A key fact to understand in thinking about cheating in over the board chess: a strong player can defeat a much stronger opponent with just 1-3 hints per game indicating the strongest move. For example, most chess experts agree that a ~2600 rated player with 2-3 hints at key moments per game would be expected to beat a ~2800 rated player. Many people might assume that a cheater needs guidance every move, thereby requiring a potentially more obvious cheating mechanism. That is not the case.
Also, clever cheating devices have been found in over the board chess competitions. So, this is possible. Moreover, one needn't carry a device on themselves. A cheater may have accomplices providing hints, if they carry a device.
It will be interesting to see how chess tournaments, as well as FIDE, chess.com, and other major chess institutions react to this situation. The potential for cheating has now been brought to the absolute forefront of chess discussion. And Carlsen's actions have been questioned by FIDE in recent interviews, with FIDE staff condemning "vigilantism" of a kind.
Some set of resolutions seems necessary--perhaps standards for security in major chess tournaments, perhaps an alliance to share cheating or reliability data amongst major chess operations, perhaps a standard term in major chess tournament agreements that no previously identified cheaters (online or otherwise) will be allowed to play, and perhaps sanctions in some form against Carlsen (or Niemann, if concrete evidence against him emerges).
> Also, clever cheating devices have been found in over the board chess competitions
The most convincing candidate for such a device I've seen is an Illuminati Thumper Pro hidden in Hans's shoe: https://illuminati-magic.com/products/thumper. If you watch the footage of him getting scanned before his match with Alireza (and, crucially, before Magnus announced he was dropping), there are a couple of subtle things that are consistent with this theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIulWkTHuu0:
1. He swallows (seemingly nervously) at 4 seconds shortly before his left shoe is scanned.
2. As the left shoe is being scanned, there are 2 beeping noises that at least to me, sound like they are coming from the wand, but are seemingly ignored by the wander. The same beeps do not repeat when his right shoe is scanned (that is, it's not just metal parts built into the shoes themselves). Two caveats to this part: First, I've heard differing opinions on whether the thumper will trigger metal detectors. Second, it's possible (even if unlikely IMO) that those beeps are not from that wand and it's just a coincidence that another wand or object beeped - since we can't see the wand in frame.
3. At 1:17 he starts nervously fidgeting with the credit card as the RF scanner gets close to his left foot and noticeably slows down when the scanner switches from his left foot to the right foot, and appears to stop completely as soon as the scanner is moving up away from his right foot. The RF scanner, to my understanding, would only detect devices that are actively transmitting which the thumper shouldn't need to do at all if Hans were using purely to receive engine moves/hints during the but the fact that it theoretically could transmit would explain why he'd be nervous about getting scanned anyway.
Of course none of these observations are proof but they sure look suspicious to me.
You don't need something that transmits if you're searching for bug-like devices or any general integrated circuits with a nonlinear junction detector:
I am very far removed from anything related to Chess, but if they want to get serious about this they should hire people who specialize in the federal-contracting adjacent field of TSCM (technical surveillance countermeasures).
I also think that people putting a lot of focus into shoes or other clothing articles underestimate the motivation and capability of people to use the traditional "prison wallet" method of concealing things.
You miss the vitally important point: they weren't needed in the game in question, so we don't even get to the point where fanciful theorising is relevant.
Magnus didn't play particularly well and Hans played ok. This was not an example of a superhuman intelligence passing hints to overcome Magnus at his best.
Even better, in that video he has a pack of gum that sets off the sensor, the security guard takes it, finishes the scan, and then gives it back! Obviously not proof of cheating but how hard would it have been to hide a device in that pack of gum?
is there any thinking on how many bits of information do you need to cheat, and how many can be communicated via thumper?
e.g. is the bit of information "move the knight" aka theres only about 4 bits of info, or is it "move the knight to E6" which is a good deal more bits, that could be lossy/error prone.
just on the surface of it, i dont see how this thing could give enough info but i suppose with a loooot of training you could improve the info transfer rate?
> Many people might assume that a cheater needs guidance every move, thereby requiring a potentially more obvious cheating mechanism. That is not the case.
IMO, this reasoning potentially implicates every high level player. If it's possible that two hints can account for the difference between 2600 and 2800, and a 19 year old kid under heavy scrutiny can exploit this weakness without being detected, it seems assured that other more experienced players are also exploiting this.
A bunch of grandmasters have now talked about the psychological aspect of even just wondering if your opponent could possibly by cheating, and second guessing if a bad looking move by your opponent might actually be a brilliant engine line.
It seems that might even be enough for Hans as a 2675 rated player to get an edge against 2800+ player without even actually cheating
That doesn't scale down the skill level. At top level of just about any thing the difference between player is decided by few mistakes (by that I define less than optimal action).
If average player does 100 mistakes per match fixing 4 of them won't matter. But if great player makes 6, fixing even single one can be deciding
Software running in a smartphone can play deep games against each other.
Chess engines aren't like car engines are to sprinting. They are more akin to text-to-image AIs but as though every single picture they produce is better than what any artist ever could produce.
Part of that is because Chess is easily defined (the win conditions are comparatively simple).
I'm rambling now and I think that's enough wall of text for a hot take.
> (or Niemann, if concrete evidence against him emerges)
This window seems closed though. Carlsen seems to have no evidence. Where else could the evidence come from? All we have is character attacks. Even if justified, they can't prove that he cheated.
All we know for sure is that Carlsen accused him of cheating with no evidence.
All this talk of "Carlsen accused him of cheating with no evidence" reminds me of the blowback against some athletes in the 70s and 80s who accused rivals of taking PEDs "with no evidence".
Sometimes the evidence of someone doing monstrously better than can be expected by their history is sufficient IMO. I mean, look at this article about swimmer Shirley Babashoff [1], dubbed "Surly Shirley" at the time by the media, for suggesting the East German women were on PEDs in the 70s. Nowadays we look back on those images of the East German women, looking more manly than any dude I've ever seen, and wonder how we considered with a straight face that they weren't on a boatload of drugs. Similarly, it completely baffles me how any sane person can think that Flo Jo wasn't on PEDs in the runup to the 1988 Olympics - her 100m dash record still stands today.
I'm not saying Carlsen went about it in the right way, because now Niemann is basically in an indefensible position, but I'm also not willing to quickly dismiss it because Carlsen has "no evidence".
What hard evidence—exactly—do you expect Carlsen to be able to produce? Alternatively, imagine anyone in a similar position. What hard evidence can anyone produce in situations such as this?
I don't know much about chess, but it seems like Niemann now has to either maintain his performance in Chess without cheating, or cheat to maintain it if he can't without - in which case he could still be caught.
That's not true. Both he and Chess.com both say that they have evidence to the extent of Hans' cheating. Both have asked Neimann for the ability to speak freely without threat of libel.
Not quite. There is still a possibility that Niemann will admit cheating. If he actually cheated there may be a time—in years or decades rather then months—that he fills with remorse and admits it (hopefully with a detailed description on how he did it so we can verify). If however he didn’t cheat, we will probably never actually know the truth.
Very interesting. I don’t really understand chess beyond the basics but when I think of sports the difference between good and great really seems to be, in baseball just a hit or two per week, in American football a running back who has the vision to cut decisively a second or less before another running would.
When you see it consistently the difference seems enormous, but the math … is surprisingly tiny.
“or less” is doing a lot of work in that first paragraph. Running plays typically only last like two seconds, maybe four if they get to the second level (linebackers).
Also, I agree the “math is tiny“ but the talent, work ethic, luck, etc. required to separate oneself from the good to be great is *enormous*.
You're right: the hint doesn't even have to be a move. It could also be an evaluation "it's better for white", or even: "there is a winning combination" which might be enough to get them to focus on finding it.
As an electrical engineer currently in the process of getting a dental implant, I would say it's definitely doable. But it would present a pretty serious packaging challenge, particularly the power supply.
[UPDATE] Turns out you can get dental implant hardware on eBay:
You don’t need a faraday cage if you suspect he gets the moves from outside. Just put a 20 minute delay to the video feed and don’t allow random people in the room.
The St. Louis chess club provided more checking / scrutiny than any other OTB tournament I have seen. How would you improve their process? Honestly would love to hear.
Daniel Naroditsky[1] said at the St Louis chess club specifically it would be pretty easy to cheat OTB no matter what searches they do. He said there is a balcony which the players have access to when they walk away from the board which has a clear view of the car park and you could have an assistant signal from there at crucial moments. He also cited a case of a player who was definitely cheating OTB[2] and was never caught and where no mechanism was ever found.
It really seems to me that everyone is overthinking this. Hans has admitted to cheating and just says he didn't cheat here. The idea we should give him the benefit of the doubt seems really odd. It doesn't really matter to me whether he cheated in this specific tournament - he shouldn't have a place in the chess world.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJVzSXsZ10I&t=3291s
[2] in the sense that every move for an extended period covering multiple tournaments was exactly the top engine move - way more accurate than any human ever
Chess tournaments could use the services of already existing casino anti cheating experts. But I imagine that would be very expensive and not feasible for most events.
I can't think of any effective way to curb online cheating in chess. Ultimately, online chess with money prizes shouldn't really exist.
Chess is not a game where there is always one right move, but where positions are threatened/protected to a greater/lesser degree, and the _value_ of those threats/protection can only be realized much further along in the game.
The best players in the world, these 2700+ rated players have:
1. Played many many positions many times over and have incredible recall of those general positions.
2. Know how to analyze a position/state of the game at any given moment and have a better "feel" for who is advantaged and/or where the greatest strengths/weaknesses of black/white are located.
However, none of them have the power of chess engines, which analyze singular moves (or poll a db) for the hundreds/thousands of possible outcomes 1, 2, 3, ..., n moves ahead (this is why the best engines are strictly better than humans at this point), so unless a player has both played and committed to memory the exact line being played in a game, the best they tend to get to is "having a feeling" about the state of the game (please forgive my oversimplification here, chess fans)
Now if a 2600 rated player - someone who's still easily in the top 1% of chess players and incredibly capable player of the game - were to be playing a game against a 2800 rated opponent, but had a computer tell them "Hey, this one move is critical" without being told the exact move, they would almost _certainly_ become heavily favored to win. That "feeling" about a position is now irrelevant. There are only a few pieces that will be likely moved on any given turn, and now you can narrow down your own analysis to what is different about moving any one of them in particular because you've been given advanced warning that the most-likely-to-be-played moves will result in wildly different consequences n moves later.
These are hours-long games. Taking 15-20 minutes on a turn is not unheard of, and doing so on a turn that is proven-critical can make all the difference.
chess experts do agree on that, they've all been saying it on various youtube channels, i was even irritated when I saw it written here cuz I was like "you're just repeating the same stuff I've been hearing"
200 points difference means a 25% chance to win, so I doubt just 1 hint is enough to bridge that gap consistently. Many high level games are won by grinding out a small advantage. I'll take a 2700 with 3 hints against a 2800 though.
The "200 points difference means 25% chance to win" breaks down at the highest levels. It works fine near the middle of the bell curve -- i.e. 800-2000 Elo -- but once you get to 2200 Elo you are talking about the >99th percentile. For example, I don't know of a single 2400 player who can score an average of 0.25 against 2600 players.
Even at my own mediocre level of 1800, I definitely do not score 0.25 against 2000 rated players. More like 0.1 if I'm feeling sharp.
I don't think people are saying that it cannot happen, just that you need to prove it instead of hurling empty accusations, especially when it can destroy someone's career. I personally think it sets a bad precedent if every top player immediately starts crying "cheating!" when beaten by a lower ranked one.
Imagine you know someone with a history of stealing cars and other valuable objects. He has been caught multiple times. Now you see him with a shiny new car that you’re pretty sure he can’t afford.
Did he steal it? Not necessarily — it’s entirely possible that he got a higher-paying legit job and saved up for it, or inherited money from a relative, or got it legally in some other way. He shouldn’t be convicted of a new crime with no other evidence just because he committed similar crimes in the past.
However, it would be entirely natural for a reasonable person to assume that theft is the most likely explanation of the facts, and to avoid trusting that person.
This is basically what happened with Hans. He has been caught cheating multiple times, and then had an unusually fast rise in rating. Is that rise impossible? No. But it’s consistent with cheating, and given his history, cheating is the simplest explanation.
So it would be totally normal for Magnus to refuse to trust such a person even though it can’t be conclusively proven that he’s still dirty. But even then, Magnus agreed to play against him, until further circumstantial evidence came to light and it just got to be too much.
So, is it possible that Hans is clean? Sure. If that’s indeed the case, do I feel sorry for him? No. He made the choice to destroy his own reputation when he cheated multiple times. If he doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt now, it’s on him.
Magnus' evidence of "it didn't seem like he was thinking very hard during critical junctures" is the nail in the coffin for me.
If he has a history of stealing cars AND his new car is hot wired? Possible it's legal? Sure. Let's not twist our hands about a grand theft auto charge, however.
I don’t think you can call the opinion of the famous player who lost about how hard he thought his opponent was thinking during the game evidence without twisting the meaning of the word past the breaking point.
My issue with this is that it's all circumstantial evidence. If you suspect someone of cheating but can't show it, then enact some anti-cheating provisions and move on. We can't have a rule of law based on just the suspicions of interested parties.
Of course we can rule out people by past cheating. Technology changes, it makes it easier to cheat but harder to hide cheating history (as most of the games between people at this time are online). Rules have to adapt to technology.
Nobody is claiming they should be. FIDE isn’t banning Hans based on Magnus’s vague suspicions, as indeed they shouldn’t.
Magnus is just refusing to invest time and energy (and rating points) to play against someone he doesn’t like, which is absolutely his right. Nobody has the right to force Magnus or anyone else to play against them.
That's not a complete analogy tho. Everyone knows Hans cheated in the past. But Magnus is going beyond that and saying that Hans cheated in the over-the-board game against him.
Coming back to your analogy. So now imagine this person suddenly has a new shiny car but he also has the Title and registration for that car. Not only that, someone reported him to the cops and the cops said that the car is not stolen. He also has income tax returns that show that he has a legit source of income. Would it be natural for a reasonable person to assume that theft is the most likely explanation?
I don’t understand your analogy. There’s no evidence that Hans didn’t cheat in the game against Magnus. This isn’t Hans’s fault, as it’s hard to imagine what such evidence could even be possible, but the fact remains that there’s nothing comparable to having the title, etc. to a car.
>Would it be natural for a reasonable person to assume that theft is the most likely explanation?
Based off of their previous behavior of stealing cars? Yes it would absolutely be the most likely explanation. Under such a circumstance, it would simply mean that their skill at stealing cars has improved to now include forging documents, and possibly bribing police.
Given their passed behavior, the objective is no longer for you to prove guilt, but for them to prove innocence. It is illogical to continually approach accusations of theft, or cheating, under a neutral assumption when a pattern emerges.
If you own ten chickens and come out one morning to nine, and a pile of feathers next to a fox, you have your culprit. Should you wander around demanding to see feathers each time another chicken goes missing before you blame the fox sleeping at your doorstep? The fox is there. There are fewer chickens. The easiest answer is the most likely.
There is enough certainty for the alternative to be inconsequential.
I believe people might be seriously underestimating just how good Magnus may be at detecting cheating.
Dude probably trains with computers regularly. He has a better memory than 10 average Joe's combined. He's been the absolute #1 of the world for what, 10 years now?
He wouldn't risk his whole reputation for nothing.
I personally take his suspicions very seriously, though I agree that evidence has to be presented sooner or later.
Hans is known to have cheated, his coach is known to have cheated, add low security in the event, Hans beating Magnus (a player two tiers above him) on black pieces (Magnus has lost only 15 games against black in an entire world champion career) and Hans acting suspicious during the game and here we are.
chess.com suggests Hans cheated more than he admits. He did (much?) better in tournaments with zero delay. In a few consecutive tournaments, he made a lot of top engine moves, slightly above Magnus/Kasparov/Fisher at their best. He had a hard time explaining his lines in the interview after the game (with Firouzja I think).
Magnus is obviously extremely qualified to detect cheating, I see many other people who are honestly just as qualified as him say that Hans isn't cheating. I'm going to also say emotions are going to play a massive role here, both in terms of defence of Hans and against Hans.
The interesting thing is the one party MORE qualified than Magnus and the other grandmasters to detect cheating is the chesscom statistics team and they think Hans has cheated online recently and didn't admit to it. Still, there's no smoking gun that proves the OTB matches were fixed, Hans can be innocent at least in those specific circumstances, but if he's been guilty in online chess recently is it truly fair to make the world champion play against him OTB?
>He wouldn't risk his whole reputation for nothing.
It is pretty important to realise in terms of Magnus's mindset he has given up on defending the world championship and doing anything other than achieving 2900 elo, the highest rating ever achieved. He is a champion, and that is his goal in life, he wants that rating in a way most people can't fathom. If he proves Hans Neimann is a cheater, Han's win's against Magnus are void, and Magnus's rating goes up. Imagine being the world champion and having your dream drift further away because of a known cheater beating you when they're at a disadvantage, what goes through your head? What goes through your head when you think of how many people COULD be cheating and making getting 2900 impossible? What can others do about the spectre of chess cheating, the world champion, doesn't stand up?
So what I'm saying here is, I wouldn't be super confident that Magnus wouldn't throw his reputation in the trash to become the greatest chess player who ever lived. I think he would absolutely throw away his reputation, but not for nothing.
Not sure Chess.com is entirely objective. They recently acquired Play Magnus after all, so he will have some influence. The timing is pretty suspicious.
It was obvious that Hans did not make a real effort while playing chess with Magnus. Hans was not concentrating. Hans was constantly moving his hand, covering his mouth. Hans was not paying attention.
That just shows that he is fallible, which I empathize with.
Also don't forget the bishop blunder by Nepo in the world championship against Magnus. That was a 1800 level blunder trapping the bishop. Nepo is in top 5 GM list.
The fact of the matter is that all GMs including Magnus have the potential to make blunders.
Niemann, as black, equalized reasonably early on and then had a consistent lead against Magnus the entire game. Magnus did make mistakes in the game, but only after a near-perfect grind for 27 moves.
To be clear, I'm not saying this to make a claim that this is definitive proof of anything. I'm pointing out that the theory that Magnus simply blundered away the game doesn't hold water. Niemann had the advantage—as black no less—for essentially the entire game against someone who is widely known for being capable of grinding away nearly-perfectly for extensive periods of time.
This. It’s like how some people in here have built amazing intuition about where a bug in a system may be, even if it’s a system they haven’t written or designed themselves
Those data points are cherry-picked by anecdote and statistically useless, unless you're also counting all the times someone thought they had such intuition that turned out not to be correct at all.
I was agreeing with your complete post, except for the last line.
No more evidence is required. The quality of Hans Niemann's moves, recently as well as during his rise from 2400-rating three years ago, is enough evidence against him.
"
My practice at home is with the computer. When I study chess with other people, we always have a chess board. But on my own, it's always at the computer.
"
Some interesting meta observations for the few people who read my comment in this already enormous thread. I noticed that opinions on the issue seemed split rather 50/50 until I started seeing the same couple of names over and over on the "no evidence of cheating" side. And in fact, searching the HTML document for this page for a particularly prolific name yields that they make up about 10% of all posts in the thread.
I'm not sure why someone would respond to dozens of all comment threads, but the different tones of voice, presented familiarity with the topic, between posts are disconcerting. I've never accused anyone of being a bot or shill (nor am I now) because I've seen starry-eyed true believers of just about every cause, idea, and entity, but this behavior is exceptionally unusual.
I think this is another example of the very common pattern of 90% of the contributions in online discourse come from 10% of the population with 90% of post coming from a 1% minority of the overall population. It's not unusual at all.
I am into chess, was studying it, have read few books on chess.
People who know near zero about chess seem to come out of woodwork to defend underdog who is attacked by the top level clique. Its understandable, but to me its akin to the flat earth arguments. All based on emotions, never have much to say about chess.
Anyone who knows a bit about chess (lets say advanced level), would point to the post game interview of game vs Firouzja as amazingly suspicious. It feels like a guy in group project who did noting and is trying to explain the project to their professor.
50/50 split is either illusion or its due to inflation of randoms giving their opinions.
No sound human would bee asking random ppl to determine if a patient has a cancer as a diagnostic tool. Cheating in chess is at top level extremely subtle, how is a random 1000 player any authority on the topic?
Agreed. Not only the firouzja interview but also the post game interview after the magnus match. It struck me as someone cheating on a test and being unable to show their work after the fact. Alejandro was pushing back against his analysis even before the cheating allegations came out. And his apology interview was full of inconsistencies where he couldn’t keep his story straight. This video does a body language analysis of the apology. While I don’t think you can put too much stock into the defensive postures, his behavior and his story is suspect at best https://youtu.be/OK9ZkoSQNFs
I'm happy to take your word for the fact that it's reasonably split, I don't have a dog in this particular race.
The strange thing to me then, is that with regards to this Hacker News thread, it is fairly split in sentiment if you look at the total number of comments in either direction, but if you look at unique commenters it overwhelmingly swings one direction.
My question from that premise is, why is that the case? Specifically, I've never seen a hacker news thread with 250+ comments where a single person or a handful make up such a large percentage of the comments. The human effort required for such a thing is significant, and obviously that can't scale forever. I'd be surprised that with tiktok and youtube videos with 30000+ comments, if there's ever been a case of a single person responding 3000+ times.
This is against terms of use here, many of us have been nailed stating similar for other posts. The guideline is "assume the best" (or something like that).
Thanks. Edited such that my post isn't so targeted, at least. If it's still insufficient and gets taken down, it happens. I think my post is far less interesting than the observed behavior I mention.
Maybe you're talking about me. I don't even like Hans. I just think people are morons for spewing bile that harms someone's real life.
I know a little bit about the situation (though not an expert - I haven't researched it a ton, just tried to think critically about the situation) due to the fact that yeah, drama is entertaining. But I also think what the WC is doing is disgusting - he is using his position of power to harm someone, and doesn't have much evidence, really, none at all, other than him saying "trust me."
Also, the parallels between this and political discord are really interesting to me, and I wish I were smart enough to boil that down on a sociological level and express myself but unfortunately I am not.
I didn't know anything about Hans until Magnus dropped out of the tournament and this all started. I follow chess, and I didn't even know (consciously, I am sure I heard it and didn't take close note) at the time that he beat Magnus, until he dropped out.
I probably should not care too much, and do something more useful with my time, but it is super annoying to me that people are spreading misinformation to such a degree and no one seems to really care that that this can really impact someone's life.
On top of that, I strongly do not believe that someone should be branded for life due to their past actions.
Do you even need to search the HTML? Just a generic find of the browser's search will reveal the same info. Not sure why you'd need to go to that trouble.
at the time I read this and replied, your comment was top of the stack. without reading the full comments, i'm already reading your comment as someone that's got their knickers in a twist rather than reading a substantive comment. so hopefully that's what you wanted?
New comments start out at the top and sink within a few minutes, only a select few will have that problem.
Ctrl+f gives false positives for name mentions, and searching the html is just as easy. Benefits of having spent so much time dealing with css style/class related bugs, I guess.
This whole situation is _not_ a Hans problem…it’s a FIDE problem. They don’t know how to reliably adjudicate claims of cheating, so it ends up being a massive game of “he said he said.” As the game gets more popular, they have a tremendous amount of work to do to guarantee game integrity – not unlike the work baseball had to do with steroids.
If other world top-50 players even think Hans cheated and got away with it, it creates an open door for lots more unscrupulous players to look for their own cheating schemes. We need to stop being so focused on a 19-year-old child and start asking chess organizers some hard questions about what they are planning to do to guarantee clean chess.
1. Ramp up anti cheat across the board. Stream delay, collect metrics which trigger an INTERNAL review at a certain threshold, etc.
2. Give players a process for lodging a suspicion of cheating. Part of this would be working with FIDE, not starting public drama. Fine them if they break the rules of that process.
If you get caught cheating, even once, you should be banned for life.
Otherwise we end up in a lose-lose situation.
It’s almost impossible for Magnus to prove Niemann cheated on that game.
It’s impossible for Niemann to prove he didn’t cheat.
But shouldn’t matter. He was caught cheating before, he shouldn’t have been allowed to compete again.
I don’t remember Ben Johnson or Lance Armstrong getting a pass
Edit: Replies seem to focus on my examples. Forget about them. Proposition stands. If you are old enough to compete you are old enough to be banned for life if you cheat. Online or OTB.
Permanent ban is standard punishment for cheating in lots of things in life. It's bizarre to me that it's not so in chess. Was he only caught while under 18. I can understand giving a second chance to children.
Imagine if they did that at the FAANG. There would be no more recruits. What percentage of all technical interviews at FAANG involve the candidate googling the answer in a way that the interviewer didn't know about?
Steroids aren't even the best analogy. If you get caught with those, you get punished, but eventually you're allowed to play again. Cheating with an engine is more like fixing the game, which is usually a life time ban in most sports.
The situation for steroids is worse though: former steroid users gain benefits today even if they've been clean for a decade, due to how muscle cells work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyFfCVxGTIc
Lance’s case is interesting. Cheating is (was?) rampant in cycling. As Bill Burr joked “our roided up guy beat your roided up guy, what’s the big deal?”
I don’t think chess is as bad as cycling. Doesn’t excuse bad behavior, but gives some perspective
Hans has admitted to cheating in tournaments for money. Money is surely the line between professional and amateur. As for forgiving young people, we should codify that if we are serious about that. For example, we might have a 3-strikes rule that allows all young people to cheat at least 3 times before they are given an adult punishment, and we might also desire the ability to seal prior history.
Well the best way for Hans to prove he didn’t cheat is to give amazing analysis after the game demonstrating his super-elite chess thinking. Unfortunately, he often sounds like someone who did nothing on a group project trying to explain how it works to the professor.
I know this isn’t proof he cheated, but it doesn’t do him any favors when he’s already under suspicion.
Edit: Way back, decades ago, in Warcraft 2, I became strong enough to regularly get accused of cheating by people who weren’t familiar with me. However the converse side of this is I was extremely accurate at detecting actual cheating.
> I don’t remember Ben Johnson or Lance Armstrong getting a pass
I do not want to suggest anything here, just side note that there are cases in cycling when someone was cheating and than suspended/relegated but without life ban like Alberto Contador in Tour de France 2010.
Magnus isn't trying to be judge, jury and executioner by refusing to play Hans. He has stated before that merely having suspicions (e.g. based on past cheating as in Niemann's case) about your opponent possibly cheating completely ruins one's mentality during a game.
He simply wants to avoid going through that, which imo is understandable.
Some other GMs mentioned the same thing, having doubts whether the opponent is cheating or not makes you play differently (if they blunder, you might consider it could be a really deep engine line).
There is no way that this is possible. Niemann's performance has such a wide variance between:
- his best days, where he is pressing for victory or easily winning against the very best players in the world (not only Carlsen, but also Aronian, Mamedyarov, Firouzja), and
- his bad days, where he plays like an average grandmaster.
Someone who can play as bad as Niemann does on his bad days could never beat Carlsen legitimately in my opinion.
Any opponent could cheat at anytime. Cheating in chess is a fact of life, and can't be stopped. Other professional sports have mostly come to terms with this, and chess needs to as well.
When you have proof of cheating the sport's authorities take action (not individual players). When you don't you let the games go on knowing some folks are getting away with it sometimes.
The thing is that FIDE isn't really doing anything. This has been mentioned elsewhere in the comments, but what they really need to do is take this seriously and hire magicians, GM's, ex-intelligence, etc... to assess the situation and with transparency provide recommendations on how to move forward.
If you look at FIDE's statement, they basically said they were made that Magnus did this and they're using "sophisticated" techniques to prevent cheating. I don't think that is a responsible way to act, given that this presents an existential threat to the sport.
With today's system, there is no way to get proof of cheating, without catching someone red handed, and there's no way to bring awareness because FIDE is either not interested, incompetent, or both. Also, there might be a lot of cheating in chess, and it could be just an ugly secret that they're protecting.
> Magnus isn't trying to be judge, jury and executioner by refusing to play Hans.
Yes, he most definitely is and the rest of your comment doesn’t disprove that in any way.
Magnus isn’t trying to be judge, jury and executioner. He has just decided that the guy is irrevocably a cheater and as a sentence he will never play a game against him again.
There are two things that must be understood before making any judgement on this case:
1. It is solidly within the realm of possibility that a person who spends all his time devoted to succeeding in tournament chess would be able to devise a cheating method that cannot be easily detected by standard protocols
2. It is impossible to prove a negative, so it is impossible to disprove Magnus' claims
With these things being said, it is both possible that Hans didn't cheat and we'll never know for sure, or that he did cheat and we'll never know how. Given these facts, the most productive analysis would be to find just how unusual Hans' performance, both in the game and prior, really was.
A few things could be determined:
1. How many other high level players have a history of cheating? Have any players who have once cheated in a lower stakes match later been proven to have cheated in a higher stakes one?
2. Based on improvement per game played, how unusually rapid was Hans' development in the past 2 years? Are there other players which have progressed as rapidly as he has despite having progressed slower earlier in their careers?
3. Do all the engine correlation analyses that implicate Hans not fire warning signals when analysis any other game by confirmed non-cheaters? Do they signal cheating in a similar way when analyzing games of proven cheaters?
It is easier to prove a positive since it requires only the "smoking gun" to be made apparent. It is much harder to disprove a negative because it requires hypothetical smoking gun that could have caused the effect (Han's beating of Magnus) to be disproven. Since we don't have a record of every electromagnetic and sonic wave which passed through the room the day Hans beat Magnus, disproving the cheating claim is likely impossible.
Readit News
Also, clever cheating devices have been found in over the board chess competitions. So, this is possible. Moreover, one needn't carry a device on themselves. A cheater may have accomplices providing hints, if they carry a device.
It will be interesting to see how chess tournaments, as well as FIDE, chess.com, and other major chess institutions react to this situation. The potential for cheating has now been brought to the absolute forefront of chess discussion. And Carlsen's actions have been questioned by FIDE in recent interviews, with FIDE staff condemning "vigilantism" of a kind.
Some set of resolutions seems necessary--perhaps standards for security in major chess tournaments, perhaps an alliance to share cheating or reliability data amongst major chess operations, perhaps a standard term in major chess tournament agreements that no previously identified cheaters (online or otherwise) will be allowed to play, and perhaps sanctions in some form against Carlsen (or Niemann, if concrete evidence against him emerges).
The most convincing candidate for such a device I've seen is an Illuminati Thumper Pro hidden in Hans's shoe: https://illuminati-magic.com/products/thumper. If you watch the footage of him getting scanned before his match with Alireza (and, crucially, before Magnus announced he was dropping), there are a couple of subtle things that are consistent with this theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIulWkTHuu0:
1. He swallows (seemingly nervously) at 4 seconds shortly before his left shoe is scanned.
2. As the left shoe is being scanned, there are 2 beeping noises that at least to me, sound like they are coming from the wand, but are seemingly ignored by the wander. The same beeps do not repeat when his right shoe is scanned (that is, it's not just metal parts built into the shoes themselves). Two caveats to this part: First, I've heard differing opinions on whether the thumper will trigger metal detectors. Second, it's possible (even if unlikely IMO) that those beeps are not from that wand and it's just a coincidence that another wand or object beeped - since we can't see the wand in frame.
3. At 1:17 he starts nervously fidgeting with the credit card as the RF scanner gets close to his left foot and noticeably slows down when the scanner switches from his left foot to the right foot, and appears to stop completely as soon as the scanner is moving up away from his right foot. The RF scanner, to my understanding, would only detect devices that are actively transmitting which the thumper shouldn't need to do at all if Hans were using purely to receive engine moves/hints during the but the fact that it theoretically could transmit would explain why he'd be nervous about getting scanned anyway.
Of course none of these observations are proof but they sure look suspicious to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_junction_detector
I am very far removed from anything related to Chess, but if they want to get serious about this they should hire people who specialize in the federal-contracting adjacent field of TSCM (technical surveillance countermeasures).
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=tscm+tech...
I also think that people putting a lot of focus into shoes or other clothing articles underestimate the motivation and capability of people to use the traditional "prison wallet" method of concealing things.
Magnus didn't play particularly well and Hans played ok. This was not an example of a superhuman intelligence passing hints to overcome Magnus at his best.
e.g. is the bit of information "move the knight" aka theres only about 4 bits of info, or is it "move the knight to E6" which is a good deal more bits, that could be lossy/error prone.
just on the surface of it, i dont see how this thing could give enough info but i suppose with a loooot of training you could improve the info transfer rate?
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IMO, this reasoning potentially implicates every high level player. If it's possible that two hints can account for the difference between 2600 and 2800, and a 19 year old kid under heavy scrutiny can exploit this weakness without being detected, it seems assured that other more experienced players are also exploiting this.
It seems that might even be enough for Hans as a 2675 rated player to get an edge against 2800+ player without even actually cheating
If average player does 100 mistakes per match fixing 4 of them won't matter. But if great player makes 6, fixing even single one can be deciding
Software running in a smartphone can play deep games against each other.
Chess engines aren't like car engines are to sprinting. They are more akin to text-to-image AIs but as though every single picture they produce is better than what any artist ever could produce.
Part of that is because Chess is easily defined (the win conditions are comparatively simple).
I'm rambling now and I think that's enough wall of text for a hot take.
This window seems closed though. Carlsen seems to have no evidence. Where else could the evidence come from? All we have is character attacks. Even if justified, they can't prove that he cheated.
All we know for sure is that Carlsen accused him of cheating with no evidence.
Sometimes the evidence of someone doing monstrously better than can be expected by their history is sufficient IMO. I mean, look at this article about swimmer Shirley Babashoff [1], dubbed "Surly Shirley" at the time by the media, for suggesting the East German women were on PEDs in the 70s. Nowadays we look back on those images of the East German women, looking more manly than any dude I've ever seen, and wonder how we considered with a straight face that they weren't on a boatload of drugs. Similarly, it completely baffles me how any sane person can think that Flo Jo wasn't on PEDs in the runup to the 1988 Olympics - her 100m dash record still stands today.
I'm not saying Carlsen went about it in the right way, because now Niemann is basically in an indefensible position, but I'm also not willing to quickly dismiss it because Carlsen has "no evidence".
1. https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/exclusive-shirley...
100% serious question.
Ball is in Han's court.
When you see it consistently the difference seems enormous, but the math … is surprisingly tiny.
Also, I agree the “math is tiny“ but the talent, work ethic, luck, etc. required to separate oneself from the good to be great is *enormous*.
[UPDATE] Turns out you can get dental implant hardware on eBay:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/272267166511
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It really seems to me that everyone is overthinking this. Hans has admitted to cheating and just says he didn't cheat here. The idea we should give him the benefit of the doubt seems really odd. It doesn't really matter to me whether he cheated in this specific tournament - he shouldn't have a place in the chess world.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJVzSXsZ10I&t=3291s [2] in the sense that every move for an extended period covering multiple tournaments was exactly the top engine move - way more accurate than any human ever
I can't think of any effective way to curb online cheating in chess. Ultimately, online chess with money prizes shouldn't really exist.
Dead Comment
source? sounds like bs to me
The best players in the world, these 2700+ rated players have:
1. Played many many positions many times over and have incredible recall of those general positions.
2. Know how to analyze a position/state of the game at any given moment and have a better "feel" for who is advantaged and/or where the greatest strengths/weaknesses of black/white are located.
However, none of them have the power of chess engines, which analyze singular moves (or poll a db) for the hundreds/thousands of possible outcomes 1, 2, 3, ..., n moves ahead (this is why the best engines are strictly better than humans at this point), so unless a player has both played and committed to memory the exact line being played in a game, the best they tend to get to is "having a feeling" about the state of the game (please forgive my oversimplification here, chess fans)
Now if a 2600 rated player - someone who's still easily in the top 1% of chess players and incredibly capable player of the game - were to be playing a game against a 2800 rated opponent, but had a computer tell them "Hey, this one move is critical" without being told the exact move, they would almost _certainly_ become heavily favored to win. That "feeling" about a position is now irrelevant. There are only a few pieces that will be likely moved on any given turn, and now you can narrow down your own analysis to what is different about moving any one of them in particular because you've been given advanced warning that the most-likely-to-be-played moves will result in wildly different consequences n moves later.
These are hours-long games. Taking 15-20 minutes on a turn is not unheard of, and doing so on a turn that is proven-critical can make all the difference.
Even at my own mediocre level of 1800, I definitely do not score 0.25 against 2000 rated players. More like 0.1 if I'm feeling sharp.
Did he steal it? Not necessarily — it’s entirely possible that he got a higher-paying legit job and saved up for it, or inherited money from a relative, or got it legally in some other way. He shouldn’t be convicted of a new crime with no other evidence just because he committed similar crimes in the past.
However, it would be entirely natural for a reasonable person to assume that theft is the most likely explanation of the facts, and to avoid trusting that person.
This is basically what happened with Hans. He has been caught cheating multiple times, and then had an unusually fast rise in rating. Is that rise impossible? No. But it’s consistent with cheating, and given his history, cheating is the simplest explanation.
So it would be totally normal for Magnus to refuse to trust such a person even though it can’t be conclusively proven that he’s still dirty. But even then, Magnus agreed to play against him, until further circumstantial evidence came to light and it just got to be too much.
So, is it possible that Hans is clean? Sure. If that’s indeed the case, do I feel sorry for him? No. He made the choice to destroy his own reputation when he cheated multiple times. If he doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt now, it’s on him.
If he has a history of stealing cars AND his new car is hot wired? Possible it's legal? Sure. Let's not twist our hands about a grand theft auto charge, however.
But is it hotwired? That's speculation from someone who just lost a race to them.
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Magnus is just refusing to invest time and energy (and rating points) to play against someone he doesn’t like, which is absolutely his right. Nobody has the right to force Magnus or anyone else to play against them.
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Coming back to your analogy. So now imagine this person suddenly has a new shiny car but he also has the Title and registration for that car. Not only that, someone reported him to the cops and the cops said that the car is not stolen. He also has income tax returns that show that he has a legit source of income. Would it be natural for a reasonable person to assume that theft is the most likely explanation?
Based off of their previous behavior of stealing cars? Yes it would absolutely be the most likely explanation. Under such a circumstance, it would simply mean that their skill at stealing cars has improved to now include forging documents, and possibly bribing police.
Given their passed behavior, the objective is no longer for you to prove guilt, but for them to prove innocence. It is illogical to continually approach accusations of theft, or cheating, under a neutral assumption when a pattern emerges.
If you own ten chickens and come out one morning to nine, and a pile of feathers next to a fox, you have your culprit. Should you wander around demanding to see feathers each time another chicken goes missing before you blame the fox sleeping at your doorstep? The fox is there. There are fewer chickens. The easiest answer is the most likely.
There is enough certainty for the alternative to be inconsequential.
Dude probably trains with computers regularly. He has a better memory than 10 average Joe's combined. He's been the absolute #1 of the world for what, 10 years now?
He wouldn't risk his whole reputation for nothing.
I personally take his suspicions very seriously, though I agree that evidence has to be presented sooner or later.
Do you have a link to this? Proof that this player has cheated in the past would be the strongest evidence, I believe, he'd do so again.
The interesting thing is the one party MORE qualified than Magnus and the other grandmasters to detect cheating is the chesscom statistics team and they think Hans has cheated online recently and didn't admit to it. Still, there's no smoking gun that proves the OTB matches were fixed, Hans can be innocent at least in those specific circumstances, but if he's been guilty in online chess recently is it truly fair to make the world champion play against him OTB?
>He wouldn't risk his whole reputation for nothing.
It is pretty important to realise in terms of Magnus's mindset he has given up on defending the world championship and doing anything other than achieving 2900 elo, the highest rating ever achieved. He is a champion, and that is his goal in life, he wants that rating in a way most people can't fathom. If he proves Hans Neimann is a cheater, Han's win's against Magnus are void, and Magnus's rating goes up. Imagine being the world champion and having your dream drift further away because of a known cheater beating you when they're at a disadvantage, what goes through your head? What goes through your head when you think of how many people COULD be cheating and making getting 2900 impossible? What can others do about the spectre of chess cheating, the world champion, doesn't stand up?
So what I'm saying here is, I wouldn't be super confident that Magnus wouldn't throw his reputation in the trash to become the greatest chess player who ever lived. I think he would absolutely throw away his reputation, but not for nothing.
That just shows that he is fallible, which I empathize with.
Also don't forget the bishop blunder by Nepo in the world championship against Magnus. That was a 1800 level blunder trapping the bishop. Nepo is in top 5 GM list.
The fact of the matter is that all GMs including Magnus have the potential to make blunders.
To be clear, I'm not saying this to make a claim that this is definitive proof of anything. I'm pointing out that the theory that Magnus simply blundered away the game doesn't hold water. Niemann had the advantage—as black no less—for essentially the entire game against someone who is widely known for being capable of grinding away nearly-perfectly for extensive periods of time.
No more evidence is required. The quality of Hans Niemann's moves, recently as well as during his rise from 2400-rating three years ago, is enough evidence against him.
Either he is a good as Stockfish, or ...
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Here is the first interview I could find from a 10 second google:
https://www.dw.com/en/world-chess-champion-magnus-carlsen-th...
The money quote:
" My practice at home is with the computer. When I study chess with other people, we always have a chess board. But on my own, it's always at the computer. "
I'm not sure why someone would respond to dozens of all comment threads, but the different tones of voice, presented familiarity with the topic, between posts are disconcerting. I've never accused anyone of being a bot or shill (nor am I now) because I've seen starry-eyed true believers of just about every cause, idea, and entity, but this behavior is exceptionally unusual.
People who know near zero about chess seem to come out of woodwork to defend underdog who is attacked by the top level clique. Its understandable, but to me its akin to the flat earth arguments. All based on emotions, never have much to say about chess.
Anyone who knows a bit about chess (lets say advanced level), would point to the post game interview of game vs Firouzja as amazingly suspicious. It feels like a guy in group project who did noting and is trying to explain the project to their professor.
50/50 split is either illusion or its due to inflation of randoms giving their opinions.
No sound human would bee asking random ppl to determine if a patient has a cancer as a diagnostic tool. Cheating in chess is at top level extremely subtle, how is a random 1000 player any authority on the topic?
"It feels like"
Do you see no irony here?
I don't think it's too surprising that some people have strong opinions about this matter either.
The strange thing to me then, is that with regards to this Hacker News thread, it is fairly split in sentiment if you look at the total number of comments in either direction, but if you look at unique commenters it overwhelmingly swings one direction.
My question from that premise is, why is that the case? Specifically, I've never seen a hacker news thread with 250+ comments where a single person or a handful make up such a large percentage of the comments. The human effort required for such a thing is significant, and obviously that can't scale forever. I'd be surprised that with tiktok and youtube videos with 30000+ comments, if there's ever been a case of a single person responding 3000+ times.
I know a little bit about the situation (though not an expert - I haven't researched it a ton, just tried to think critically about the situation) due to the fact that yeah, drama is entertaining. But I also think what the WC is doing is disgusting - he is using his position of power to harm someone, and doesn't have much evidence, really, none at all, other than him saying "trust me."
Also, the parallels between this and political discord are really interesting to me, and I wish I were smart enough to boil that down on a sociological level and express myself but unfortunately I am not.
I didn't know anything about Hans until Magnus dropped out of the tournament and this all started. I follow chess, and I didn't even know (consciously, I am sure I heard it and didn't take close note) at the time that he beat Magnus, until he dropped out.
I probably should not care too much, and do something more useful with my time, but it is super annoying to me that people are spreading misinformation to such a degree and no one seems to really care that that this can really impact someone's life.
On top of that, I strongly do not believe that someone should be branded for life due to their past actions.
at the time I read this and replied, your comment was top of the stack. without reading the full comments, i'm already reading your comment as someone that's got their knickers in a twist rather than reading a substantive comment. so hopefully that's what you wanted?
Ctrl+f gives false positives for name mentions, and searching the html is just as easy. Benefits of having spent so much time dealing with css style/class related bugs, I guess.
If other world top-50 players even think Hans cheated and got away with it, it creates an open door for lots more unscrupulous players to look for their own cheating schemes. We need to stop being so focused on a 19-year-old child and start asking chess organizers some hard questions about what they are planning to do to guarantee clean chess.
1. Ramp up anti cheat across the board. Stream delay, collect metrics which trigger an INTERNAL review at a certain threshold, etc.
2. Give players a process for lodging a suspicion of cheating. Part of this would be working with FIDE, not starting public drama. Fine them if they break the rules of that process.
Good god yes, I couldn't believe they didn't have a stream delay in the original Hans/Magnus game that kicked this off
If you get caught cheating, even once, you should be banned for life.
Otherwise we end up in a lose-lose situation.
It’s almost impossible for Magnus to prove Niemann cheated on that game.
It’s impossible for Niemann to prove he didn’t cheat.
But shouldn’t matter. He was caught cheating before, he shouldn’t have been allowed to compete again.
I don’t remember Ben Johnson or Lance Armstrong getting a pass
Edit: Replies seem to focus on my examples. Forget about them. Proposition stands. If you are old enough to compete you are old enough to be banned for life if you cheat. Online or OTB.
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My guess? Over 30%
I don’t think chess is as bad as cycling. Doesn’t excuse bad behavior, but gives some perspective
These seem like fair qualifications to your proposition.
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I know this isn’t proof he cheated, but it doesn’t do him any favors when he’s already under suspicion.
Edit: Way back, decades ago, in Warcraft 2, I became strong enough to regularly get accused of cheating by people who weren’t familiar with me. However the converse side of this is I was extremely accurate at detecting actual cheating.
I do not want to suggest anything here, just side note that there are cases in cycling when someone was cheating and than suspended/relegated but without life ban like Alberto Contador in Tour de France 2010.
Niemann doesn't have to approve such a thing. It falls on the accuser to prove that the accused is guilty.
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He simply wants to avoid going through that, which imo is understandable.
Someone who can play as bad as Niemann does on his bad days could never beat Carlsen legitimately in my opinion.
When you have proof of cheating the sport's authorities take action (not individual players). When you don't you let the games go on knowing some folks are getting away with it sometimes.
If you look at FIDE's statement, they basically said they were made that Magnus did this and they're using "sophisticated" techniques to prevent cheating. I don't think that is a responsible way to act, given that this presents an existential threat to the sport.
With today's system, there is no way to get proof of cheating, without catching someone red handed, and there's no way to bring awareness because FIDE is either not interested, incompetent, or both. Also, there might be a lot of cheating in chess, and it could be just an ugly secret that they're protecting.
Yes, he most definitely is and the rest of your comment doesn’t disprove that in any way.
Magnus isn’t trying to be judge, jury and executioner. He has just decided that the guy is irrevocably a cheater and as a sentence he will never play a game against him again.
1. It is solidly within the realm of possibility that a person who spends all his time devoted to succeeding in tournament chess would be able to devise a cheating method that cannot be easily detected by standard protocols
2. It is impossible to prove a negative, so it is impossible to disprove Magnus' claims
With these things being said, it is both possible that Hans didn't cheat and we'll never know for sure, or that he did cheat and we'll never know how. Given these facts, the most productive analysis would be to find just how unusual Hans' performance, both in the game and prior, really was.
A few things could be determined:
1. How many other high level players have a history of cheating? Have any players who have once cheated in a lower stakes match later been proven to have cheated in a higher stakes one?
2. Based on improvement per game played, how unusually rapid was Hans' development in the past 2 years? Are there other players which have progressed as rapidly as he has despite having progressed slower earlier in their careers?
3. Do all the engine correlation analyses that implicate Hans not fire warning signals when analysis any other game by confirmed non-cheaters? Do they signal cheating in a similar way when analyzing games of proven cheaters?
Since this statement is itself a negative, you've presented a paradox, because if it were proven true it would then be false.
It is easier to prove a positive since it requires only the "smoking gun" to be made apparent. It is much harder to disprove a negative because it requires hypothetical smoking gun that could have caused the effect (Han's beating of Magnus) to be disproven. Since we don't have a record of every electromagnetic and sonic wave which passed through the room the day Hans beat Magnus, disproving the cheating claim is likely impossible.