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In case you haven't seen it, some new evidence surfaced yesterday: https://youtu.be/jfPzUgzrOcQ
This seems interesting, any chess-knowing people willing to take the hit for the team and watch all 23 minutes?
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If someone makes a mistake at 16, is it a valid reason to ban a person for life? Ok. If someone kills a person at 16. Should the killer be in prison for life?
Enough with the fiction that cheating is a mistake, or that a 16 year old smart enough to be a chess grandmaster is simultaneously so underdeveloped that they have not learned the consequences of cheating. Your comparison with murder is ridiculous. First of all, teenage murderers are regularly sentenced to life in prison. A murderer is deprived of fundamental human liberties--Niemann is deprived of being able to comp…
(Considering that people become more or less aware about their responsibilities and consequences of their actions at about 15 yo, he is now 4 times the responsible age he was at 16.)
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It's one thing to say an old man cheated when he was 12 years old, it's yet another to say a 19 year old did it just a handful of years ago. He's still a kid.
My intuition is that there's evidence out there that shows he cheated more, but people grow up a lot from age 12 to 19. That time period is basically the entirety of adolescence! I don't think it's fair to pin the actions of their 12 year old self on a 19 year old.
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Is there a good summary by a chess expert on how he may or may not have cheated? (Ideally a video).
In chess you cheat by receiving external assistance. Nowadays, especially at the high level, that assistance is basically always from a computer. Other than that your guess is as good as mine as _how_ he could have received said assistance, I've seen some wild theories.
A micro-vibrating motor in his shoe, buzzing morse code? f4 to g5 for example?
This is highly disappointing. For one thing, the fact that Carlsen is making this statement now and not weeks earlier is embarrassing. For another, the evidence he presents is disappointingly weak. I can understand being suspicious of online games. Fair enough. But the evidence for cheating offline is: 1) Rapid progress in OTB chess. This rapid progress is still much less rapid than many other players and involved Ha…
How can people act like the evidence of online cheating doesn't affect the likelihood that he cheated OTB? This is the exact same person playing both games.
Circumstantial evidence is still evidence
Dude probably trains with computers regularly. He has a better memory than 10 average Joe's combined. He's been the absolute #1 of the world for what, 10 years now?
He wouldn't risk his whole reputation for nothing.
I personally take his suspicions very seriously, though I agree that evidence has to be presented sooner or later.
1. How would Niemann have cheated? The shoe computer theory is a bit far fetched - are devices that small capable enough? Is he suspected of having an accomplice?
2. Why didn't Magnus just say something right away? He could have easily made his accusations at the moment to event organizers - quietly - and they could have had Niemann remove his shoes or something. Instead he threw a tantrum. Obviously this isn't just about Hans.
Personally, I think Niemann is just a 19yo kid who has made mistakes and Carlsen is a 31yo professional who is absolutely hammering this kid to make a larger point. He may be frustrated, but taking it out on Hans is a bit much. The imbalance of power here is just off the charts.
Even if Hans somehow cheated in that OTB game - of which there isn't a shred of real evidence - Magnus is the leader of the chess world and needs to accept that responsibility and react in a mature way. He should have taken the high road, simply said "I don't know what happened, but it was highly unusual. Let's guarantee that this doesn't happen in the future," and directed his frustrations totally at the event organizers rather than encouraging the entire world to attack this one kid.
In case you haven't seen it, some new evidence surfaced yesterday: https://youtu.be/jfPzUgzrOcQ
This seems interesting, any chess-knowing people willing to take the hit for the team and watch all 23 minutes?
Everyone has games that are perfect. Everyone. Not just GMs or Super GMs. I have at least a few perfect games and I'm half the rating Hans is.
The games analyzed also have crazy blunders by his opponents.
My chess.com rating is only 864 and after making a move that won me the game my opponent said they were going to report me because "I played an unusual tactic."
It's taking all the fun out of the game.
Edit - to clarify that cheating being on the agenda is a sad state of affairs, not that Carlson calling it out is sad.
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The reasons Carlsen gives for being suspicious are not "the moves played were unusual" but about Niemann's behavior surrounding them.
When Robert Fischer achieved an unprecedented scores in the pretenders matches prior to winning the champion title, I believe that the biggest factor was not the quality of the play of Fischer, but the way he mentally unbalanced and broke his opponents, who absolutely did not give a performance they were capable of.