ken has said something very close to that), then Ken is wrong. The most that he could reasonably conclude is that the statistical model that he used did not detect a high probability of cheating. Moreover, I watched and listened to his analysis for about two hours, and he clearly acknowledged that he was not using any sort of Bayseian analysis that would include a number of relevant factors, such as clock time and Niemann's extensive history of cheating -- a history that Ken expressly acknowledged in a subsequent email message to chess.com. As chess.com summarized: "Notably, Ken Regan, an independent expert in the field of cheat detection in chess, has expressed his belief that Hans cheated during the 2015 and 2017 Titled Tuesdays, as well as numerous matches against other professional players in 2020."

Also, although Ken has often been cited over the years as the world's foremost expert on chess cheating, I don't believe it's an accurate characterization these days. I've followed Ken off and on for close to fifty years; he was a very talented junior player in the '70s and is a very smart guy (I remember Joel Benjamin, when he was the youngest master in U.S. history at the age of 13, describe Ken, who was a few years older, as the smartest guy he knew), and he has been involved in some of the highest-profile cheating disputes in the computer-driven age of chess, but I believe that the team at chess.com has developed considerably more sophisticated tools, and they have also relied on the assessments of GMs who are considerably stronger players than Ken. And although chess.com has pointed out that its focus has been on detecting cheating in games played at faster speed limits than are used in so-called "classical" chess, chess.com has flagged specific OTB tournaments played by Niemann that FIDE might want to take a look at. Whether FIDE will actually take a serious look is, I suspect, a matter of considerable doubt.

It's in reference to real-life opponents, often in matches or tournaments involving substantial prize money. And on-line results can affect whether a player receives invitations to certain OTB tournaments or whether a player will become successful as an on-line chess "streamer," which has become a surprisingly hot market these days. (I've been shocked to discover how weak some of the "streamers" actually are; I'd much rather watch and listen to a truly great player like Nakamura.) Niemann himself has talked about how hard he worked to increase his on-line ratings in order to gain invitations to tournaments and attract fans to his streaming site. (One especially shocking revelation in the chess.com report is that Niemann cheated in every game of an on-line match against, of all people, Ian Nepomniachtchi. That hardly fits with Niemann's assertion that he merely cheated in a few "random" on-line games.)

I don't know much about chess but if he cheated that much online, he cheated in person. End of story. How? Who knows..

I'll pay him $100,000 if he agrees to play him again naked and beats him.

You're saying that if the kid was cheating at 9 years old that that'd mean anything about whether he's cheating today? That's just ridiculous.

communication device on body that vibrates or the like

All cheating online means is that you at some point flip your computer screen to a different screen that might give you some help

It's a whole different world from trying to cheat in person where they have incredible security and they use metal detectors and oftentimes play in a delay form in a private room

Cheating in personal also might cross the line to being an actual crime because it might be fraud on some level

Cheating online while technically still cheating it's just a much different level of seriousness because it's so easy you're sitting a computer and like I said it's just a whole different ball game if you don't understand chess and you don't understand computer technology then so be it but...