GAME OF CONS
Chess has been shaken to its core, thanks to its top player accusing an opponent of cheating – and now all kinds of conspiracy theories are doing the rounds
IT ISN’T a world usually known for scandal and drama, populated as it is by brainy boffins who can stare at pieces on black and white squares for hours before making a move. But a recent furore has thrown the game of chess into the global spotlight – and the details are enough to make you change the way you look at it forever. Allegations of cheating, misuse of artificial intelligence and the insertion of anal beads to dodge the system – little wonder the game of kings has been making headlines.
Online chess became hugely popular during the Covid-19 pandemic, fuelled by lockdown and the runaway success of the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit.
But playing on a computer in the comfort of your home means you can also cheat – and chess experts say it’s become so rampant it’s threatening to make a mockery of the game.
Right now the person under scrutiny is Hans Niemann, a 19-year-old American who’s admitted to cheating online but claims he’s never done so during in-person, over-the-board games.
Yet a sensational incident recently, called his claims into question. Magnus Carlsen, a Norwegian grandmaster dubbed the king of chess, dramatically pulled out of the Julius Baer Generation Cup after making his first move against Hans.
It’s believed he did so in protest, his single move in the match speaking volumes about his refusal to play against someone perceived to be a cheat.
Just a few weeks earlier, Hans had emerged from nowhere to beat Magnus in the prestigious Sinquefield Cup in St Louis, ending his winning streak of 53 matches.
Hans, who was the lowest-ranked player in the tournament, said he’d won “thanks to some ridiculous miracle”.
“It must be embarrassing for the world champion to lose to an idiot like me,” he added. “I feel bad for him.”
Magnus has called Hans “abrasive” and says his decision to resign from the match after a solitary move was a “professional” one to preserve the game of chess.
“So far I have only been able to speak with my actions and those actions have stated clearly that I am not willing to play chess with Niemann,” he says.
‘IT WASN’T ME’
Hans, who was born in the US and grew up in Holland where he attended a school for gifted kids, became a grandmaster at the age of 17, the same year he won the US Junior Chess Championship.
His meteoric rise over the past two years, from around 800th in the world to the top 40, has raised eyebrows. But his fans – he has a huge following on Twitch, the gaming streaming platform – say he’s simply a late bloomer.
However, he has admitted to cheating – twice. He says it happened years earlier. When he was 12, he cheated in an event with prize money, and at 16 he cheated in “random games”.
These were the biggest mistakes of his life, he says, and he’s never cheated while live-streaming a game. Magnus, however, isn’t buying it. “I believe Niemann has cheated more – and more recently – than he has publicly admitted,” he says.
“His over-the-board progress has been unusual, and throughout our game in the Sinquefield Cup I had the impression that he wasn’t tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions, while outplaying me in a way I think only a handful of players can do.”
Hans claims he’s so clean he’s even prepared to play naked in “a closed box with zero electronic transmission”.
THE BUTT STOPS HERE
Rumours are rampant that one of the ways Hans cheated was by using remotecontrolled, vibrating anal beads to receive coded messages from his coach during games. The allegation was first voiced as a joke by online site Reddit, but then quickly gained popularity when it was picked up and popularised by Elon Musk. Some experts say the use of the sex toy as a cheating tool is possible in theory, but veteran chess commentator Maurice Ashley isn’t convinced.
“The greatest conspiracy theories get blown out of proportion. Chess is the flavour of the moment – and we’re getting attention in a way we would never like to have,” he says.
Another suggestion is Hans may have been leaked Magnus’ opening preparation. Others say the American may simply have been the better player that day.
CHECK THIS, MATE
As the scandal ripped through the chess world, respected platform Chess.com dropped a bombshell: they announced they’d previously investigated Hans and the games he’d played on their site and found he’d “likely received illegal assistance in more than 100 online games”, including in events where prize money was at stake.
“Outside his online play, Hans is the fastest rising top player in classical [overthe-board] chess in modern history,” Chess.com says in its 72-page report. “While we don’t doubt that Hans is a talented player, we note that his results are statistically extraordinary.” As grandmaster Anish Giri points out, it’s going to be a hard stigma for Hans to shake. “It’s a big problem playing against people who’ve admitted they’ve cheated online.”
ONLINE CHEATS
The drama has highlighted the issue of online cheating in chess – a practice expert Leon Watson says is “unstoppable”.
“Players can easily have a second window open on their computers that will help them break the rules,” he tells the Daily Mail.
Igors Rausis, a Latvian-Czech grandmaster, was caught using his smartphone in a toilet cubicle to try to get an advantage during a tournament.
NEXT MOVE
Early in October, Hans spoke out about the scandal after winning his first-round match at the US Chess Championship against grandmaster Christopher Yoo (15). His victory, he said in a post-match interview, was “a message to everyone”.
“This entire thing started with me saying ‘chess speaks for itself ’ and I think this game spoke for itself.
“It also showed I’m not going to back down and I’m going to play my best chess here regardless of the pressure.”
Shania feels her new music is a fresh musical phase after having open-throat surgery to fix the damage caused by Lyme disease.
She contracted the disease in 2003 after being bitten by a tick while out horse-riding.
Her symptoms were terrifying, Shania says in Not Just a Girl, a new Netflix documentary about her life. “I was on stage, very dizzy. I was having these very, very, very millisecond blackouts, but regularly, every minute or every 30 seconds.”
She also developed dysphonia, a disorder of the vocal cords which causes hoarseness and makes talking difficult and singing almost impossible.
The surgery was scary – and waiting three weeks in silence before using her voice was maddening, she says.
“The anticipation was crazy. It wasn’t the three weeks of silence – it was the three weeks of waiting to see if it worked. I was like, ‘Oh my God, I can yell! I can be loud!’ ”
She also had to retrain her voice. “I’m a different singer now,” she told Rolling Stone magazine.
“There was a lot of coming to terms with that. It’s been one of the obstacles in my life that I’ve just had to learn to live with.”
Her new song, Waking Up Dreaming, isn’t a big ballad. “It’s very up, dance, poppy, rocky, edgy,” she says.
Shania and Frédéric (52) started to grow closer. “We slowly became very, very good friends. We had many months of just trying to make sense of everything,” she says. “Holding each other up was a very difficult time emotionally, for both of us. And we really found something very beautiful in the end, and unexpected.”
Shania married the Swiss businessman in an intimate beach ceremony in Puerto Rico in 2011.
“We were two people who’d been jettisoned from our lives as if we’d been shoved off the edge of a cliff. Thankfully, we managed to grab each other on the way down and break each other’s fall.”
They now live in La Tour-de-Peilz in Switzerland, in a home with views of mountains and a lake.
It’s a far cry from how she grew up dirt poor in Toronto, Canada. Shania lived with her mom, Sharon, and stepdad, Jerry Twain. She and her three siblings often went to bed hungry and the singer wrote in her memoir how Jerry abused her mom physically and the kids verbally.
Jerry once plunged Sharon’s head into a toilet and Shania thought her mom was dead. “I really thought she was drowned or dead or that he’d just smashed her head in and she was never going to wake up.
“Also through the humiliation of how I thought she’d been killed, by drowning in a toilet – it was obviously very hard to take.”