With that said, pretty much everyone in my family, including my SO, are lawyers and I have been around the block a few times when it comes to discussing slander / libel suits in the US.
As an independent 3rd party with no interest in the world of Chess, I don't see how Niemann expects to win any damages in this case.
In the US the bar for slander is very high due to the existence of the first amendment and trying to protect it, you will basically have to prove malicious intent and that the offending party knew they were lying. Other countries like the UK have a much lower bar which is why it's a bigger deal there.
Unless I am missing some clear piece of evidence no one made a bad faith comment (and i need to stress you need to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt)
Magnus felt there was foul play because he knew of Nieman's history of cheating which was public knowledge in the chess world, same thing with his comments regarding the coach
Chess.com simply made available data that is rightfully theirs and stated that his rise has been exceptional.
Hikaru simply commented on the situation like a million other youtubers / twitch streamers and influencers, he just happens to be an expert in the field so he made his opinion using his domain knowledge and the fact that Niemann had been previously accused of cheating.
Again, unless i am missing some clear piece of evidence no one acted maliciously or twisted the truth to purposely cause harm, only gave their opinion using the information they had available.
>> I don't see how Niemann expects to win any damages in this case
I don't think that's the only reason you bring a slander lawsuit. I think sometimes people do it expecting they will lose, but knowing the defense will be "we have no evidence the things we said were true, but our false statements are technically legal", and making the defendants go on the record with that defense.
IANAL but I think if they knew the statements were false (or with reckless disregard for the truth) then it would be slander. This is the "actual malice" standard. But in this case it seems absurdly unlikely that Niemann could prove this.
Shame that it is so difficult to navigate twitter at times, there is a lot of really good analysis here for anyone that is interested. I didn't go over the conspiracy and anti trust charges but he does a good job covering the bases and explaining what Niemann needs to show in order to be awarded damages or not have the suit thrown out.
> As an independent 3rd party with no interest in the world of Chess, I don't see how Niemann expects to win any damages in this case.
That's not the goal with most of these libel/slander law suits. Consider the most famous one - Billy Mitchell the most infamous professional gamer of all time. The evidence is basically unanimous he cheated but he uses lawsuits to shut down people who can't afford to fight them.
I imagine this is no different. Your only mistake is assuming the court won't throw out such a trashy lawsuit and lawyers exist that actually have some dignity.
The Billy Mitchell strategy doesn't make sense in this case though, since I guarantee you that all three named entities have more money to fight lawsuits than Hans Niemann.
Assume for a moment Hans did not cheat (aside from the times he admitted to cheating).
In the scenario where he did not cheat - how amazing is his performance? I.e. beating Magnus, Elo rating, etc. I know chess.com did an analysis, which I've read, but I'm hoping someone more impartial could explain it.
In the scenario where he did not cheat, is he really on a Bobby Fischer-like ascendance?
This is what I'm trying to understand - both scenarios seem so wild to me. Either (a) this guy is cheating a pro-level chess (totally wild) OR (b) he's on a crazy ramp-up of skill (totally wild).
(a) is pretty self-explanatory.
(b) is what I want someone to explain - if this is the scenario, just how crazy is the rate of his skill increase?
He has had an impressive but not unprecedented ramp up, from 2400(ish) to 2700 in around 3 years. There are actually other young stars, in particular a trio of Indian prodigies who've had a similar surge at the same time. I recommend the work of Nate Solon, a chess master and data scientist, easy to find on Twitter, he's published some interesting analysis. It's surprising for Magnus to lose a White game at all, especially to someone not in the top ten, but really no more than surprising - these sort of things happen. Can Djokovic lose to the world #100? Absolutely, he can have a bad day. The world #100 (in tennis or chess) is 98% (ish) as good as the world #1. Did Niemann cheat against Magnus? Obviously I don't know but I do think extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence and I don't see it in this case.
Carlsen was also immediately worse out of the opening and the game went directly from the opening to an endgame where Carlsen(white pieces) was slightly worse.
His win over Carlsen wasn't considered to be superhuman. Neither player played perfectly. In his podcast, Fabiano Caruana (someone capable of judging this) said he felt very strongly that Niemann hadn't cheated in the tournament.
His ELO gains are impressive, but not unique. [1]
If he is cheating, no sensible hypothesis of how he's doing it has yet been offered. So it seems more probably he's a legitimately talented player whose merit's obscured by his past.
There was nothing particularly amazing. His rise is not extraordinary. The only part that is slightly unusual is that it came towards his mid to late teens, whereas such a rise is commonly seen in the early teens. However, even that can very easily be explained by the pandemic, where he used that time to dedicate himself to chess (which is something no one is questioning).
Further, in the particular game he beat Magnus in, he did not play an extraordinary game or anything. He simply did not make any major mistakes. Whereas Magnus did. If imagine the majority of GMs playing in Hans’s position would have won that game.
I‘ve been trying to draw parallels to other sports in this regard. Nobody accused Tiger Woods of cheating (at golf) when he redefined the sport. People DID accuse Lance Armstrong, and they were right (although in that case the whole field was cheating). New England Patriots? Kinda cheated. Michael Phelps has never been accused AFAIK.
As a non-chess player, I can’t help but wonder if this is just an entire sport refusing to accept that someone could come along and achieve this, or if it’s really just too good to be true.
Plus Hans did admit to at least some amount of cheating.
Golf's a game of precision motor control, while insanely long drives might be evidence of cheating, it's hard to imagine a way to make yourself more accurate besides skill, at least without it being obvious on live television.
Biking obviously involves a lot of different things but it's much easier to see how doping is going to help.
Football has so many facets that it's kind of surprising there aren't more cheating scandals, but at the same time it's harder to isolate any one thing and say that's what's giving a team an edge.
Michael Phelps rose to prominence after most of the big doping scandals by which point anti-doping measures were well established. Besides doping, it's tough to cheat at swimming.
With chess, it's trivial to have a computer on your person capable of beating any human alive, it's just communicating with said computer that is a challenge. Given that chess masters are supposed to be extremely good at strategy and making clever moves people won't see coming, I'm sure there have been some ridiculous cheating attempts.
To be clear online chess legitimately has a cheating problem. I think it has gotten better but according to chess.com there have been a number of Grandmasters including some of the top 100 players in the world who have cheated on the site and admitted it. Cheating in over the board chess seems to be much less common but everyone realizes it is possible and if done well would be challenging to catch. I think this has primed the field for people to be suspicious.
> I can’t help but wonder if this is just an entire sport refusing to accept that someone could come along and achieve this
That's what Niemann wants you to believe, but it's not right. Carlsen is rated about 200 Elo points above Niemann. That makes a win in classical an upset, sure, but far from unprecented, and far from proof that he's a threat to Magnus' dominating position in the chess world the last decade. Weaker players have beaten Magnus, even with black.
Hans is currently rated around 2700 (at least his live rating after his performance at the US Chess Championship). A few other GMs around that rating have beaten Magnus in just the last week or two (Arjun Erigaisi and Gukesh to name a couple), so it's not out of this world. It is still certainly an upset, but not impossible.
> In the scenario where he did not cheat - how amazing is his performance?
Not amazing at all. It’s a fairly standard performance which is why it’s very dubious he cheated OTB. The chess.com report has to stretch the truth considerably to try to imply there is something fishy OTB. Magnus was just playing aggressively to score against a weaker opponent and had a bad day.
His performance ramp up is not particularly impressive. He played less tournaments that people his age four years ago and his rating went up towards competitive GM level when he started seriously playing. That’s a typical trajectory for a young pro-player. To be clear, we are not talking about a Fischer-like, world champion contender path here.
His rate of improvement, assuming no cheating since his ban in 2020, is a faster ascendance than any other player in history, including Bobby Fischer. So yes, assuming he suddenly quit cheating cold turkey, his performance would indicate he is a once in a generation talent and could easily become the best in the world, according to the Chess.com report.
I'm a huge Hans fan. (F him for cheating, but setting that aside.) His play is objectively insane. Either he's somehow been cheating this whole time via shoefish, or he's the real deal.
GothamChess has had excellent coverage of his games.
Hans threw a masterful knockout punch at the end, one which his opponent completely overlooked, and was solely a single move. There wasn't cheating-like high level strategy involved -- it was a one-move fatality.
Whatever else the kid has done, he is one hell of a chess player. I find it hard not to root for him, even knowing his history.
His performance at the US chess championship with strict anti-cheating measures in place proves beyond a reasonable doubt that he's as good as his rating. This whole "improved too fast" as proof of cheating is nonsense.
He might have still cheated to beat Magnus but there's no proof.
This isn't really true. He started later then most other high level players, and then the pandemic meant he was studying and playing online a lot without raising his OTB rating. He's a good player but I don't think there is any real argument that he might ever be world champion.
This is just not true. Check out the analysis here [0], for example. His rating improvement has been steep but he's also played a very large number of games, so his rating gain per game as opposed to per unit of time is not so crazy.
Also, no one seriously expects Hans to be a world championship contender.
>Assume for a moment Hans did not cheat (aside from the times he admitted to cheating).
as far as i can tell he's hasn't cheated since 2020. Ive seen several of his games though where he certainly has cheated.
>In the scenario where he did not cheat - how amazing is his performance? I.e. beating Magnus, Elo rating, etc. I know chess.com did an analysis, which I've read, but I'm hoping someone more impartial could explain it.
Magnus ultimately drew the match; the one he lost he resigned on move 2. So no remarkable performance.
>In the scenario where he did not cheat, is he really on a Bobby Fischer-like ascendance?
The chess.com allegations has him better than bobby fischer in terms of rise. Though I would say that's not accounting for elo inflation.
>This is what I'm trying to understand - both scenarios seem so wild to me. Either (a) this guy is cheating a pro-level chess (totally wild) OR (b) he's on a crazy ramp-up of skill (totally wild).
He's an admitted cheater; but what seems to have gone unsaid is that perhaps his cheating isn't actual cheating. Rather he was reading his stream comments and viewers were cheating for him. It's not quite the same.
Flipside, streaming is always going to take some of your focus and attention. Streamers are by default not going to be able to compete at the top most level. So the probability he's at a supergm level is basically impossible.
> He's an admitted cheater; but what seems to have gone unsaid is that perhaps his cheating isn't actual cheating. Rather he was reading his stream comments and viewers were cheating for him. It's not quite the same.
..what?! Your definition of cheating appears to differ from the accepted meaning of the word in quite a few ways
From everything said about Hans the thing that sticks out to me the most is his analysed centipawn loss over all his games. Typically, as someone improves, both their loss per move and loss-variance falls. For hans, there is limited improvement over time and a high variance in the quality of his moves. He effectively has played at a 2700 level for a couple of years... This seems to be unusal compared to compariable pros.
I have listened to some his interviews recently and he talks extensively about engine analysed lines. He talks about avoiding lines he hasn't analysed or is uncertain on. I wouldn't be surprised if he has optimised his development on engine analysis. It would explain a high number of highly accurute games. It would also explain the variance in his play where he forced into unknown lines.
Hans went from 2400 to 2700, so he obviously improved. Centipawn analysis is just youtuber snakeoil. Everyone at the top level has trained and analyzed lines with engines for the past 25 years.
> Assume for a moment Hans did not cheat (aside from the times he admitted to cheating). In the scenario where he did not cheat - how amazing is his performance? ...In the scenario where he did not cheat, is he really on a Bobby Fischer-like ascendance?
I think so, yes, and even considerably moreso.
According to Yosha Iglesias[1] and her anonymous mathematician friend, for 5 tournaments in a row starting at the Philadelphia Open in July 2021 Hans Niemann played at an average engine correlation of 73%, beating Bobby Fischer's average engine correlation of 72% during his 20 game winning streak between 2 Dec. 1970 and 30 Sept. 1971. Fischer's peak rating was 2895 in October 1971 at 27yo. Niemann's peak rating was 2699 this month, October 2022, at 19yo.
Also according to Yosha, in three years Niemann has played 10 games with a perfect 100% engine correlation and 23 games with engine correlations above 90%.[2]
My own chess layman analysis of the experts' analyses is that the best chess players in the world right now generally play games with engine correlations ranging game to game from the mid-60%s to the high-80%s, with much rarer games in the 90%s, and games 100% engine correlated being a once or twice in a lifetime event. Magnus Carlson at his best has an engine correlation of 70%.[1]
Unless he cheated, it is quite clear to me, at least, that Hans Niemann is the singular greatest chess player of all time.
It's a very impressive rise, but in part because it started later in life than other young GMs. In absolute terms, he's still on par with about a dozen young 2700s who are about the same age. It's just that he caught up really fast.
If I never bowled in my life, started, and two weeks later claimed I was getting 270 or higher on a consistent basis you wouldn't say "well there are pro bowelers his age that get similar scores "
What I don't think most people are appreciating in this thread is that at this level of play the cheating can be extremely subtle and yet extremely effective. None of the players in this dramas are talking about a cheater having a hidden mind link to a chess engine. These games typically hinge on one or two crucial moments. GMs need only one bit of information at the right moment to play several hundred points above their normal rating. A cough at a point where there's a win opportunity or a potential trap is all that's needed.
You can prove statistically that he used Stockfish in some critical games; 100% same moves. In other games he was at Magnus' level, around 75%, and in some on his normal level.
Yes, Stockfish is really good. But not crazy. Just call him Hans Shoefish.
Not a lawyer but I’ve been in lawsuits on all sides. It’s the general recommended practice.
The number can only go down, never up, so you ask for all that you can.
It does have -some- sense if you think about it: this is a young kid with a whole career ahead of him. Because of this accusation, his career is pretty much over. Since he could have been one of the best (as demonstrated by beating magnus) he would have made $100m over a lifetime. Based This is probably the order of magnitude that hikaru and magnus will make in their careers. Or some loose logic like that
I think this whole drama is on chess.com for allowing cheaters back on their platform and not having a public wall of shame. They've known that Hans had cheated online and never disclosed it. Now they are trying to fool us into thinking they're on the public's side.
If you don't penalize cheaters early on then every kid that's promising at chess will start to cheat online to boost their stream views and to have enough income to focus fully on chess.
Is it normal for these suits to be so... salty? in their formulations. I've never read one before, but a lot of the wordings are pretty hilarious.
> Carlsen, having solidifed his position as the "King of Chess", believes that when it comes to chess, he can do whatever he wants and get away with it.
> On September 4, 2022, Niemann soundly defeated Carlsen during an in-person game
> Notably, this was not the first time that Niemann beat Carlsen at chess
> Notorios for his inability to cope with defeat, Carlsen snapped. Enraged that the young Niemann, fully 12 years his junior, dared to disrespect the "King of Chess", and fearful that the young prodigy would further blemish his multi-million dollar brand by beating him again
Just a thought experiment: what if it turns out that, for all practical purposes, it is impossible to prevent cheating in chess?
I mean the sport of Tour de France cycling disappeared for a decade, replaced by an identical-looking-but-fundamentally-different sport of competing to see who can cheat (dope) the best. It was probably not even possible to get into the TdF during that time period, without doping, there were so many people doing it.
It is entirely possible, that chess (as a professional competition) is not going to survive this, because it will turn out that with modern computing and communications technology, it is not possible to prevent cheating. Whoever wins the competition, will be the one who cheated the best. Chess will be replaced with an acting and subterfuge competition.
> Chess will be replaced with an acting and subterfuge competition.
Which sort of prompts the question: Why isn't there a "World Chess Cheating Championship"?
The competitors would be given the chance to either demonstrate a type of cheating, or demonstrate a counter-measure, and then judges would be able to organise rigorous tests that paired the methods off against each other.
One sort of test that would be interesting to try is to have a GM who is able to receive a one-bit signal from an accomplice once per game (the much-discussed "this is an important move, think carefully" signal), and then statisticians should try to pick that game (or some set of such games) out of a sea of non-cheating games.
Basically I think that the chess community shouldn't take any "security measures" by event organisers at face value. Without red-teaming, any such measures are just security theatre.
I'm not a chess player but have been interested in the developments of this saga from exposure via HN and other sources.
Here is Carlsen's twitter statement in regards to the issue in case anyone wants to see or needs a refresher. I'm personally not aware of other "public statements" made that could be closely related but I'm just a rando
I think him being damaged by being called a cheater is incredibly obvious, it has materially impacted his future earnings directly, and it has also had a significantly impacted his reputation beyond what the prior cheating allegations did. Magnus and Hikaru are two of the biggest chess celebrities on the planet, and Chess.com (According to Hans himself) has the best anti-cheat team in the chess world. Being accused of cheating by these individuals publicly, as well as being accused to cheating RECENTLY, both have severely impacted his reputation.
I don't think the legal question is going to be establishing that Hans has faced harm. I think that's self-evident. The interesting question is more did Magnus Carlsen's/Chess.com's/Hikaru Nakamura's statements amount to Libel/Slander?
My money is against Hans. Libel/Slander is hard to prove in the US.
I'd also note that Chess.com prefers to deal with things privately and would've been quiet about this had Hans not publicly used Chess.com's brand to bolster his own credibility, essentially saying that Chess.com vouches for him. Then Chess.com asked him to retract his words but Hans refused.
One might even think that his own documented and admitted history of cheating is what has damaged him. Who wants to play against a cheater? Has he suddenly come down with a case of honor? How can he prove that? He has already destroyed his own reputation. Why should anyone want to play him? He is whining because he is reaping what he has sown himself.
Readit News
With that said, pretty much everyone in my family, including my SO, are lawyers and I have been around the block a few times when it comes to discussing slander / libel suits in the US.
As an independent 3rd party with no interest in the world of Chess, I don't see how Niemann expects to win any damages in this case.
In the US the bar for slander is very high due to the existence of the first amendment and trying to protect it, you will basically have to prove malicious intent and that the offending party knew they were lying. Other countries like the UK have a much lower bar which is why it's a bigger deal there.
Unless I am missing some clear piece of evidence no one made a bad faith comment (and i need to stress you need to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt)
Magnus felt there was foul play because he knew of Nieman's history of cheating which was public knowledge in the chess world, same thing with his comments regarding the coach
Chess.com simply made available data that is rightfully theirs and stated that his rise has been exceptional.
Hikaru simply commented on the situation like a million other youtubers / twitch streamers and influencers, he just happens to be an expert in the field so he made his opinion using his domain knowledge and the fact that Niemann had been previously accused of cheating.
Again, unless i am missing some clear piece of evidence no one acted maliciously or twisted the truth to purposely cause harm, only gave their opinion using the information they had available.
I don't think that's the only reason you bring a slander lawsuit. I think sometimes people do it expecting they will lose, but knowing the defense will be "we have no evidence the things we said were true, but our false statements are technically legal", and making the defendants go on the record with that defense.
https://twitter.com/AkivaMCohen/status/1583225640873959424
Shame that it is so difficult to navigate twitter at times, there is a lot of really good analysis here for anyone that is interested. I didn't go over the conspiracy and anti trust charges but he does a good job covering the bases and explaining what Niemann needs to show in order to be awarded damages or not have the suit thrown out.
That's not the goal with most of these libel/slander law suits. Consider the most famous one - Billy Mitchell the most infamous professional gamer of all time. The evidence is basically unanimous he cheated but he uses lawsuits to shut down people who can't afford to fight them.
I imagine this is no different. Your only mistake is assuming the court won't throw out such a trashy lawsuit and lawyers exist that actually have some dignity.
Deleted Comment
Assume for a moment Hans did not cheat (aside from the times he admitted to cheating).
In the scenario where he did not cheat - how amazing is his performance? I.e. beating Magnus, Elo rating, etc. I know chess.com did an analysis, which I've read, but I'm hoping someone more impartial could explain it.
In the scenario where he did not cheat, is he really on a Bobby Fischer-like ascendance?
This is what I'm trying to understand - both scenarios seem so wild to me. Either (a) this guy is cheating a pro-level chess (totally wild) OR (b) he's on a crazy ramp-up of skill (totally wild).
(a) is pretty self-explanatory.
(b) is what I want someone to explain - if this is the scenario, just how crazy is the rate of his skill increase?
His ELO gains are impressive, but not unique. [1]
If he is cheating, no sensible hypothesis of how he's doing it has yet been offered. So it seems more probably he's a legitimately talented player whose merit's obscured by his past.
[1] https://twitter.com/ChessNumbers/status/1568340548490252288
Further, in the particular game he beat Magnus in, he did not play an extraordinary game or anything. He simply did not make any major mistakes. Whereas Magnus did. If imagine the majority of GMs playing in Hans’s position would have won that game.
As a non-chess player, I can’t help but wonder if this is just an entire sport refusing to accept that someone could come along and achieve this, or if it’s really just too good to be true.
Plus Hans did admit to at least some amount of cheating.
Biking obviously involves a lot of different things but it's much easier to see how doping is going to help.
Football has so many facets that it's kind of surprising there aren't more cheating scandals, but at the same time it's harder to isolate any one thing and say that's what's giving a team an edge.
Michael Phelps rose to prominence after most of the big doping scandals by which point anti-doping measures were well established. Besides doping, it's tough to cheat at swimming.
With chess, it's trivial to have a computer on your person capable of beating any human alive, it's just communicating with said computer that is a challenge. Given that chess masters are supposed to be extremely good at strategy and making clever moves people won't see coming, I'm sure there have been some ridiculous cheating attempts.
That's what Niemann wants you to believe, but it's not right. Carlsen is rated about 200 Elo points above Niemann. That makes a win in classical an upset, sure, but far from unprecented, and far from proof that he's a threat to Magnus' dominating position in the chess world the last decade. Weaker players have beaten Magnus, even with black.
Not amazing at all. It’s a fairly standard performance which is why it’s very dubious he cheated OTB. The chess.com report has to stretch the truth considerably to try to imply there is something fishy OTB. Magnus was just playing aggressively to score against a weaker opponent and had a bad day.
His performance ramp up is not particularly impressive. He played less tournaments that people his age four years ago and his rating went up towards competitive GM level when he started seriously playing. That’s a typical trajectory for a young pro-player. To be clear, we are not talking about a Fischer-like, world champion contender path here.
GothamChess has had excellent coverage of his games.
Like seriously, look at this one: https://youtu.be/ainUWFboMLs?t=1490
Hans threw a masterful knockout punch at the end, one which his opponent completely overlooked, and was solely a single move. There wasn't cheating-like high level strategy involved -- it was a one-move fatality.
Whatever else the kid has done, he is one hell of a chess player. I find it hard not to root for him, even knowing his history.
He might have still cheated to beat Magnus but there's no proof.
Also, no one seriously expects Hans to be a world championship contender.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/x9bgtx/how_quickly_d...
as far as i can tell he's hasn't cheated since 2020. Ive seen several of his games though where he certainly has cheated.
>In the scenario where he did not cheat - how amazing is his performance? I.e. beating Magnus, Elo rating, etc. I know chess.com did an analysis, which I've read, but I'm hoping someone more impartial could explain it.
Magnus ultimately drew the match; the one he lost he resigned on move 2. So no remarkable performance.
>In the scenario where he did not cheat, is he really on a Bobby Fischer-like ascendance?
The chess.com allegations has him better than bobby fischer in terms of rise. Though I would say that's not accounting for elo inflation.
>This is what I'm trying to understand - both scenarios seem so wild to me. Either (a) this guy is cheating a pro-level chess (totally wild) OR (b) he's on a crazy ramp-up of skill (totally wild).
He's an admitted cheater; but what seems to have gone unsaid is that perhaps his cheating isn't actual cheating. Rather he was reading his stream comments and viewers were cheating for him. It's not quite the same.
Flipside, streaming is always going to take some of your focus and attention. Streamers are by default not going to be able to compete at the top most level. So the probability he's at a supergm level is basically impossible.
..what?! Your definition of cheating appears to differ from the accepted meaning of the word in quite a few ways
I have listened to some his interviews recently and he talks extensively about engine analysed lines. He talks about avoiding lines he hasn't analysed or is uncertain on. I wouldn't be surprised if he has optimised his development on engine analysis. It would explain a high number of highly accurute games. It would also explain the variance in his play where he forced into unknown lines.
I think so, yes, and even considerably moreso.
According to Yosha Iglesias[1] and her anonymous mathematician friend, for 5 tournaments in a row starting at the Philadelphia Open in July 2021 Hans Niemann played at an average engine correlation of 73%, beating Bobby Fischer's average engine correlation of 72% during his 20 game winning streak between 2 Dec. 1970 and 30 Sept. 1971. Fischer's peak rating was 2895 in October 1971 at 27yo. Niemann's peak rating was 2699 this month, October 2022, at 19yo.
Also according to Yosha, in three years Niemann has played 10 games with a perfect 100% engine correlation and 23 games with engine correlations above 90%.[2]
My own chess layman analysis of the experts' analyses is that the best chess players in the world right now generally play games with engine correlations ranging game to game from the mid-60%s to the high-80%s, with much rarer games in the 90%s, and games 100% engine correlated being a once or twice in a lifetime event. Magnus Carlson at his best has an engine correlation of 70%.[1]
Unless he cheated, it is quite clear to me, at least, that Hans Niemann is the singular greatest chess player of all time.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfPzUgzrOcQ&t=15m11s
[2] https://twitter.com/iglesiasyosha/status/1574374153997647874
If I never bowled in my life, started, and two weeks later claimed I was getting 270 or higher on a consistent basis you wouldn't say "well there are pro bowelers his age that get similar scores "
Yes, Stockfish is really good. But not crazy. Just call him Hans Shoefish.
From what I understand, if he's innocent then he's beyond Bobby Fischer.
>FIRST CAUSE OF ACTION (Slander – Against All Defendants)
>SECOND CAUSE OF ACTION (Libel – Against All Defendants)
>THIRD CAUSE OF ACTION (Violation of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1, et seq. – Against All Defendants)
>FOURTH CAUSE OF ACTION (Tortious Interference with Contract and Business Expectancies – Against All Defendants)
>FIFTH CAUSE OF ACTION (Civil Conspiracy – Against All Defendants)
And he is seeking 4 x "not less than $100,000,000, plus pre-judgment interest"
The number can only go down, never up, so you ask for all that you can.
It does have -some- sense if you think about it: this is a young kid with a whole career ahead of him. Because of this accusation, his career is pretty much over. Since he could have been one of the best (as demonstrated by beating magnus) he would have made $100m over a lifetime. Based This is probably the order of magnitude that hikaru and magnus will make in their careers. Or some loose logic like that
What possible violation of the Sherman Act could he be pursuing?
Dead Comment
Chess.com sponsors and owns so much of the Chess community.
They have more power and influence than even FIDE over the players IMO.
- GM sponsors? Chess.com money.
- Chess streamers? Chess.com money.
Magnus joining forces in a more professional setting via the acquisition created a serious conflict of interest.
Not a perfect example, but imagine if Lebron James was on the board of the NBA while playing for the Lakers...
It just becomes too easy for things to spiral.
How I see it, chess.com's "timed banned", "the report" and "the CEO reddit comments" fueled a fire that didn't need it to support their guy.
Chess.com on all fronts has been only acting in their own self interest ($) and not for the sport of the game.
And now, hilariously, Magnus is not only in bed with that but he can't get out / is part of it.
> Carlsen, having solidifed his position as the "King of Chess", believes that when it comes to chess, he can do whatever he wants and get away with it.
> On September 4, 2022, Niemann soundly defeated Carlsen during an in-person game > Notably, this was not the first time that Niemann beat Carlsen at chess
> Notorios for his inability to cope with defeat, Carlsen snapped. Enraged that the young Niemann, fully 12 years his junior, dared to disrespect the "King of Chess", and fearful that the young prodigy would further blemish his multi-million dollar brand by beating him again
This actually reads like a thriller. Very interesting (and refreshing) to see this kind of structure in a high-profile lawsuit.
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I mean the sport of Tour de France cycling disappeared for a decade, replaced by an identical-looking-but-fundamentally-different sport of competing to see who can cheat (dope) the best. It was probably not even possible to get into the TdF during that time period, without doping, there were so many people doing it.
It is entirely possible, that chess (as a professional competition) is not going to survive this, because it will turn out that with modern computing and communications technology, it is not possible to prevent cheating. Whoever wins the competition, will be the one who cheated the best. Chess will be replaced with an acting and subterfuge competition.
Which sort of prompts the question: Why isn't there a "World Chess Cheating Championship"?
The competitors would be given the chance to either demonstrate a type of cheating, or demonstrate a counter-measure, and then judges would be able to organise rigorous tests that paired the methods off against each other.
One sort of test that would be interesting to try is to have a GM who is able to receive a one-bit signal from an accomplice once per game (the much-discussed "this is an important move, think carefully" signal), and then statisticians should try to pick that game (or some set of such games) out of a sea of non-cheating games.
Basically I think that the chess community shouldn't take any "security measures" by event organisers at face value. Without red-teaming, any such measures are just security theatre.
Here is Carlsen's twitter statement in regards to the issue in case anyone wants to see or needs a refresher. I'm personally not aware of other "public statements" made that could be closely related but I'm just a rando
https://twitter.com/magnuscarlsen/status/1574482694406565888
I don't think the legal question is going to be establishing that Hans has faced harm. I think that's self-evident. The interesting question is more did Magnus Carlsen's/Chess.com's/Hikaru Nakamura's statements amount to Libel/Slander?
My money is against Hans. Libel/Slander is hard to prove in the US.
This is ultimately led to the WSJ article.