I've been reading up on this, and I honestly don't see any indications of cheating here. Firstly, the whole butt plug thing came from a reddit joke. People were joking about the best way to cheat. The reddit community, not surprisingly, came up with a not so tasteful solution. Then Niemann jokingly made a comment about his willingness to play naked to disprove cheating allegations.....that wouldn't prevent you from using a butt plug, so the the reddit community blows up again.
I also don't see how someone cheating online when they are 12, or even 16/17, has any relevance. Kid are jackasses. I remember when I was gaming in junior high and high school all sorts of cheating scripts were circulating. He probably wasn't taking chess seriously when he was 12, and didn't realize that he would be banned from a tournament as an adult for taking advantage of some kind of cheating script. So what if he cheating "100 times" during his teenage years. How many games did he play? 100,000?
From what I've seen from the post-game interviews, Niemann has an extreme knowledge of chess, and the his winning set up in particular. He was able to replay the game from memory. He'd also done research on his opponent. He knew his standard moves and also his deviations going back many years.
On top of that Magnus admits to making an error, and he probably made more than one. To me this just looks like a low probability win occurring. If Magnus is the 95% favorite, he's going to lose 1/20 times. This was one of those times, as Magnus made errors.
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