a report destroys the career of Hans Niemann

The Tesla leader then fired up the gossip stock with two tweets, later deleted, about vibrating balls. Despite everything, they had a serious background. Transmitting a chess move is very easy by morse code or with a gesture. The danger is real, because there are plenty of mobile applications capable of easily defeating the best grandmasters. One of them, the American Hikaru Nakamurahas said it very clearly to his long million followers after being the one who added fuel to this fire: «I don’t see a happy ending to all this».

Last night, a report leaked by Chess.com and reviewed by ‘The Wall Street Journal’ destroyed the career of the 19-year-old American Hans Niemannpreviously pointed out by the world champion, Magnus Carlsen. According to the internal study of the chess portal, the American «probably received illegal assistance in more than 100 online matches, as recently as 2020.” In many of them there were prizes at stake, which contradicts the confessions of the accused, who admitted to being sorry for two occasional cheats, when he was 12 and 16 years old.

Other grandmasters involved

The most devastating thing about the document is that it states that dozens of grandmasters they have also confessed to cheating on the website, four of them from the world top 100. Chess.com’s policy is to allow chess players, if they confess, to open a new account under another name. Also that of keeping the identities of these people hidden, an editorial line that changed when Niemann spoke in public about some of his communications with the company, on whose platform they play more than 90 million chess players of all the world.

Chess was born 1,500 years ago, day up, day down. He traveled through Asia and Europe for centuries, flew on the back of the printing press, grew up with computers, surfed the internet like no one else and even took advantage of a pandemic to raise his fever, accentuated from fiction by a redhead fond of pills and gambits. until Magnus Carlsen woke everyone up from sleep: “I have been cheated and this is very serious,” the Norwegian came to say, ready to lead the battle against a fraud that used to be swept under the boards. Chess, the last redoubt of fair play, was cracking live.

The champion was outraged losing against a 19-year-old with a bad reputation and worse gestures. He left the tournament in San Luis and days later he won an internet game, again against Hans Niemann. He moved a horse to avoid the default and surrendered in protest. If they don’t like your principles, you don’t have others. The bad thing is that he ran the risk of adulterating the competition and, even worse, unleashing a Witch hunt against an innocent colleague, until proven otherwise.

Magnus later wrote a ‘lawyer-proof’ statement to justify himself. He had no proof, but he had no doubts either: he considers Niemann a crook and cannot sit quietly in front of someone who has confessed to cheating. “He has cheated more and more recently than he admitted in public,” said the number one, who did not clarify whether Chess.com, which has just bought his company, Play Magnus Group, had provided him with inside information. “I don’t want to play against people who have cheated in the past because I don’t know what they are capable of in the future,” he added.

Magnus thus opened a case worthy of debate in the highest courts, legal and moral: does he have the right to refuse the confrontation due to harboring suspicions or due to the prescribed sins of the rival? The Norwegian, who has not been able to prove that he was cheated on the board, explains that in the game he lost he noticed unusual behavior. His doubts seem sincere, but it is also possible that he rushed to the denunciation: «I had the impression that Niemann was not tense or fully focused in critical positions, while outplaying me with black in a way that only a handful of players can,” he claimed.

Naturally, the Carlsen-Niemann case has divided the boards. Grandmasters and amateurs are divided into two camps with hardly any room for a third way: that Niemann is a cheat, as the Chess.com report seems to indicate, and that Carlsen has acted badly, as a self-proclaimed sheriff in a lawless city. Garry Kasparov He was criticized and there was no lack of people who even asked for a punishment for Magnus, for not respecting the presumption of innocence and for pointing out a young player with an uncertain future. The International Chess Federation itself (FIDE) has just opened its own investigation, but not before giving Carlsen a little slap on the wrist.

Play ‘too’ fast

Everyone looks at Niemann with a magnifying glass. An army of experts scours his games for ‘machine’ moves, beyond the reach of the human mind. Apart from the data provided by Chess.com, no incontestable live criminal evidence has been found, but there is a surprising facility to play ‘too’ fast in complex positions.

The great Spanish teacher Paco Vallejo, number one in Spain, is one of those who suspected. “I’ve seen some amazing games and at the moment I only see two options: he has the greatest talent in history or he gets outside help.” Among his followers, three out of four bet on the second possibility.

In that case, how could Niemann pass the checks? At big tournaments, players undergo an electronic scanner. Another thermal analysis prevents, in theory, hiding the smallest piece of plastic outside the body, not to mention the famous vibrating balls.

Actually, cheating in chess is the easiest thing in the world and on the internet it is an almost unstoppable plague. Only in media competitions is a double camera used: the one from the computer that focuses on the player’s face and another to see the game room. Vallejo believes that even those tournaments should be held in guarded clubs. The players are sometimes asked to show something specific and are forced to share their monitor screen with the referees, but neither measure seems sufficient.

Gaming platforms have their own spyware, which detects if another application is used during gameplay. His methods are secret and every day they kick hundreds of cheaters out of their rooms (Chess.com, Chess24, Lichess, ICC, ChessBase…), all in games where only pride is at stake. It is known, for example, that many were caught using a program that always placed the pieces in the exact center of the squares. No human hand that handles a mouse or uses a tablet or mobile phone is capable of doing this three times in a row, without deviating even half a millimeter. When this became known, cheat programs began to simulate human movements as well, more random and imperfect in a mechanical sense.

Deep Blue He achieved the milestone of beating Kasparov a quarter of a century ago, but it was a tome that did not fit in a mini-flat. Artificial intelligence now only needs a cheap phone to spread panic. The biggest difficulty for cheaters is broadcasting the game – something that some platforms do for free – and receiving the winning moves with the help of an accomplice.

The best weapon against fraud is to broadcast the competitions with a delay. The cheater then needs to send the signal himself or have someone from the audience or a coach, who does watch the game live. In this section, the security measures are more lax, at the moment.

technology for evil

From there, and stinky anal beads aside, technology offers devilish solutions. In the military installations of some countries, the use of graphene glasses, which have many applications. A reader of classified documents, for example, can already take them ‘put’ by the pin, never better said, without the need to photograph them.

They advertise on the internet undetectable devices, real-time video transmission systems, which are used “to copy in exams, carry out hidden surveillance functions, private detectives, etc.” A camera hidden in a shirt button picks up the signal. Its usefulness in a chess tournament is not hard to imagine. At the last CES in Las Vegas, the largest technology fair in the world, smart contact lenses were presented, which do much more than improve the user’s eyesight.

Classical chess seems mortally wounded. If this goes further, we would only be left with, with luck, the fastest games, in which in theory there is no time to consult with the machines.

Meanwhile, Hans Niemann planned to return to active chess today, since he is enrolled in the United States Championship, which takes place in San Luis, the stage where he defeated Carlsen. If it is presented, it will be a success with the public. Chess.com may have nailed it with their report on him. Just in case, Hans Niemann had been very quiet for a few days.

Is all this bad for chess? Not necessarily. If the crusade undertaken by Carlsen is enough for FIDE and tournament organizers to take the problem seriously and dispel suspicions in the future, it will be a positive catharsis, not just the biggest crisis experienced in recent decades by this ancient game.