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Chess. Now with added excitement!

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So, while you’ve all been bothered by events in Italy and elsewhere, the chess world has been lit up by a cheating (pending) scandal that is the most exciting thing to happen since Italy accepted the en passant as a legal move in 1880.

Here is the situation: A fortnight or so ago, Magnus Carlsen, widely considered the greatest chess player to have ever lived, withdrew from a major over-the-table tournament after losing an early game to Hans Niemann, a young American player (playing Black, no less). Niemann ended Carlsen’s 50+ game winning streak.

Carlsen almost certainly would have won the tournament, and its US$500,000 prize purse, if he had remained. At the time, he posted a vague tweet wishing the remaining participants well and alluding to there being more he couldn’t discuss. This is an extraordinary happening at this level of chess.

The chess world, fuelled by a couple of the more popular ‘Tubers (as the kids call them) immediately interpreted Carlsen’s actions as an accusation of cheating, and Carlsen’s silence over the following week did little to quell the hysteria. Accusations weren’t helped by Niemann’s rather odd interviews and behaviour over the subsequent days, although it soon became obvious to observers that Niemann occupied a rather extensive slice of the spectrum. It also didn’t help that Niemann had admitted to cheating in a couple of online games when he was 12 to improve his rating and the quality of his opponents. Remember that this is a sport where grandmasters are frequently crowned before they hit puberty, so he was considered a professional at that point. Additionally, there had been a rather remarkable boost in Niemann’s rating over the past few years, with significantly more victories in online than over-the-table tournaments. Hmmm.

Then a week ago the two met again in the early rounds of an online tournament. Carlsen played one move and then resigned from the game (but remained in the tournament, which he comfortably won). Any un-clutched pearls amongst the spectators were rapidly pulled to the bosom and I hear there was a run on smelling salts throughout the chess dens of the world. By this time, public sentiment had turned towards Niemann and Carlsen was urged to provide evidence or apologise. Again Carlsen remained silent.

Until today. Carlsen has just released a statement confirming that he was led to his actions through a suspicion of cheating, and has doubled down by saying that he is certain Niemann both cheated in the first over-the-table game and in other recent online games. He offered no proof (although it sounds as if an investigation is ongoing) other than saying that Niemann’s body language didn’t betray enough stress on Niemann’s part, and also that some of his moves seemed odd.

Now is probably a good time to discuss why cheating is such a taboo in chess. For the past 20 years or so, computers have been able to consistently beat human opponents, and the best of these chess engines (such as Stockfish) can beat Carlsen any day of the week. For online tournaments, this is trivial as you can simply run the program on another device, but there are also issues in face-to-face games. Many of the major tournaments are live-streamed, so if there is some way of communicating information to the player (vibrating shoes, socks, anal beads – no I’m not kidding) then they become invincible. It would only take input on a couple of key moves to completely swing a game. Tournament organisers have been slow to react to the availability of this technology.

Now, Carlsen is probably better placed than anyone in history to identify whether his opponent is a human or computer, but the lack of any firm evidence has created a dilemma. Tournament organisers are unlikely to invite both Carlsen and Niemann to any future tournaments and risk a repeat (all chess tournaments are by invite) and they all want Carlsen at their event. So unless Carlsen capitulates and publicly admits he was wrong, Niemann’s professional career is effectively over, whether he cheated or not. That’s a tough break for any 19-year-old.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSevxOfgz8DSeY7vKVNAlhrx7HcUsiN-sxTArE8qact6w&s

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Comments

  2. For Podicle


    Very interesting article on a subject I never would otherwise have read. I played chess at school and hated it – the whole point of the game is to destroy your opponent. I usually lost in (inter) school competitions, but even when I won, there was no pleasure in crushing the other player.

  3. It’s hard to get worked up about any one individual genius’s problems. Chessplayers is nutsoid, it was ever thus. The better, the madder. Not bonkers in a likeable way, but deeply, viciously deranged. Any history of the great grandmasters reads like a psychoanalyst’s clinical files. The time is arriving when AI will not only be smarter than the average bear, but smarter than the smartest grandmaster, more particular than the smartest particle physicist. Let’s hope the insanity is left to the humans.

    (If you want Stockfish – or anonymous bastard on-line opponents – to humiliate you on your phone, I can recommend “lichess”, which you can also play offline. It’s free, no ads, and horrible.)

    • Yes, although Carlsen seems reasonably normal compared to many others at his level, despite the fact that he was dropped into a cauldron of Sicilian Defence when he was a baby. While he has sulked a couple of times after losing games he has never done anything like this.

      In balance, I should have pointed out that Carlsen obviously underestimated his opponent in that first game with Hans. He made a couple of poor moves that Niemann pounced on, so maybe he is just a poor loser.

  5. Ever the pragmatist, my take on Olympic doping is you’re never going to stop it, so why not let them take whatever they want? 100m sprint in 5 seconds, Marathons in an hour.

    Similarly, why not insist all chess players wear vibrating anal beads, which are set to go off at random intervals? Then we’ll really be able to judge their powers of concentration.

  7. I used to play a lot, was in a Monday evening chess club, if I lost it really spoilt my day. Also played in matches against other teams and was at several tournaments or exhibitions with Grandmasters (inc Kasparov). Won a tournament once through a mixture of luck and other results going my way.

    Accusations of cheating are nothing new, the first big game I was aware of had allegations of it going on (Fischer v Spassky 1). Not really up to date with chess these days, but I read all about this in the Guardian and it is all a bit murky and disappointing. Cat’s out of the bag possibly and they need to work out how to go forward given rampant superior technology. Online chess would appear to be dead if everyone just plugs their moves into a computer. Maybe they will move to faster in person games where the clock is also your opponent. Speed chess can be thrilling (yes, really)

    And the game had been on a new high recently with the Queen’s Gambit series (brilliant) and lots taking up the game during lockdown

  9. I played a great deal of competitive Chess as a kid. For reasons I still don’t fully understand, my school was super into it and regarded it as the most important sport on offer. As a consequence, I spent many a happy afternoon at tournaments with my mates, attempting to crush our opponents and arranging games of playground football with them between rounds.

    I also got quite into Chess history, and read up on Capablanca, Lasker and Tal, although it was always the absolute mad bastard Fischer who commanded most of my attention. For my 30th birthday we flew to Iceland to visit the room where he played his championship games against Spassky – a pilgrimage to stand in the very spot where he probably complained about the tone of the lightbulbs. I hadn’t played competitive Chess in years, but it was still a joy to visit the place where such an insane volume of mental energy had been expended over a board game.

    That’s what I always loved about Chess – the combination of intense, almost inhuman focus and intellectual violence. There’s a photo from Fischer/Spassky of the American, hands on head in deep meditation, glaring across the top of the pieces at his opponent in a manner that suggests he would like to kill him by force of sight alone, and might attempt to do just that. I love that photo – it is, to my mind, the absolute essence of the game. For several years, I had it up above my desk.

    I stopped playing seriously at about 12. There had been highs and lows; I’d won a number of trophies, been a national Chess champion and played speed Chess in adult tournaments as a 9 year old. But I’d also found myself regularly playing against kids whose parents watched the games with binoculars from the balcony, or – in one rather spectacular case – against a family of Chess prodigies whose parents had pulled them out of school and were travelling the country in a caravan, complete with live-in Chess tutor. On one memorable occasion, which has lived with me ever since, I played a kid with a photographic memory. When I asked him why he wasn’t annotating his moves, he simply replied “no need”. Later that afternoon he replayed our entire match for me, from memory. Super impressive, but one more piece of evidence that I was at a crossroads and could either elect to join the travelling circus or take what I’d learned, skip town and use it all elsewhere in a manner that might be more – ahem – socially advantageous. I’ve always been fond of that latter path, so I jacked it all in.

    Nowadays, I play the odd game against mates, and I dabble in lichess from time to time. The software element has definitely taken some of the luster off the game, and that process was already underway when I was a kid, although Deep Blue had yet to take Kasparov to the cleaners, and there was talk in some circles that a computer would never beat the top players. It seemed like wishful thinking, even way back then. That said, Stockfish is 15 years old now, and readily available, but online Chess is in seemingly rude health. The culture just adapted round it.

    I have followed Carlsen a bit, because his story is so interesting and I like his style. I don’t really know what to make of the anal beads thing; it sounds almost too brilliant to be true, so a bit of me assumes it’s been made up. You never can tell with Chess though, it has a long history of pushing people to behave in ways that appear inexplicable.

    What I do know is that you have to be a bit of a dick to cheat at Chess, because that beautiful, fathomless game is one of the better things to spring from the minds of human beings. It somehow manages to combine being deeply rational with having a romantic streak a mile wide.

    One of my absolute favourite moments in Chess history arrived in 2001 (the week of 9/11, no less), when British Grandmaster Nigel Short claimed to have played online against Bobby Fischer, by that stage a reclusive lunatic who no one had seen play in years (the full story is recounted at the link below, but Fischer had essentially retired in the early 70s). Now, it’s quite possible that the individual Short played was not Fischer (and perhaps not even a human being at all) but the sheer, glorious mystique of it all is so compelling as to be undeniable – the purported Fischer deliberately playing ridiculous, suicidal openings before unleashing “”moves of extraordinary power” to utterly crush probably the best Chess player these isles have ever produced. Who wouldn’t want that to be true, and who wouldn’t want to spend some time pondering what it must be like to be trapped inside a brain like Fischer’s.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2001/sep/10/internetnews.internationalnews

    • ” … that beautiful, fathomless game is one of the better things to spring from the minds of human beings. It somehow manages to combine being deeply rational with having a romantic streak a mile wide.”

      Why Bing – *snurfle* – that’s … beautiful. Thank you.

    • Wonderful response, Bingo.

      Even though I’ve been following global chess events, I don’t actually play chess but I’ve known the rules for as long as I can remember. I grew up in a family with a genius older brother who always had a chess set in front of him and his head in various stern-looking books with humourless East Europeans on the cover. Occasionally, he would convince me to play a game and defeat me in three moves, accompanied by a withering eyebrow raise as if he wasn’t quite convinced I was actually sentient. You could say it put me off chess, somewhat, although I’ve always been intrigued by the personalities and drama of the game.

      I’m an avid boardgamer, and there isn’t really much crossover with the world of chess, surprisingly. Chess players are lifers, devoted to a single, antique game whereas for many boardgamers the novelty of new designs is what attracts us. Chess is only one of many great, strategic games, but it is now so bound up in centuries of theory and lore that it has attained a position in the eyes of the public (and players) as the only ‘proper’ boardgame, which I think is a bit sad, as we are truly living in a golden age of boardgame design.

      • Cheers!

        I actually completely agree with you on boardgames. I love Chess, but I’m never a fan of exceptionalism, or elitism; it doesn’t really matter whether one game is “better” than another, all that matters is the joy you take from it.

        A good friend of mine is super into the whole boardgame renaissance, and through him I’ve been able to catch a little of the buzz. Some truly wild game design out there, the creativity is inspirational.

        On a semi-related note, I should flag that the true legacy of my early love affair with Chess is a colossal weakness for turn based strategy videogames. Many of them are essentially Chess with a load of extra detail piled on top, and I find them incredibly compelling – I once started playing Advance Wars on a Nintendo DS and basically came to three hours later, alerted to the passage of time solely by the growing ache in my back – I hadn’t moved a muscle.

        Only recently, I had to delete the outstanding Into The Breach from my phone (anyone who has Netflix can download it for free, strong recommend), because it threatened to eat my life. Such a simple formula, so cleverly executed.

        I don’t think we should ever be fussy about where we get our kicks. Chess has a really compelling back history and a unique grandeur, but it’s a black hole you could vanish down to the exclusion of everything else (as many have), and while that’s fun to watch, it’s no way to live. That’s basically the realisation I had at 12 year old, and it still holds true today.

        • I actually really like the idea of the variants with random setup (Chess 960 etc) because they remove the vast body of opening theory and history and revert back to pure skill. In this form, chess is more like a modern strategy board-game: here’s a mechanism, some levers to pull and a starting position, now make the best of it.

          I can genuinely say that I am equally good at classical chess and random chess!

          • Yes, I quite enjoy an app called “Really Bad Chess” where the pieces could be anything. Typically – “Great! I have four Queens and the computer only has one. I’m bound to win!”

            You can guess the rest.

  10. Yeah, chess is okay if you like a perfectly evolved game that sums up the human condition (the male one, for the most part).

    Really, it’s like a swordfight and you must think first, before you move.

    Me, I’m in the uppermost reaches of the top 13,000 tiddlywink players in the world. No anal beads here, bro. Bring it!

  12. My rating about 30 years ago was about 1700, maybe 1750. I played in our local club’s B team. One night, our A team was a man short and I was seconded into it, and I was drawn against a bloke who’s rating was over 2100. When he saw my rating, he was pissed off because he knew he could slaughter me easily, which meant he wasn’t going to get an interesting game. He opened with a few stupid moves(because he was going to hammer me anyway)and I just developed normally and played solidly. After 20 moves or so, he was left with only bad moves and he resigned before move 25 as he knew checkmate was coming in a couple of moves. Our A team won that night against a team they expected to lose to!

    I don’t play anymore, apart from against a couple of mates and that’s only occasionally. I do keep up with what’s going on in the chess world though. I’m still a member on chess dot com and I used to love doing the puzzles, but these days, I can’t find the time.

  13. As someone who knew all the moves of chess from as far back as I can remember who spent his childhood playing the game in the manner Eric Morecambe played the piano (all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order) and only had a breakthrough in my twenties when I came to understand the need to carefully construct defence and attack simultaneously, may I ask you useful-but-not-genius players did you pick up the strategy of the game all on your own while very young or did you get nudged in the right direction by siblings, opponents, books or some other higher power..?

    • When I was a teenager I used to get books from the library and play through the games that were included. Never learnt enough openings though so I normally relied on one or two. Must admit I was a pretty average player who generally fell short against anybody decent. Think we had 6 players in our team and I was normally on board 5 or 6.

    • I played loads, I kept my eyes open and I didn’t like losing. That was about it.

      What I do recall is that we played a lot of different variations of the game, which may have helped with our overall strategic awareness. Speed chess, simultaneous chess, bughouse chess, Scottish chess – all that stuff.

      Learned a few openings, and got super comfortable with a handful of them, but then there always comes a point in the game when those props fall away and you have to rely on your wits. At that point, you need to rely on a combination of deep thought and instinct.

      Probably the most important element was zeroing in on a style that worked best for me. I’d love to say that it was a buccaneering, Fischer-style high risk blitzkrieg, but it was actually pretty much the exact opposite: a grueling, attritional approach, wherein you played the percentages, nicked material and positional advantages in the early game and then leveraged those advantages to slowly grind the opponent into dust. All the risk tolerance of a future lawyer, at 8 years old.

      • Yes, that attritional grind is what I ultimately discovered. Against anyone decent I’m happy just not to lose. I just can’t imagine seeing it so young – I remember at that age picking fantasy football teams with my big brother and I’d have four left footed midfielders and four strikers and he’d admonish me saying “you can’t do that – they’d all be in each other’s way”. If I couldn’t grasp that from watching football..

      • I hope I can say this without offending (I know I can, you’re not the easily offended type) but I see something of the chess player in your AW posts in discussions. Always eloquent and precise and very well thought out, but sometimes also adversarial or competitive.

  14. The digital age has opened a Golden Era of cheating at chess, lending earlier cheats a charming clumsiness:

    “The earliest example happened in the 11th century, when King Canute the Great tried to return a captured piece to the board in a game against his brother-in-law, the Earl of Ulf.”

    “Viktor Korchnoi accused Anatoly Karpov in 1978 of receiving a hidden signal when he got purple yogurt as a snack during a match.”

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