Quote:
Originally Posted by mrkajz44
I've followed both the chess and poker stories a bit and both of them are extremely similar:
- Well respected vet gets beat by a relatively inexperienced player
- Well respected vet accused the other one of cheating because their ego has a hard time handling the loss
- Zero evidence is presented other than "this is odd / unusual"
- Most people side with well respected vet and form all sorts wild theories about how/why the other player cheated
It's clearly an abuse of power and the chess one is even worse because Carlsen is basically the GOAT so his word carries a ton of weight. I've seen some commentary thrown around legal defamation because these top players are obviously harming the reputation of the lower players with no actual evidence other than "they shouldn't have beat me and they played unusual".
I had no idea about the fishing story, but that one seems pretty clear.
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I can only speak intelligently to the chess scandal (and, really, only sort of intelligently…. I play chess a lot but am objectively terrible at it..)
The truth is I don’t know what to think anymore. On the one hand there is zero objective evidence that Hans cheated in the Sinquefeld cup game against Magnus, and his accuracy in that game was nothing special.
On the other: chess.com is apparently sitting on information about Hans that it is gong to trot out at some point, likely further to Magnus’ accusation that Hans has “cheated more, and more recently” than he has admitted.
And then there is the fact that Hans’ past tournament games show a history of EXTREMELY, I’ll say suspiciously, accurate play. Magnus might have a 100% acccuracy game in his career—so did Capablanca. But based on the chessbase measure Magnus’ average accuracy is more like 70%, and Garry Kasparov in his prime was 69%.
Hans Niemann, meanwhile, is a grand master but only recently someone that the world took notice of as a person who can win against “super GMs” like Carlsen, Nakamura, Eronian, etc. His FIDE rating has risen meteorically since the pandemic, in a way that is unusual at his age—not unheard of, but very unusual.
But… there is no evidence. And the vibrating anal beads theory strikes me as beyond far-fetched.
All of which is to say, I just don’t know, and don’t know how anyone could. Cheating is an existential threat to competitive chess right now though and I think it matters a lot for organizations like FIDE, chess.com, and other chess federations to get the response to this right.
Because here is the reality: I can believe that somehow Hans circumvented the controls and managed to communicate moves to himself with some kind of hidden device. What I kind of can’t believe is the proposition that ONLY HANS is doing or has done this. If he is doing it, I feel like it’s virtually certain others are doing it too.