If You Ain't Cheating, You Ain't Trying: Investigation Finds That Chess Grandmaster Hans Niemann "Likely Cheated" Over 100 Times
Cheating scandals, so hot right now. Cheating scandals.
Doesn't matter if it's chess, professional poker, fishing tournaments, or your girlfriend. Turns out everybody and their mother is obsessed with cheating right now.
Now this chess scandal is the one that opened the floodgates. As you might recall we had the supposed greatest chess player in the world, Magnus Carlsen, resign from a tournament after losing to alleged cheater and potentially anal bead user, Hans Niemann. Carlsen lost a game against Niemann and then quit the tournament because he thought some tomfoolery was afoot. There had certainly been a known history amongst the chess world of Niemann cheating before, and he's admitted as such in interviews about a few online games here and there. But after a formal investigation was launched, it would appear as if Hans Niemann slightly undersold the amount of times he's cheated before by the tune of…oh…about a hundred.
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WSJ -- When world chess champion Magnus Carlsen last month suggested that American grandmaster Hans Moke Niemann was a cheater, the 19-year-old Niemann launched an impassioned defense. Niemann said he had cheated, but only at two points in his life, describing them as youthful indiscretions committed when he was 12 and 16 years old.
Now, however, an investigation into Niemann’s play—conducted by Chess.com, an online platform where many top players compete—has found the scope of his cheating to be far wider and longer-lasting than he publicly admitted.
Okay so quick disclaimer here: The Wall Street Journal is behind a paywall and I'm not spending $8 per month just for some random chess updates here and there. So those two paragraphs were as far as I could get. But the investigation being conducted by Chess.com seems reliable enough to me to believe whatever the findings say. And apparently they say ol' buddy boy has been cheating left and right to win a bunch of prize money.
So they still don't know whether or not he cheated in that specific in-person game against Magnus that started this whole ordeal. But I feel like if you cheat over 100 times, it's pretty fair to label you as a cheater. Like even if you didn't cheat at that specific time, I think it's more than fair for anybody you beat to just automatically assume you were cheating. I thought it was a weak excuse from Magnus to begin with, but now that he has a history of cheating over 100 times instead of just once or twice? I think that's a great excuse to go with right off the bat.
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The thing I'm still unsure of at this time is whether or not I rebuke the cheating. On one hand, I kind of like the idea that there's this serial cheater on the loose in the chess world wreaking havoc everywhere. Some people just want to watch the world burn. That sort of thing.
But on the other hand…well if there's money involved here then yeah, you can't be pulling that shit. People have every right to want to expose this maniac and get him out of the game. If it were just for pride then I'd say cheat all you want until you get caught. But once money gets attached to these things, you have every right to try to bury cheaters' names. I've been Team Hans this whole time but after this investigation, I have no other choice but to be Team Magnus.
Sidenote: Still no word on whether or not anal beads were used. Maybe that was further into the investigation and behind the paywall. But until I hear some concrete evidence to prove otherwise, I have to assume it's true.