By: Ryan Guo
On September 20, 2022, reigning chess champion Magnus Carlsen resigned to grandmaster Hans Niemann after playing just 1 move in a chess game. This event shocked many people, and one week later, Carlsen posted a tweet on Twitter, saying that “I am not willing to play chess with Niemann,” because Carlsen believes that Niemann “has cheated more — and more recently– than he has publicly admitted.”
2 weeks before the game, Niemann admitted to the public that he had cheated in chess, saying that he had used electronic devices to calculate best moves during online games. However, he claimed that he only cheated at age 12 and age 16, and hasn’t cheated ever since. Because he admitted cheating and for other undisclosed reasons, Chess.com, the popular website to play chess with other online players, ended up banning him.
After resigning after one move, Carlsen remained silent. One week later, he decided to give an explanation why. He said that Niemann getting rank 49 in the entire world was unusual.
Furthermore, when Carlsen played Niemann in a previous tournament in St. Louis, Carlsen had the impression that “he wasn’t tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions, while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do. This game contributed to changing my perspective.” Carlsen also said that he won’t be able to trust people who have cheated in the past, as he won’t know what they would do in the future.
A week after this scandal, a grandmaster named Andrew Tang thanked Carlsen for bringing up an issue that ” the chess community wanted to pretend doesn’t exist,” and that Tang wanted to see a reckoning on online cheating in chess, saying that “Guess what it still seems pretty easy to get away with and many GMs besides [Hans] have done it!”
Grandmaster Maurice Ashley said that she encountered situations where players used online devises to cheat, even in tournaments. “I know of a situation with a player where the coach had a code for where they stood on the floor,” Ashley said, “and they just had to stand in the right place for you to know what piece to move.”
Other grandmasters have heard of people hiding their phones in bathrooms to use during a game. Grandmaster Maria Gevorgyan, was shocked that people would cheat in the first place. Gevorgyan said that they could cheat because of the prize money and winning against other players, but she added that none of those things are worth risking someone’s own reputation.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/09/27/1125316142/chess-magnus-carlsen-hans-niemann-cheating