19-year-old chess grandmaster Hans Niemann was banned by massive online chess platform Chess.com, just a few days after being accused of cheating in real life against five-time World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen—starting an international firestorm in the chess world. “We have shared detailed evidence with him concerning our decision, including information that contradicts his statements regarding the amount and seriousness of his cheating on Chess.com,” Chess.com said in a statement.
Niemann is not taking the accusations lying down.
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During an interview with Saint Louis Chess Club, Niemann revealed that Chess.com had taken action to remove access to his account and banned him from playing in the Chess.com Global Championship over the accusations. Niemann claimed that all the backlash and unearthing of past dirt were motivated by self-interest and a sort of mob mentality. “I believe this is completely unfair,” he said. “This is a targeted attack, and if you look at my games, this is not, it has nothing to do with my games, so why does the CEO of Chess.com come to me and say we’re looking forward to having you at the Global Chess Championship, we’re looking forward to you playing in our events, and then right when I beat Magnus they decide to remove my account and not let me play in the tournaments.”
Niemann is defending himself against backlash from the chess community, including five time U.S. Chess Champion Hikaru Nakamura, who are publicly doubting the integrity of his win.
The accusations were first levied by Carlsen himself, who, following his loss to Niemann, promptly withdrew from the tournament and tweeted a clip of football manager Jose Mourinho saying, “I prefer not to speak. If I speak I am in big trouble…and I don’t want to be in big trouble.”
People took this cryptic tweet to mean that the only reason why Niemann won was because he cheated. Nakamura decided to stream the game between Niemann and Carlsen on Twitch, where he said, “There was a period of 6 months where Hans did not play any tournaments for money on Chess.com. That’s all I’m going to say.” Nakamura was referring to the fact that Niemann had been previously banned from Chess.com for cheating, which helped further taint Niemann’s trustworthiness in the chess community.
Niemann admitted to cheating on Chess.com in the past, but claimed that the two times he did were involving trivial, non-over-the-board games, and that he was only a child as he was 12 and 16 when it happened.
“I just wanted to get higher-rated so I could play stronger players, so I cheated in random games on Chess.com,” he said. “Now, I was confronted, I confessed, and this is the single biggest mistake of my life and I’m completely ashamed, and I’m telling the world because I do not want any misrepresentation and I do not want rumors. I have never cheated in an over-the-board game.”
Chess.com released its own statement Thursday countering his claims, which said: “At this time, we have reached out to Hans Niemann to explain our decision to privately remove him from Chess.com and our events. We have shared detailed evidence with him concerning our decision, including information that contradicts his statements regarding the amount and seriousness of his cheating on Chess.com.”
Niemann said, “The main thing that I want to say is that I’m not going to let Chess.com, I’m not going to let Magnus Carlsen, I’m not going to let Hikaru Nakamura, the three arguably biggest entities in chess, simply slander my reputation because the question is, why are they going to remove me from Chess.com right after I beat Magnus. What’s with the timing?”
So far, there has not been any concrete evidence that points to Niemann cheating. Carlsen has not issued any more statements regarding the matter. Neither he nor Nieman responded to Motherboard’s request for comment.
The chess community has been on fire since Niemann beat Carlson, with some saying that Niemann won fair-and-square, with Carlson playing a poor game. Others have been wildly speculating about how Niemann would have cheated, considering the match took place “over the board,” meaning on a physical chess board.
According to The Guardian, a possibility of cheating could be that Carlsen’s pre-game analysis was leaked to Niemann, but the structure at hand was already played in a well-known game against England’s Michael Adams in 2006. Another, more outlandish theory, which seemingly started as a joke but has been bandied about, proposes that Niemann cheated by using electronic anal beads connected to a chess engine computer, which would vibrate when he made the correct moves. Elon Musk tweeted about this theory%E2%80%9D%20%E2%80%93%20Schopenhauer.%E2%80%9D), which was first posited on Reddit and then was later mentioned on Canadian grandmaster Eric Hansen’s ChessBrah Twitch feed, which has 282,000 followers: “That’s probably a good one, right? An anal bead would probably beat the thing, I’m serio[us],” Hansen said in response to a commenter on his feed. “The engine—it would probably, I don’t know. I really don’t know. Think about it. I told you it was a prostate massager, but I’m not an expert at that stuff.”
There are still many people who have been publicly supporting Niemann as the underdog. Russian chess grandmaster, Garry Kasparov, told TASS, “Of course we can’t say with certainty that Niemann didn’t cheat, but Carlsen surprisingly played the opening so badly with white that he automatically got into a worse position.”
Jacob Aagaard, a Danish-Scottish chess grandmaster who was British champion in 2007, came out in support for Neimann calling the accusations “so obviously untrue.” While French chess champion Maxime Vachier-Lagrave called the scandal a “witch-hunt.”
Niemann expressed his disappointment over how one of the best moments in his career so quickly became one of the worst. “For me to see my hero, to see my absolute hero try to target, try to ruin my reputation, ruin my chess career, and to do it in such a frivolous way, is really disappointing, because you spend your entire life looking up to someone, and then you meet them,” he said. “My dream came true, I lived my dream for a day, beating Magnus, and then all of this happened.”
