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Originally Posted by TheIronMaiden
He cheated lots online, that is an undeniable fact. But chess.com has not found further evidence of cheating in two years, no?
Maybe I am optomistic or sympathetic, but age in addition to time without cheating does give him some benefit of the doubt.
If FIDE finds evidence that he cheated over the board then the case is closed. Otherwise i think that young people deserve a chance at redemption.
This is a person who has spent every waking moment trying to get better at chess since he was 10 years old. Being labled a cheater would ruin his life as it stands now. Moving forward carefully and with full evidence is important. If he is actively cheating then shame on him and he will suffer, but he is innocent until proven guilty. Suspension is not enough.
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Yeah, I’ve been ruminating a bit on the chess.com report and I’m coming around to the view that there isn’t much there. Yes, they say he cheated more often than he admitted to, but let’s not forget he was in an extemporaneous interview—and let’s not forget what he said: he cheated online in a titled Tuesday event when he was 12, and then cheated when he was 16 but not in prize money events.
The report says he cheated when he was 12 and also cheated as recently as 2020 when he was 17, not 16. He also cheated in rated games and prize money tournaments. There is no direct evidence that he cheated since and the report is clear that chess.com’s anti-cheat algorithms are not designed for classical time controls or over the board chess. The report also says that a lot of the online analysis (based on other strength scores or numbers of “perfect games” in Hans’ over the board play “do not meet our standard” for cheat detection.
So what do we know? We know that Hans cheated a bit more than he confessed to online and in more important games. I actually don’t think the difference is huge in either case: the report says he cheated in 100 separate games, he says he cheated on two occasions (at 12 and 16) but never said in how many games it occurred. We also know that chess.com is not prepared to say he has ever cheated over the board, and while it notes some oddities and statistical anomalies in the end they aren’t enough to support a conclusion. That will be up to FIDE. As for when the cheating occurred, he said he was 16 and chess.com said it happened as recently as 2020 when he was 17. Not, in my view, a huge difference and it can be explained as just a mistake from a young guy trying to defend himself.
Overall, it’s still not a great look for Hans, just because his statement about not cheating in “real games” or prize money tournaments obviously isn’t true. But at the end of the day, I feel like the true purpose of this report was for chess.com to explain its decision to uninvited Hans from its global chess championship event in 2022, based on conduct that it has known about for two years, after having invited him before — when it clearly already knew about all of it.
And in that respect I find the justification unsatisfying. It’s a bad look when you consider that chess.com recently made the decision to merge with Magnus Carlsen’s “Play Magnus” platform, so he and they are now business partners. They deny he had anything to do with the decision, but I guess I’m just not convinced Hans’ removal from the event wasn’t driven by business considerations that have nothing to do with him.
And I still have no idea whether he has cheated over the board in the last 2 years: quite fairly, chess.com says they are not the arbiter of that, and their cheat detection system isn’t set up to answer that question.
Did he cheat against Magnus? I don’t know: maybe. It was not a remarkable game from Magnus at all—he played poorly by his standards. There were some odd things about the opening, and Niemann’s post game interview was definitely weird. But… I also think he probably is just a weird dude.
The whole thing is confusing and honestly after reading the report I’m left with more questions than answers. To me the most explosive thing disclosed in the report is that 4 of the top 100 chess players in the world have had their accounts closed for cheating on the chess.com platform, and many other titled players including GMs. They claim only .14% of players cheat, but I wonder if that’s based on who they catch, as that stat suggests to me cheating is highly prevalent—and that is a serious problem. Cheating is an existential threat to competitive chess, especially online.