I mean, Jan is basically backing Magnus here. He calls Niemann’s game “more than impressive”.
That’s what I want to know. Is this a postle situation? Some kind of chip/implant in his body where someone can feed the best moves to him?
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“More than impressive” is an ambiguous phrase but yeah I feel like he gives a bit of a Look there.
Interesting situation. Let’s assume Hans wasn’t cheating but just playing way above his rating for reasons. Could seeing that level of play over the course of a few hours put a world champion on massive tilt, who obviously has to have a great sense of the relative strength of his opponents, computers or otherwise? It wouldn’t be the first time a chess world champion got flustered and accused people of cheating (Fischer virtually every time against the Soviets, Kasparov against Deep Blue 97, Topalov against Kramnik in 2006, off the top of my head).
The circumstantial evidence and GM takes are juicy though. The part where Hans says he miraculously studied that line in the morning seems super sus. Like, there are only so many things you can look at during prep, he was struck by lightning and looked at one of 100,000 lines that could have been played, that Magnus never plays?
he’s jsut 19 and wouldn’t be the first guy in any competitive venture to stagnate at a level then finally get it and fly up. Also I wouldn’t take anything he says at face value like that.
but he’s a known cheater and doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt, though I haven’t seen anything as to how yet
I guess what I’m most interested in is how the accusers think he is doing it. Has anyone floated a theory on that yet.
One theory I’ve heard in the comments is that there was a mole in magnus’ camp who leaked his prep but that doesn’t explain the rise from 2500 to 2700+. I think they are just using their intuition and experience to sniff out that something’s not right, much like a poker pro playing with or observing postle would be able to tell something’s not right even if they don’t know his exact method of cheating
Yeah, Magnus mole theory has exactly the problem you describe.
Also are there actually rules that address that? Imagine one of Magnus’ team is just pissed of at Magnus for some reason and decides to get revenge by calling up Hans and telling him what to prep for. Obviously, it’s dirty, but is there an actual rule that has been broken in that scenario.
Ah ok I had one thing out of order, the lol clips of Hans doing apparently ~2400 level post game analysis were after his draw against Alireza, which featured a few dubious ideas from Hans.
Here’s Hikaru clowning at it, (although the youtube vid is kinda click baity, not much new info in it)
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Poor guy surrounded by nonbelievers.
He said he’s a really competitive guy, so winning is absolutely the bottom line for him.
Maybe this is his how he did it:
Niemann says during school days, he concealed a chess book beneath his desk
There are dozens of very easy ways to cheat. The reasons for not doing it are not because it’s difficult. So I don’t think his accusers would be a favorite to put a finger on how he’s doing it because there are so many possibilities. But their intuition can still be correct, especially when combined with the circumstantial evidence.
I enjoyed the Alireza post match interview
Having read a bunch about this I’m going to go out on a limb and say I think Niemann was not cheating. I think Magnus suspects him of cheating, was concerned that the tournament organisers weren’t doing enough to prevent it, and as a result didn’t play very well against Hans and ragequit.
The thing is other than Magnus’s loss and subsequent tanty, what actually needs explaining here? Nothing in his game against Magnus was suspicious in itself. He didn’t play perfectly, there are no unbelievable moves. Against Firouzja he made an intuitive sacrifice that was sound for reasons other than the reasons he had thought it was sound, that happens. And he was like +2 against Firouzja at one point and then drew, did his ability to cheat desert him? He’s gained a lot of rating recently, but that has been a common phenomenon as people stopped playing OTB chess during COVID but continued to improve, with the improvement showing up rapidly when OTB chess resumed.
Maybe there’s more to this than we know so far, but right now I don’t see anything that is particularly inexplicable here.
i was just on agadmators channel and saw Hans also beat Magnus only a few weeks ago in shorter time format - which presumably would be much harder to cheat in than classical.
also important to remember Magnus never accused Hans of cheating - he could just be frustrated with his camp which caused him to withdraw
That could definitely be true and it would be a scummy move by Magnus. He could correct the record instead of letting everyone assume he is making a cheating accusation.
But if it were just that, if I speak I’m in big trouble, doesn’t make much sense
https://i.imgur.com/DRLTOXp.png
It’s going to be hard for Hans to get into any big events if Magnus refuses to play in tournaments with him now
Shit hitting the fan now. Hans is saying Chess.com is unfairly sanctioning him. Rambling excitedly. The comments on the stream must be >90% supporting Hans.
https://twitter.com/HansMokeNiemann/status/1567289714897571841?s=20&t=OXHIRgOW6hO7suUc8xEohQ
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Yeah it’s the same on Reddit, Hans getting a lot of backing now. There is a good piece by Jacob Aagaard (GM and high-level chess coach) here as well, which is well worth reading:
Some people on Twitter is saying that Nakamura and Nepomniachtchi are backing up these accusations of cheating. I watched the Nakamura YouTube video and found it to be ridiculous, but also void of an actual accusation of cheating. When Nakamura is saying that no 2700 calculates this poorly, he is flat out wrong. I can also show positional mistakes from Nakamura that undermines the credibility of the playing strength of the former no. 2. Mistakes that Hans would simply not believe a GM had made. Because they are his strengths and Nakamura’s weaknesses.
There are many GMs who are suspicious. There are also many GMs who think this is ridiculous. There are also many GMs that are without real skills outside playing chess in exactly one way.
Shots fired lol. This is looking more and more like simply a tantrum by Magnus.