The Question Behind the Magnus Carlsen-Hans Niemann Drama: How to Cheat at Chess? A cheating scandal has upended chess—and cast a new spotlight on how a player might possibly cheat without being detected
World champion Magnus Carlsen has set the chess world on fire in recent weeks while barely saying a word. First, he abruptly quit a prestigious tournament in St. Louis after a defeat in early September. Then this week, he resigned from a game after making just one move. What both staggering incidents have in common was Carlsen’s opponent, a 19-year-old American grandmaster named Hans Moke Niemann.
Carlsen hasn’t said explicitly what he’s thinking. But the chess community set out to decode his message and came to the conclusion that Carlsen thinks Niemann is a cheater.
Niemann, who beat Carlsen in their first meeting and was credited with a victory over him on Monday, has forcefully denied any allegation that he has cheated during any in-person game. He did, however, admit this month that he had received illegal assistance in online play on two previous occasions, chalking them up as youthful indiscretions. Chess.com, which has suspended Niemann, indicated in a statement the breadth of his cheating was greater than that. Underpinning the entire fracas is a much more fundamental question: How would a player cheat at chess—and get away with it? The answer is in everyone’s pocket. Over the past 20 years, chess technology has become so advanced—and so portable—that anyone with a smartphone is capable of pulling up websites with software powerful enough to grind down Magnus Carlsen. These chess engines, as they are known, have such awesome powers of calculation that they can analyze moves deep into the game’s future in mere seconds.“ Any chess program running on a cellphone could communicate better moves than even the world champion plays,” American grandmaster Maurice Ashley says.
Magnus Carlsen has set the chess world on fire in recent weeks while barely saying a word.
From there, it’s a matter of getting the chess engine’s guidance to the player. The irony is that once chess engines became so sophisticated, chess cheating turned into a decidedly low-tech endeavor. The illicit schemes initially concocted by some of the finest tactical minds in the world have mostly involved trips to the bathroom to secretly look at a phone. In 2006, for instance, Veselin Topalov’s team accused Vladimir Kramnik of taking a suspect number of bathroom breaks during the World Championship match. Though the allegation wasn’t proven, organizers responded by forcing the players to share a bathroom.
The strangest part is that this wasn’t the only Toiletgate in high-level chess. More recently, Latvian Grandmaster Igors Rausis, who has also represented Bangladesh and the Czech Republic, was suspended by the game’s world governing body in 2019 after he was caught using a smartphone in the washroom. Bathroom intermezzos became less of an issue when the pandemic pushed many high-level tournaments online, but cheating didn’t. In fact, it exploded.
And so did the infrastructure to catch it. Chess.com reported in November 2020 that it had closed 18,000 accounts in 30 days for fair play violations, more than in any single month in the site’s existence before that point.
The shuttered accounts included average pawn-pushers and grandmasters alike, the site said.
Screenshot from a stream of the online chess match between Magnus Carlsen and Hans Niemann at the Julius Baer Generation Cup on Sept. 19.But what represents an existential crisis for the game today is the mere notion that it remains plausible to cheat at the highest levels during in-person events without detection.
It just takes an accomplice, a chess engine, and a bit of spycraft. “All you need is a sophisticated enough communication device to be able to pull off such a brazen act,” Ashley says. There are all sorts of gizmos someone could attempt to sneak on their person, from nearly invisible earpieces to a tiny device that vibrates or buzzes in a way that is only felt by the person wearing it. It could even be hidden in someone’s shoe. With an apparatus like that, it would simply require a third party following the game in real-time with an engine to deliver a signal.
Unless officials catch a player in the act—or in the bathroom—it’s extremely complicated to say definitively whether a grandmaster cheated in a specific over-the-board game. At that level, players don’t need to be fed every move. Contests tend to be won and lost in subtle middle-game combinations that gently tilt the balance.In practice, this means that a cheater might only need assistance in a couple of key moments—a quick buzz to indicate that the optimal tactic is, say, a knight move rather than nudging another pawn. Simply being told which piece to play is enough for a grandmaster’s mind to understand why a computer deems the move to be correct.
In a way, it isn’t so different from the scandal that upended baseball when the Houston Astros stole opposing pitchers’ signs and relayed it to their batters by banging trash cans in the dugout. In another way, it’s completely different: even knowing the pitch type, the Astros had to execute and hit a ball at 95 miles per hour. They still could have struck out. But when you know the move in chess, the only physical skill is picking up a piece. And all of a sudden, it becomes a duel of human vs. computer
.After Carlsen lost to Niemann and withdrew from the tournament in St. Louis having played only three rounds, event organizers ramped up security, even though they said that they hadn’t found anything untoward. Players were wanded with a metal detector and the broadcast of the games was delayed by 15 minutes—a countermeasure that aims to deter outside help because anybody watching remotely would be behind the action.
A screen grab from a video posted by the St. Louis Chess Club of Hans Niemann.Chess insiders have suggested that more stringent methods, such as longer tape delays and more thorough screenings, may be necessary. Russian grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi appeared to be joking when he raised the possibility of “playing naked in a locked room.” But the mere idea suggested how extraordinary the rules might have to become to eliminate even a whiff of funny business.
Unbothered by the allegations, Niemann took his St. Louis victory over Carlsen as a sign of his own rapid progress. Though he was the lowest rated player in the field, that was his second win in the tournament’s first three games. “It must be embarrassing for the world champion to lose to me,” he said at the time. “I feel bad for him.”
Niemann then proceeded to lose or draw his final six games.
By Joshua Robinson and Andrew Beaton
