Chess Hard

On the Hans Niemann Revenge Tour

Nobody remembers the winner of the Sinquefeld Cup in 2022, but everyone remembers the game between Magnus Carlsen and Hans Niemann that transformed the chess world into daily doses of more cheating accusations getting thrown around than a season of Desperate Housewives. Beating Magnus as Black? How could it be possible? (Seriously, he hadn’t lost in 53 straight classical OTB games, and had an even longer streak as White.)

The drama that followed has long been discussed (and somehow has its own Wikipedia page) so I’ll briefly note the critical event: immediately after the match, Hans did an interview with the (now disgraced) GM Alejandro Ramirez where, during the postgame analysis, he gave a bunch of incorrect analysis and wasn’t really able to explain “how” he beat Magnus. Given the result, and the fact that he was known to have cheated while playing online in the past, when Magnus made a comment implying that Hans had cheated and withdrew from the tournament, the chess world erupted in drama. Keep in mind that Hans, at the time, was 19 years old (and in fact crossed 2700 with that win for the first time.)

In the two years that have followed, not only has he maintained his performance, but he’s gotten better (as 19 year old chess players are wont to do.) But in the face of the remarkable media firestorm around him and the implicit disinvitations from tournaments because Magnus has refused to play him since (either by forfeiting or sitting out when they’re paired), the fact that he has battled his way back in the ongoing Speed Chess Championship and has taken out multiple players renowned for their speed ability as an underdog is worth noting. The clip at the beginning of the article is from this extensive interview given after the quarterfinals, where the chess world realized that Hans Niemann and Magnus Carlsen were paired against eachother and will play for the first time since the incident in a month.

During his comeback arc, I must admit that I’ve been rooting for Hans since the beginning of the drama. When I saw the game that was the catalyst, I was perplexed. I’m no Magnus, but as someone who is better at chess than 99% of people, I couldn’t figure out where the suspicions came from. There might have been an offbeat line played in the opening that is beyond my comprehension with regards to abnormality (even in my heyday, I was known for knowing absolutely nothing about opening theory), but nothing changed dramatically in the position as a result. Frankly, if the nameplates were removed, it looked like a GM cleanly playing a position and taking advantage of a blunder. The most uncharacteristic thing about Magnus’ play was he looked remarkably mortal and made a pretty straightforward blunder. Nothing about Hans’ play was anything beyond his capacity, at least by my reading of it.

Consequently, my theory, even at the time, was that Magnus already personally disliked Hans and as a result lost his cool during the match after a mild opening surprise, played like crap, and blundered. This is pretty much why you do opening prep — the element of surprise is the only reason to prepare lines! It’s a psychological advantage when you’ve worked out a position and your opponent has to figure out what you know. I was frustrated when, after watching the interview and seeing the reaction, that other titled players, who have definitely played games that lasted hours and come out sounding incoherent after meaningless matches in Wisconsin Westin ballrooms, weren't pointing out that he had just beaten the GOAT, who never loses, as black.

Even today, the CEO of chess.com is insinuating that because Hans wasn’t coherent in the interview immediately after the result of his life that he “had some explaining to do.”

To paraphrase Don Draper,

That’s what the moves are for!

Has nobody spewing this garbage ever achieved anything and become emotionally overwhelmed or hit such an adrenaline high after coming out of a flow state that you struggle to think coherently?

Surely, a significant amount of fault is attributable to the nature of online chess and computer analysis. As I wrote in my essay on chess engines,

Most of the chat streams I see are filled with users spouting the engine evaluation as gospel truth and using it as a crutch to say "Ian blundered" or "Ding blundered" when the number evaluation moves by less than .5. While most stronger GMs doing commentary tend to stray away from using the engine to assess positions, some of the 'amateur-friendly' streams have this nasty habit of solely going over engine lines and attempting to interpret the computer rather than assessing the position with their own human perspective, which brings me to my second point: computer chess is not human chess.

Undoubtedly, computers are better than humans at chess. The computing boom has created engines that are nigh-unbeatable, and humans aren't ever going to catch up skill-wise…

It's almost impossible to understand why computers play the way they do in certain positions, which makes players like Magnus, who can tap into a computer-like instinct in some positions to find ridiculous ideas, such a pleasure to watch.

Rensch’s comment is partly a product of the fact that chess engines and the ease with which they can be accessed have made people way too self-assured and cynical to accept that odd, surreal, single-instance, brilliant outcomes can and do happen all the time. (Cue Insane Clown Posse’s Miracles.) Just look at this ridiculous comment from Magnus from October 2023, after he got outplayed in a beautiful game:

Chess players are notoriously sore losers, but are we really at the point where someone wearing a watch makes you suspicious and blows a fuse? This is outright pathetic. (For what it’s worth, I used to play the …e6 and …b6 structures from that game, and though I’m not a GM, occasionally I’d get blasted off the board if I fell too far behind in development and didn’t get counterplay, which is what Suleymanov did in their game.)

To go after this speculative, sacrificial attack against Magnus Carlsen is a daring choice that should have been celebrated accordingly. And it’s directly a result of the Hans affair that people can’t get their head out of the mud and accept this.

You won’t understand my opinion if you look at a computer, and that's the problem — not enough people play OTB or know that it's a completely different game from what the screens and the bots tell you is “chess”. Online chess cannot come close to the pure ego battle that live, classical chess is. And frankly, most elite players I know don’t really care for online chess at all. (Unsubtly, this is why I don’t think Hans should have been blacklisted for online cheating in the first place, and I know in my bones that Hans would never cheat OTB. You do not dedicate your life to chess and building zero other skills to push your prodigious skill as far as you can just to throw it all away by cheating in the most visible game of your life. The fact that this was robbed from him is just brutal.)

To be clear, I am not a fan of Hans, the person. Even in a game filled with antisocial weirdos, poor sports, and manchildren, he’s uniquely abrasive and sticks out. It's completely fair, given his online cheating history (which was known well before The Magnus Affair), that going forward, people had to be absolutely certain he didn't cheat OTB. It's unfair, as someone who has played games against an opponent who found a novel way to cheat OTB, to have that uncertainty in your head. You can't play chess at the highest level that way. But it's also fair to say that this wasn't the game that should have done it. If his cheating was such a concern, why did it happen precisely after Magnus played poorly and lost an otherwise-unimpressive game?

The stuff Hans is ranting about in the opening clip is where I really started to become vengeful myself. A random joke that went viral about Hans using a device shoved up his behind to cheat started showing up in totally unrelated group chats from people who weren’t even casual observers of the chess scene.

Why should he have been subjected to this? Why wasn’t he given the benefit of the doubt in the court of public opinion before he became the focal point of any and all cheating discussions for the rest of time? This outright led to Hans being asked, point blank, by Piers Morgan if he had used it to cheat, and he actually had to deny this. Again, the kid was 20 YEARS OLD at the time.

The other angle is that he effectively got cut off from participating in high level events because Magnus refused to play him. Implicitly, Magnus was saying that he would not attend a closed event if Hans was also participating. There isn’t a lot of money in chess, and there’s not a lot of money in running chess tournaments either. This was the equivalent of Apple saying “you can either pay us 30%, or we’re not going to let you on the App store”, but for a scenario where, other than at the absolute peak, you’d struggle to outearn your average big tech L3. It’s legal, but it’s brutal use of leverage, and clearly immoral when he was essentially cleared of OTB suspicion in rational minds. In (what at least historically was) a “gentleman’s game”, this is wrong. The point of the closed events is that the best play the best, full stop. When the stakes are smaller, people paradoxically get much pettier due to the fact that the monetary opportunity cost of losing reputation is much lower than the benefits gained from controlling the anthill. The historical corruption of FIDE would make a Brazilian president blush, and in effect, the fact that nobody stuck up for Hans and his life’s work reflects poorly on everyone involved. Without a doubt, this would crush any 19 year old. Hans doesn’t get enough credit for his mental fortitude here, because it’s simply astonishing. He fully deserves to unload, as he did in that interview, and take names.

Lost amidst the narrative of Fischer’s brilliance and mental illness is that he was absolutely insufferable as a human being. Great when he was talking about chess, a total nightmare everywhere else, especially to tournament organizers (where Fischer had a point — the amount of work for inflation-adjusted pennies as prizes was absurd, but he certainly made it harder for them to not go bankrupt.) It’s a testament to Fischer, and, yes, Hans, that they were so good at chess that they kind of avoided having to learn how to interact more normally in society. This kind of brash hardheadedness that makes you a pain to socialize with is good for your chess ability. And isn't that what you ultimately want as an observer, to see the best chess possible? In a way, Hans is the most Fischer-esque player out there right now. Undoubtedly Hans looked up to Magnus, which is why his brain broke when he beat Magnus like that. He literally couldn’t figure out what’s going on. This is a heel-turn worth of the big screen.

The Hans story is the Incredibles meets Queen’s Gambit meets the National Enquirer. That he’s come this far is a story in and of itself, but he’s only 21 years old. Probabilistically, he has a decent shot at becoming the US #1 — narratively, I think he will be, and I’m rooting for it to happen. To be the greatest, you’re going to have to beat your heroes.

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