Never in a million years did I ever think that I’d be adding to the conversation about the happenings in the chess world, but here we are. Earlier today, I saw that Magnus Carlsen released a statement about resigning when playing Hans Niemann, and although I had no clue who either of these guys was, my recovering addict brain got hooked.
I ended up going down a rabbit hole to learn everything I could about the situation and now know more about professional chess than I ever thought I would.
This is a story of cheating, past behavior, the pseudoscience of body language reading, due process, and so much more. Although I’m not someone in the chess world, I think it’s important to get outside perspectives. Oftentimes, someone who isn’t “in it” can provide a different angle of thought to a conversation, and that’s why I decided to sit down and discuss this story that’s dominating headlines.
Since it seems like the consensus is that Hans cheated, I’m going to be taking the opposite end of the argument. I come from the world of debunking conspiracy theories and trying to teach people to become better thinkers. The best way to disprove a hypothesis is to come up with alternate explanations and to challenge the hell out of it.
So, it’s 100% possible that Hans cheated, but we need to put the “evidence” up to scrutiny to see how it holds up and also see if there are alternate explanations. Another topic that I’m extremely invested in is wrongful convictions, and most of the time, wrongful convictions happen because entire juries and prosecutors can’t think of alternate explanations.
For those of you who are unaware, let’s get you caught up to speed.
Magnus Carlsen is one of the best chess players in the world, if not the best. While getting caught up on this story and the main characters in it, I also learned that Magnus’ mental health hasn’t been doing well. This is important to note, and we’ll come back to it soon because there are some things going on that definitely need to be taken into consideration when stepping back and getting a full view of this story.
The other main character in this story is Hans Niemann, an extremely young chess player who has been seeing a meteoric rise in success. Something to know about Hans is that he admitted to cheating when he was 12 or 13 years old. While this may seem like it was a long time ago, Hans is only 19 years old, so this is something to note as well.
Not long ago, Hans and Magnus played in an “over the board” match, which, to my understanding is a live match. Hans wins the match, and rather than continuing in the tournament, Magnus decides to end his run and leave.
As you know, this story involves cheating accusations, but there’s something to be said about someone like Magnus Carleson leaving a tournament after losing. It’s important to ask questions when viewing this story in order to get closer to the truth. After his loss, it’s easy to say Magnus left because Hans must’ve been cheating and Magnus has been suspicious for a while. But more importantly, we need to ask, “Would Magnus have reacted the same if the match was closer?” Or, would he have acted the same if someone else beat him?
We don’t know. But is it possible?
Magnus is a multimillionaire world champion chess player. It’s hard to imagine not having a massive ego when that’s what you’re working with. Magnus is a sort of celebrity and hangs out with billionaires. While we may not know how he would have acted if the loss played out in a different way, I’m not sure how well he would have taken a loss against someone as young as Hans in any other situation.
After this, Hans and Magnus played in a different tournament online. Based on how the system is set up, Magnus had to play at least one move before leaving, and that’s exactly what he did. He resigned from the tournament after one move, and then he went silent.
Today, after silence and a lot of speculation from the public, he released a lengthy statement.
This is when I became interested in the story because I saw multiple people talking about it. I became extremely curious about what’s going on.
The primary question I had was, “How do you cheat at chess?”
In my younger days, I was there for the start of competitive Esports with the game Counter-Strike. This game came after some others like Quake, but it’s really what started taking Esports to the next level. Due to these games being played on computers, there were various ways to cheat. I was a writer, but I became the coach of one of the best teams in the world, so I needed to know about the different ways people could cheat.
Of course, it was a lot easier to cheat online, but most tournaments were in person on LAN. Still, people would cheat. I’ll never forget going to a tournament where a team from Kazakhstan was caught cheating. If I remember correctly, they were either using thumb drives to try and upload illegal configs, or their coach was in the stands behind opponents and signaling to them.
Chess is completely different. When you play in person, it’s just two people and a game board, so I had to learn all of the ways a person could possibly cheat.
As I dove into this story, the first thing that shocked me was just how many people love chess. Every video I came across about this story on YouTube had 10s of thousands or hundreds of thousands of views. Some of the channels even had hundreds of thousands of subscribers discussing chess, and one had over a million. I don’t know if this has been going on for a while or if The Queen’s Gambit really made chess more mainstream.
The first video I came across had the strongest “evidence” I’ve found of cheating, and it made a little bit more sense to me about what’s going on. I’ll do my best to explain it to my capability, but here’s the video that I watched just in case you’d care to watch it because they probably explain it much better than I can.
Basically, humans can only be so good at chess. Computers, on the other hand, can do all sorts of math faster than any human. It can come up with probabilities and all that jazz. Well, this program can check how a human played and compare it to how a computer would play. It gives a correlation percentage, and to put it into perspective, here’s the correlations for some of the best matches and people in the world:
Bobby Fischer during his 20 consecutive winning streak - 72%
Magnus Carlsen at his best - 70%
Super top tier players (grand masters) - 62-67%
Average top tier players - 57-62%
One guy named Sebastien Feller got a 98% correlation in Paris 2010, and he was caught cheating.
Well, when they did this for Niemann, they found he was getting 100% on quite a few games. Which is insanely suspicious. Albeit suspicious, we need to also take a look at probabilities. Anyone who’s read a single book on probabilities has probably heard of Nasim Taleb’s bestselling book that everyone and their mom references, The Black Swan.
The subtitle of this book is “The Impact of the Highly Improbable”. Why? Well, up until a certain point, people thought there were only white swans. Then, someone saw a black swan.
We need to separate the difference between impossible and improbable. Throughout his book, Taleb lists a slew of “black swan” events that nobody expected nor prepared for. While I’m not a mathematician, I think we can all get the basics down for probabilities.
Do you have any idea how many people believe in the supernatural and other strange things because they don’t understand probabilities? They think because they thought about an old friend the other day and then that friend calls that it’s some kind of sign. They don’t take into consideration all of the times they’ve thought of a friend and never got a call.
The best way I heard this explained was someone saying that there are 8 million people in New York City. That means that every single day, something happens to someone that had a one in 8 million chance.
Now, with chess, this is different. “Accidentally” stumbling into such a crazy correlation rate isn’t the same as a coincidence. But, I don’t see anyone asking if this is even possible.
As an outsider, I’m curious about how this algorithm works. What’s it comparing it to? Does it need to be updated? Is it updated? Is it possible that it’s outdated?
I know nothing about how this software works, and maybe it’s bullet proof, but again, we need to come back to asking, “How does one cheat at chess?”
Chess is massive, and it gets a ton of viewers. They even checked Hans to see if he was smuggling in a device to the tournament area, but nothing was found. Hans admitted that when he was 12, he cheated using a chess engine. Now, it’s seven years later, and nothing was found on him when he played this over-the-board match.
I’m now learning why I saw “anal beads” trending on Twitter the other week. There’s speculation that Hans must’ve used some sort of anal device to cheat. If this were the case, it’d involve a second person who could morse code moves to him. While possible, I can’t imagine asking a friend to control that sort of device for me.
So, as of now, the best evidence we have is Hans’ chess engine correlation and the speculation of this guy using some next-level efforts to cheat at chess.
What I also learned is that Hans had made chess his life, and it’s pretty much what he eats and breathes. The same is obviously said for Magnus, but since Magnus has been in it for so long, it’s getting to him when he’s not the best. This is common among anyone who is playing at the highest level of any sport, and we regularly hear stories of top athletes having mental breakdowns.
When I came across this video, I saw a clip of an interview Magnus did where he discusses how he’s been questioning his abilities since 2017. He also discusses how this led to a deep depression, which resulted in him curling up in a fetal position and just not knowing how he’s going to manage going forward.
By the time these two played, you have Magnus on the decline and Niemann on the rise. I don’t think it’s too crazy to think Magnus wouldn’t take the loss very well in any circumstance.
What I also learned while researching this story was that Magnus was the owner of Play Magnus, which was bought out for $85.5 million by Chess.com. Chess.com is another big character in this story, and they banned Hans shortly after he beat Magnus.
As someone who has very little trust for the rich and anyone dealing with 10s of millions of dollars, this all seems extremely shady to me. And as a top player, Hans clearly brings in a lot of money whenever he plays at events. I think everyone should be fairly skeptical as they learn about these details.
Let’s say that we’re 100% sure Hans cheated. Even if that’s the case, this is beyond unethical. I’m starting to wonder how Magnus can even be a player with such a massive conflict of interest.
For anyone in the chess community, I’d be extremely concerned that Magnus has so much sway that he can get people banned without evidence. I don’t know much about this guy’s character, but that doesn’t really matter. Anyone with that much power that can influence decisions is never a good thing.
It’s why I’m strongly against philanthrocapitalism. Do we really want billionaires in control of who gets resources and who needs help? No thanks. It’s never good when that much power is concentrated.
What bothers me the most about this story is the body language reading and mind reading going on. Body language experts are some of the biggest grifters out there, and the fact that people think they can detect deception is just heartbreaking. Time and time again, it’s been proven that even experts barely fair better than chance when detecting deception.
If you don’t believe me, go read the book Duped by Tim Levine and How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
While researching this story, I kept coming across amateur body language experts and human lie detectors pointing at different things Hans has done or said as their “evidence” of cheating. I know I’m going to piss off some chess players with what I’m about to say, but it needs to be said. Chess players are seen as being extremely intelligent, which they are, but if you’re in the chess community and thinking you can read body language, you really need to widen your scope of knowledge.
Even in Magnus’ statement, he points to body language reading. In his statement, he says the following:
“His over the board progress has been unusual, and throughout our game in the Sinquefield Cup, I had the impression that he wasn’t tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions, while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do.”
If I’m being honest, what made me sit down to write this was seeing a tweet with thousands of likes saying something along the lines of, “Imagine thinking you have better intuition than Magnus Carlsen and that he wouldn’t know when someone’s acting strange.”
Like, do you people realize that some of the smartest people in the world believe in conspiracy theories? I truly don’t think people understand how insanely stupid smart people can be. Throughout the COVID pandemic, we’ve seen people with literal medical degrees push conspiracy theories. There are stories of Nobel Prize Winners believing in insane things and geniuses getting conned by their long-distance girlfriends they’ve never met.
So, yes, Magnus has years of experience and countless hours playing against people, but there’s also a little thing called confirmation bias that nobody’s immune to. Walking into a match against someone you already assume is cheating, everything they do is going to look like cheating.
Why do you think cops focus on the wrong suspect for 12 hours straight of interrogations? They lock in on someone, and then everything the person does is just further “evidence” that they did it.
Let’s also think about this for just a minute. Sit back, and get into the mind of a cheater. Magnus says that Hans wasn’t “fully concentrating” during their match. If you were going to cheat against one of the best in the world, don’t you think you’d be concentrating? And if you were cheating, would you make it this blatantly obvious?
Not only would Hans need to be the best cheater in the world, but he’d also need to be the dumbest. This is similar to conspiracy theorists thinking that these shadow organizations and the Illuminati are hiding clues in plain sight. If these people were really trying to take over the world, why would they leave clues to get caught?
Yes, it’s possible Hans cheated, but the guy would have to be a certified moron to be that obvious when knowing that the entire chess world would be looking at this match repeatedly if he won.
As mentioned earlier, I’m a recovering addict, so I get what it’s like to royally screw up. Hans screwed up when he was 12, and I saw one YouTuber actually bring up the point that people grow and change. It’s one of the reasons I’m pro-prison reform. We have this crazy idea that people can’t change. Meanwhile, even you can recognize how much you’ve changed over the years.
Should someone be banned from chess forever for cheating when they’re 12? Even if they cheat when they’re in their 30s or 40s and “know better”, is it justified to ban the person forever due to the crazy idea that they can’t change?
I saw people say that if you don’t have harsh punishments, it won’t deter others. That’s a terrible argument. In the United States, we have the death penalty, yet murders still happen. Clearly, punishment isn’t the best deterrent. This is why increasing sentences is a dumb idea to reduce crime, and I doubt it’d be much different if you did it in chess.
Again, it’s 1000% possible that Hans cheated. Maybe he has some bluetooth anal beads and a really good friend. But as it stands, there’s no evidence, and this multimillionaire is blowing up this kid’s life. The burden of proof has somehow been shifted to the accused rather than the accuser, and that’s scary.
Maybe you haven’t been in that position before, but I sure have been, and it’s awful. So, hopefully, you gained some new perspective on this situation, and hopefully, people can chill out before assuming this kid is guilty without evidence.
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He also admitted cheating at age 16 which is probably more relevant than cheating at age 12. It's a complicated situation but if you cheat the suspicion is always going to be there going forward. I'd also add Magnus isn't on the decline yet and has lost to younger players than Hans in the last 12 months.