January 5, 2023 • 24 mins
Magnus Carlsen, the greatest chess player in the world, accused 19-year-old Hans Niemann of cheating. Why? Because Niemann beat him twice. Carlsen and the chess world can't prove Niemann is cheating, but they're convinced he is. The accusations are tearing apart the chess world and raising questions about maintaining fair play in a high-tech world. David Segal covered the story (and yes, the anal beads theory) for The New York Times.
You can read the whole article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/04/business/chess-cheating-scandal-magnus-carlsen-hans-niemann.html
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. I'm David Siegel, and I wrote, He's the bad
boy of chess, But did he cheat? It's in the
New York Times, and it's the story of the week.
I once had a budding friendship with retired baseball player
(00:35):
Sean Green, and one of the ways we'd express our
friendship was playing words with friends. He was very good,
and I cheated. I mean, we hadn't explicitly agreed not
to look up how to arrange our letters into really
long words, but I'm pretty sure Sean wasn't doing it.
He was really good at Words with friends, So I
(00:58):
told myself that perhaps that's how people played the game
with computers doing all the work. The guilt I have
over this years later is odd intense. Part of it
is because Sean was a home run hitter who maintains
he didn't take performance enhancing drugs during the steroid era.
He sacrificed so much out of honor, and I couldn't
(01:21):
even bear losing at Words with friends. So when I
heard about the scandal tearing apart the world of professional chess,
all of my self hatred was directed at Hans Nieman,
a guy who's been accused of cheating in one of
the biggest chess scandals ever writing his hard who's got
(01:52):
that kind of time when you're already busy trying to
be Joe Stein until it turns on a mic mab
it twiddles and knob because a journalist Frand has got
in that jewel job outories single story just listen to
smart people speaking conversation. Information is a story when Magnus Carlson,
(02:26):
the greatest chess player in the world, accused nineteen year
old Hans Nieman of cheating. It tore apart the chess world.
David Siegel wrote about the scandal for The New York Times. Okay,
so the story is about these two chess players, Magnus
Carlson and Hans Nieman, and they're both grandmasters. But these
guys couldn't be more different from each other. Right, Let's
start with Magnus Carlson, who I met once at a party.
(02:49):
He looked like he looked like a chess player. He
looked like a like a soccer star or an underwear
model or something like. He's very intimidating. What is he like?
Magnus Crosson started off as this as this thirteen year
old phenomenon who became a grandmaster at a super young
age and then just was mowing down everyone in a
matter of a couple yours. He's a five time world champion.
(03:12):
He's also kind of become a brand corporate sponsorships and
this fashion brand g Star raw hires him to be
a spokesmodel. He even has his own chess app, play Magnus,
that the biggest chess website, chess dot com bought in
twenty twenty two, and he has just beloved right, He's
the golden boy of chess. He's got lots of star
(03:32):
power and lots of charisma, and he's also conversational, unlike
a lot of other chess players who are not so conversational.
And he's also arguably the greatest chess player who's ever lived.
And then there's this other guy in the story, Hans Nieman,
who I've never heard of. So Hans Nieman is like
the polar opposite of Magnus Carlson. He's this nineteen year
(03:53):
old American and he's got like a popular Twitch stream,
he's got that big Sam Bankman freed hair, and he's
just he's got kind of like a scowl on his face.
He looks like trouble. I think he looks awesome. I
gotta say, I totally love the way he looks. He
looks like he's robbing a great like old country band
of a lead singer. He looks like he got kicked
(04:13):
out of Wilco before the first album. He was in
sun Volt for like a month exactly. He left with
the other guy. Yeah, he's also a performer. Like his
twitch stream is really pretty entertaining. During COVID, he had
a heart rate monitor strapped to him and he would
play with that and he once got his heart rate
up to one sixty two, just like sitting and playing. Yeah, no,
(04:37):
it's just yeah, it's incredible. Like he just he revs
himself into this frenzy and he's screaming and he's swearing
and he's carrying on. So we have the suave top
ranked Magnus Carlson and the Brady rule breaking Hans Nieman,
and they both show up to the FTX Crypto Cup
and they have to play each other. And it's not
supposed to be much of a game, right, Like Hans
(04:58):
is the lowest ranked player in the entire tournament, and
Magnus Carlson has been unbeaten for fifty games in a row,
So this is not supposed to be a great showdown.
Hans Zeman's nobody. There are very few people who really
know who he is. He's been a guy who's been
like running around the globe playing open tournaments, which you
don't need an invite too, as the name suggests, So
this was not supposed to be a great game. Magnus
(05:21):
is playing with the white pieces and Hans is playing
with the black ones, which is a big disadvantage because
you have to go second. But then something shocking happens
and Hans wins. Right, Yeah, it is a stunner. If
in the chess world this causes, this causes big ripples, Yeah,
it's it's totally startling. A lot of money was lost
(05:42):
that night in Vegas. People lost their shirts in Vegas.
It was, it was. It was a shocker. And yeah,
Hans Neman walks out of that game into this hallway
and there's a man there with the microphone waiting to
interview him, to experience him exulting what you would expect
would be a man exulting over a career making triumph,
(06:06):
and instead Hans looks him dead. In thee says chess
speaks for itself and then walks away, and this becomes
a sort of great famous moment. And this phrase chess
speaks for itself is now on coffee cups, It's on
T shirts just like stunned the chess world and amuse them.
That's a mic drop of a statement, right, Chess speaks
(06:27):
for itself. Yeah, have you used that line anywhere? I've
adapted it, you know what I mean, Like dinner speaks
for itself. Just so you really you can slot it
into just about anything. So Carlson and Nieman face off
again a month later in the sink Field Cup, which
is a huge chess tournament in Saint Louis, and it's
like the winner gets one hundred grand and Magnus and
(06:50):
Hans have to face off again. And what happens then,
So what happens then is that once again Hans and
Neman is playing with the black pieces, and this is
arguably one of the most picked over and studied games
in the history of chess. So he beats them again
with the black pieces. With the black pieces, yes, And
(07:11):
I've seen the interview afterwards where Hans Nieman says he
got really lucky and guessed in advance that Magnus Carlson
was going to be using the fianchetto variation, which which
seems ridiculous because it's an opening move that's so obscure
that he's never even used it before. And yet Hans
Nieman says he like prepared for it in advance and
was ready for it. Yes, that interview becomes exhibit A
(07:35):
for all the skeptics because he says all sorts of
things during that interview that raised suspicions, and one of
them is exactly what you just said. That he prepared
for this very opening, which he himself described as a miracle.
He said, by some miracle, I prepared for that very
opening today like that morning he had he had walked
through like what if Magnus Carlson uses this opening? But
(07:59):
I spoke to enough people that said no, no, it's
he didn't use that very specific opening, but it was
close enough to a bunch of different openings that had
made perfect sense for Hans and Eman to prepare for it.
After this surprising loss to Hans, what does Magnus do?
He stews, apparently, and then the next day he tweets
(08:21):
saying announcing that he's quitting the Sinkfield Cup. And he
doesn't do that. No one just quits a tournament in
the middle, right, Nobody quits the tournament in the middle.
And it's a crazy thing to do because he doesn't
have to play Hans Niman again. It's a round robin.
He doesn't have to blame again. He might blame again,
but he was like, I need to take a stand,
and he issues this tweet that basically has a video
(08:43):
clip of a soccer coach saying something like I'd like
to say more, but I can't. I'll get in trouble.
And it's a soccer coach talking about cheating. Right, He's
talking about cheating exactly. So everyone knows immediately that Magnus
Carlson has taken this unprecedented step of quitting this tournament,
and he is quitting it because he thinks that Hans
Nieman has cheated. Although he doesn't say that directly, but
(09:05):
it's so clear that that's what he means. That The
sink Field Cup adds security measures. They add a fifteen
minute delay to the broadcast of all the moves from
the games, and they start scanning players with a radio
frequency scanner in case they are getting radio signals from
a confederate. By the way, TMZ was covering the story
(09:27):
and they showed Hans Nieman getting wanded before he walked
in to make sure he hadn't have any devices on him,
which I think it's the first time tmzs cover chess.
That surely is true. So the thing that I had
to understand was how easy it is to cheat at
chess right now. Like back when Gary Casprof lost to
IBM's Big Blue computer, it was a huge deal. But
(09:49):
now you can just like open up your smartphone and
beat the world's best player in chess every time. Right,
That's exactly right, So that's exactly what happens. So crazy,
it's crazy. So Big Blue. When we knew about Big Blue,
back when it beat Gary Casprof, it was this like
one point four ton machine. It was this massive mainframe. Now,
(10:10):
if you have a self a smartphone, you can beat
Magnus Carlson every single time you play if you are
willing to just read the moves off of what they
call a chess engine, and the most famous one of
them is called Stockfish. So Stockfish will never lose apparently,
will never lose to Magnus Carlson. If you could get signals,
if you get moves from a cell phone and have
(10:32):
Stockfish send you the moves, you'll win every time. You know,
the board is just a bunch of squares, and those
squares I have a letter and a number, so like
you know, a through age and one through eight. You
could just cheat by sending someone a letter in a
number and it would tell them where to move you,
kind of like Morse code. This is entirely in the
realm of speculation because here's the thing. No one's ever
(10:53):
been caught doing this, and it might be because no
one's ever done it. So people have been caught cheating before,
but they do cock and maybe things like they go
to the bathroom, take out their phone, call Stockfish and
get the moves while they're in the bathroom. Like some
of the most famous examples are that there's ham handed
(11:14):
as that. Now, no one, as far as I've can tell,
has ever been caught with any kind of a device
in the socks or anywhere else that can convey the
messages that you're describing. You know, you could conceive of them,
you could imagine them easily, but they've never no one's
ever been caught with such a device, just part of
what makes Magnus Carlson's accusation so lunatic. Then there's a
(11:38):
rumor that spreads. I think it starts as a joke,
like all good conspiracy theories do, that Hans Nieman was
getting this information about where to move through vibrations in
anal beads. That's right, but this is like, yes, I mean,
this is a big rumor that a lot of people
are talking about, like it was kind of everywhere, right,
it was everywhere, and Elon Musk tweeted it, so that
(12:00):
might explain the part of the every awareness and no
one was really taking the analbead guess that seriously right?
That was inherently ridiculou It was inherently ridiculous. But it
was definitely the case that when Mangus Carlson got done
with this tweet, that people believed that Hans Nieman cheated us,
even if they had no workable, vible theorious to how
(12:23):
he did it, let alone any physical evidence that he
had done it. It's really kind of crazy. I went
to a sex toy store here in London. There's a
bunch of the story. It was completely unrelated. It's just
just purely I want to hear the story anyway, but
please Yeah. So I went there and I went around
to three of them, and I just asked them, is
(12:46):
there any device that you sell that would not show
up on a metal detector or any of these vibrating
devices metal free? And they all said, now, they all
have whatever would connect it to, whatever make it vibrate,
and whatever would make it receive a signal would have
to have some metal. So the question is then, like
(13:07):
gets pretty obscure. It's like, would would a metal detector?
Does it have enough metal to set off a metal detector?
All the people that I spoke to these sex toy
shops that absolutely would. It would set off the metal detector.
So good luck trying that particular ruse in a chess tournament.
Sex toy shop workers are a lot more technically reminded
(13:27):
than I would have guessed. Yeah, maybe you need to be. Yeah,
there's a lot of technology. There's like and they have
remote controls. I learned quite a bit. Wow, what a
great job you have. It's entertaining. Well. This debate over
whether he cheated or not kind of divides the whole
Chess World. When Magnus tweets these accusations, what is Hans's response.
(13:54):
By the time he sits down for his next interview
at the Sinkfield Cup, He's lived and he gives us
very impassioned speech, effectively a monologue, where he confesses to
a lot of things, including cheating at the age of
twelve and sixteen, and he says, here's why I cheated
because I wanted to play better players, I wanted better ratings,
(14:19):
I wanted to play I wanted to get more people
to watch my Twitch stream. He considers it a terrible
mistake and that he's spent the last two years trying
to make up for that mistake. And that's why he
says he's spent twelve hours a day playing chess, that
(14:39):
he was motivated to clear his name and to prove
to himself and the rest of the world that he
did not need artificial intelligence to play with the best
players in the world. And you can imagine being outrageous
to him at the very moment that he proves this
that he can play with the best players by beating
the greatest player arguably in history, and being accused of cheating,
that this would be incredibly aggravating and unnerving. Part of
(15:03):
that speech sounds a lot to me like Lance Armstrong
asking people to tell to Urine like this is a
quote from that speech, Nieman says, they want me to
strip fully naked, I'll do it. I don't care because
I know I'm clean. You want me to play in
a closed box with zero electronic and transmission. I don't care.
You know, name whatever you guys want. So think of
(15:25):
it from from Niemen's standpoint. There's nothing here that suggests cheating.
So if you're Hans Nieman, maybe that is an actual,
honest expression of your willingness to go the extra mile
to prove that, in fact, you did not cheat. Okay,
So these two guys, Hans and Magnus face off again
(15:46):
just a few weeks later at the Julius Bear Generation Cup.
I can't believe they play this often. What happens when
they start playing, They sit down to play this is
an online tournament, and Magnus Carlson made one move and
then he resigned. So he basically forfeits this game and
then releases a much longer tweet that says, I believe
(16:11):
that Nieman has cheated more and more recently than he
is publicly admitted is over the board progress has been unusual,
and throughout our game in the Sinkfield Cup, I had
the impression that he was intense or even fully concentrating
on the game in critical positions while out playing me
as Black in a way that I think only a
handful of players can do effectively. What he's saying is,
(16:33):
Hans was way too chilled out during our game. And
in fact, most people who play Magnus Carlson are kind
of like they're in a state of fear and anxiety
and they are concentrating fully. And it is true. You
can watch video of this game and you will see
Hans Niemen at the Sinkfield Cup playing Magnus Carlson and
(16:55):
he's looking around the room and he's chewing gum. It's
like he's waiting for a bus. Like if you told
me this kid who's waiting for a bus and be like, okay,
that's about right, not playing the greatest chess player in history.
So it's very peculiar. But you know what, everything about
Hans Zeman's pretty peculiar. Maybe just maybe it's not that
(17:16):
something was broken about Hans Nieman. Maybe instead, something was
breaking inside Magnus Carlson. But first, our sponsors are going
to sell you. I'm guessing some chess shaped sex toys.
I'd recommend starting with either upon or a bishop. Chess
(17:40):
dot Com, the biggest chess website, issued a seventy two
page report saying that Hans Nieman didn't just cheat twice online,
he cheated more than a hundred times, and they found
his quick improvement in real life games to be highly suspicious.
But Chess dot Com had just spent eighty two million
dollars to buy Magnus Carlson's site, Play Magnus, so they
(18:03):
weren't exactly a neutral observer. Hans Nieman responded to these
accusations with a surprising maturity and calmness. No, of course
he didn't. He sued everyone involved. So Hans is now
suing Magnus and Chess dot Com for a hundred million
dollars over their allegedly defamatory claims. Has Hans's career actually
(18:26):
suffered like one hundred million dollars worth as a result
of these allegations from Magnus. It's far from clear to
me that his life is ruined or that his chess
career is over. He is one of the most famous
chess players in the world now. There are a lot
of people who know his name that didn't know it before.
He's still going to tournaments and he's still doing really well.
So what do you think's going on? Why would Magnus
(18:47):
Carlson make this accusation? It was he just like butt hurt?
Was it just that he's getting older and may not
be as good and he's panicking or this seems like
he has such a reputation that this seems like a
huge risk for him to accuse someone of cheating if
they weren't. That is a great, great question. It's a
great mystery. So my assumption is that when Magnus carl
(19:09):
Wison played him at the FTX, he had heard the
rumors that Hans was a cheater, and by the time
he leaves Miami and the FTX and goes to Saint
Louis for the Sinfield Cup, he's decided that Hans is
a cheater and that really affected Magnus Carlson's performance. That's
I think what happened, because what is a greater psyche
(19:30):
out than to think that you were competing against an
unbeatable computer. And so I don't doubt that Magnus Carlson
is utterly sincere. He's just wrong. So this guy who's
ranked number thirty nine is the only one to beat
the number one best chess player of all time. And
the reason you're marshaling forward for that unbelievable defeat happening
(19:55):
twice is that Carlson psyched himsel out because they thought
he was playing computer. Yeah, that might be the greatest
psychological move of all time to convince people you're cheating
when you're not. Totally absolutely it's an incredible, brilliant like
psych out. Of course, it's not what Hans and Eman
intended at all. I think, no idea. Maybe by all
(20:18):
means in fur the worst. You know, we're clearly on
other sides of this whole thing. What's going on in
your life that you're such a Hans fan? What do
you think emotionally draws you towards him? What happened to
him is really kind of morally gross. It really is
kind of repugnant because he was accused of something that
he didn't do, and there's no way for him to
(20:41):
prove that he didn't do it other than all of
the circumstantial proof that's been marshalled on his behalf by
all sorts of grandmasters in the wake of this little calamity,
you feel really sure that he didn't cheat. Yeah, he
did not cheat. The interesting thing to me about these
stories is the pathos, the kind of like, you know,
the kind of internal mental anguish of this whole thing,
(21:02):
and the complexity and nuances of it. You know, there
were a lot of people who wondered about his mental
state when this whole Singfield Cup thing happened. You know,
do you have a support network? There was a Q
and A thing that happened at the Singfield Cup where
people got to type in their questions for Hans and
one of them was like, do you have people to
talk to? Because, like you can imagine, like he's just
(21:23):
this nineteen year old kid who's been accused of this
terrible thing by the most popular and most famous chess
player in the world. There are cheating scandals everywhere right now.
There's there's a cheating scandal in poker, there's a cheating
scandal in bridge. Like it feels like we're at a
moment when tech is threatening any kind of human interaction
(21:44):
that's big. That's a big bull statement you just made there,
My friend, that's what we do on the show. Yeah.
David Siegel is a reporter for The New York Times
and wrote he's the bad boy of chess, but did
he cheat? In The New York Times. David, thank you
so much. The story is great and it made me
interested in chess yet again. Thank you. It's a pleasure.
(22:08):
Thank you. People haven't cared this much about chess since
Bobby Fisher and he was fighting the Russians at the
height of the Cold War. The scandal's gotten people's attention
because we're afraid of smart people. Specifically, we're afraid that
they're using their smartness to do sneaky things for their
own advantage. Politicians, lawyers, podcasters. We assume they're using tricks
(22:33):
to run scams on the rest of us. So when
one of them gets caught or even accused, we feel vindicated.
We accuse others, even though we're all doing a little
cheating ourselves. We cheat a little in our taxes, we
exaggerate our resumes, we spell out oxyfenbutazone in words with friends,
and we do it because we assume everyone else's at
(23:02):
the end of the show, what's next for joel Stein.
Maybe he'll take a naver poke around online. Our show
today was produced by Kate mccaulliff, Mola Board and Nishev Bencutt.
It was edited by Robert Smith. Our engineer is Amanda
kay Wang and our executive producer is Katherine Giradol. And
(23:25):
our theme song was written and performed by Jonathan Colton.
And a special thanks to my voice coach Vicky Merrick
and my consulting producer laurenz Elasnick. To find more Pushkin podcast,
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you
listen to your podcasts. I'm Joel Stein and the story
of the week speaks for itself. So the craziest part
(23:48):
for me was at the sink Field Cup in Saint Louis.
There are Hans Nieman groupies there exactly. So this was,
you know, the backlash to the backlash I guess is
that a group of women showed up in matching cocktail
dresses and sunglasses, all bearing signs and said, you know,
we love Hans of his accent, we love his hair,
(24:11):
that sort of thing. Yeah, supporting them. They look like
the women from the Robert Palmer video, like the red
lipstick and the black hair and the black dresses, and
it just seems like this doesn't happen in chess, right,
never has happened before. In fact that when they interviewed
Nieman yet again for I think a third sit down
interview at the Sinkfield Cup, he said, look, this is
(24:33):
all very terrible and strange, but at least for the
first time in history, there are fangirls showing up at
a chess tournament, which has to be you know, a first.
Coming up next week, Hawaii's Crazy War over Zombie Cats,
Pushkin. I'm David Siegel, and I wrote, He's the bad
boy of chess, But did he cheat? It's in the
New York Times, and it's the story of the week.
I once had a budding friendship with retired baseball player
(00:35):
Sean Green, and one of the ways we'd express our
friendship was playing words with friends. He was very good,
and I cheated. I mean, we hadn't explicitly agreed not
to look up how to arrange our letters into really
long words, but I'm pretty sure Sean wasn't doing it.
He was really good at Words with friends, So I
(00:58):
told myself that perhaps that's how people played the game
with computers doing all the work. The guilt I have
over this years later is odd intense. Part of it
is because Sean was a home run hitter who maintains
he didn't take performance enhancing drugs during the steroid era.
He sacrificed so much out of honor, and I couldn't
(01:21):
even bear losing at Words with friends. So when I
heard about the scandal tearing apart the world of professional chess,
all of my self hatred was directed at Hans Nieman,
a guy who's been accused of cheating in one of
the biggest chess scandals ever writing his hard who's got
(01:52):
that kind of time when you're already busy trying to
be Joe Stein until it turns on a mic mab
it twiddles and knob because a journalist Frand has got
in that jewel job outories single story just listen to
smart people speaking conversation. Information is a story when Magnus Carlson,
(02:26):
the greatest chess player in the world, accused nineteen year
old Hans Nieman of cheating. It tore apart the chess world.
David Siegel wrote about the scandal for The New York Times. Okay,
so the story is about these two chess players, Magnus
Carlson and Hans Nieman, and they're both grandmasters. But these
guys couldn't be more different from each other. Right, Let's
start with Magnus Carlson, who I met once at a party.
(02:49):
He looked like he looked like a chess player. He
looked like a like a soccer star or an underwear
model or something like. He's very intimidating. What is he like?
Magnus Crosson started off as this as this thirteen year
old phenomenon who became a grandmaster at a super young
age and then just was mowing down everyone in a
matter of a couple yours. He's a five time world champion.
(03:12):
He's also kind of become a brand corporate sponsorships and
this fashion brand g Star raw hires him to be
a spokesmodel. He even has his own chess app, play Magnus,
that the biggest chess website, chess dot com bought in
twenty twenty two, and he has just beloved right, He's
the golden boy of chess. He's got lots of star
(03:32):
power and lots of charisma, and he's also conversational, unlike
a lot of other chess players who are not so conversational.
And he's also arguably the greatest chess player who's ever lived.
And then there's this other guy in the story, Hans Nieman,
who I've never heard of. So Hans Nieman is like
the polar opposite of Magnus Carlson. He's this nineteen year
(03:53):
old American and he's got like a popular Twitch stream,
he's got that big Sam Bankman freed hair, and he's
just he's got kind of like a scowl on his face.
He looks like trouble. I think he looks awesome. I
gotta say, I totally love the way he looks. He
looks like he's robbing a great like old country band
of a lead singer. He looks like he got kicked
(04:13):
out of Wilco before the first album. He was in
sun Volt for like a month exactly. He left with
the other guy. Yeah, he's also a performer. Like his
twitch stream is really pretty entertaining. During COVID, he had
a heart rate monitor strapped to him and he would
play with that and he once got his heart rate
up to one sixty two, just like sitting and playing. Yeah, no,
(04:37):
it's just yeah, it's incredible. Like he just he revs
himself into this frenzy and he's screaming and he's swearing
and he's carrying on. So we have the suave top
ranked Magnus Carlson and the Brady rule breaking Hans Nieman,
and they both show up to the FTX Crypto Cup
and they have to play each other. And it's not
supposed to be much of a game, right, Like Hans
(04:58):
is the lowest ranked player in the entire tournament, and
Magnus Carlson has been unbeaten for fifty games in a row,
So this is not supposed to be a great showdown.
Hans Zeman's nobody. There are very few people who really
know who he is. He's been a guy who's been
like running around the globe playing open tournaments, which you
don't need an invite too, as the name suggests, So
this was not supposed to be a great game. Magnus
(05:21):
is playing with the white pieces and Hans is playing
with the black ones, which is a big disadvantage because
you have to go second. But then something shocking happens
and Hans wins. Right, Yeah, it is a stunner. If
in the chess world this causes, this causes big ripples, Yeah,
it's it's totally startling. A lot of money was lost
(05:42):
that night in Vegas. People lost their shirts in Vegas.
It was, it was. It was a shocker. And yeah,
Hans Neman walks out of that game into this hallway
and there's a man there with the microphone waiting to
interview him, to experience him exulting what you would expect
would be a man exulting over a career making triumph,
(06:06):
and instead Hans looks him dead. In thee says chess
speaks for itself and then walks away, and this becomes
a sort of great famous moment. And this phrase chess
speaks for itself is now on coffee cups, It's on
T shirts just like stunned the chess world and amuse them.
That's a mic drop of a statement, right, Chess speaks
(06:27):
for itself. Yeah, have you used that line anywhere? I've
adapted it, you know what I mean, Like dinner speaks
for itself. Just so you really you can slot it
into just about anything. So Carlson and Nieman face off
again a month later in the sink Field Cup, which
is a huge chess tournament in Saint Louis, and it's
like the winner gets one hundred grand and Magnus and
(06:50):
Hans have to face off again. And what happens then,
So what happens then is that once again Hans and
Neman is playing with the black pieces, and this is
arguably one of the most picked over and studied games
in the history of chess. So he beats them again
with the black pieces. With the black pieces, yes, And
(07:11):
I've seen the interview afterwards where Hans Nieman says he
got really lucky and guessed in advance that Magnus Carlson
was going to be using the fianchetto variation, which which
seems ridiculous because it's an opening move that's so obscure
that he's never even used it before. And yet Hans
Nieman says he like prepared for it in advance and
was ready for it. Yes, that interview becomes exhibit A
(07:35):
for all the skeptics because he says all sorts of
things during that interview that raised suspicions, and one of
them is exactly what you just said. That he prepared
for this very opening, which he himself described as a miracle.
He said, by some miracle, I prepared for that very
opening today like that morning he had he had walked
through like what if Magnus Carlson uses this opening? But
(07:59):
I spoke to enough people that said no, no, it's
he didn't use that very specific opening, but it was
close enough to a bunch of different openings that had
made perfect sense for Hans and Eman to prepare for it.
After this surprising loss to Hans, what does Magnus do?
He stews, apparently, and then the next day he tweets
(08:21):
saying announcing that he's quitting the Sinkfield Cup. And he
doesn't do that. No one just quits a tournament in
the middle, right, Nobody quits the tournament in the middle.
And it's a crazy thing to do because he doesn't
have to play Hans Niman again. It's a round robin.
He doesn't have to blame again. He might blame again,
but he was like, I need to take a stand,
and he issues this tweet that basically has a video
(08:43):
clip of a soccer coach saying something like I'd like
to say more, but I can't. I'll get in trouble.
And it's a soccer coach talking about cheating. Right, He's
talking about cheating exactly. So everyone knows immediately that Magnus
Carlson has taken this unprecedented step of quitting this tournament,
and he is quitting it because he thinks that Hans
Nieman has cheated. Although he doesn't say that directly, but
(09:05):
it's so clear that that's what he means. That The
sink Field Cup adds security measures. They add a fifteen
minute delay to the broadcast of all the moves from
the games, and they start scanning players with a radio
frequency scanner in case they are getting radio signals from
a confederate. By the way, TMZ was covering the story
(09:27):
and they showed Hans Nieman getting wanded before he walked
in to make sure he hadn't have any devices on him,
which I think it's the first time tmzs cover chess.
That surely is true. So the thing that I had
to understand was how easy it is to cheat at
chess right now. Like back when Gary Casprof lost to
IBM's Big Blue computer, it was a huge deal. But
(09:49):
now you can just like open up your smartphone and
beat the world's best player in chess every time. Right,
That's exactly right, So that's exactly what happens. So crazy,
it's crazy. So Big Blue. When we knew about Big Blue,
back when it beat Gary Casprof, it was this like
one point four ton machine. It was this massive mainframe. Now,
(10:10):
if you have a self a smartphone, you can beat
Magnus Carlson every single time you play if you are
willing to just read the moves off of what they
call a chess engine, and the most famous one of
them is called Stockfish. So Stockfish will never lose apparently,
will never lose to Magnus Carlson. If you could get signals,
if you get moves from a cell phone and have
(10:32):
Stockfish send you the moves, you'll win every time. You know,
the board is just a bunch of squares, and those
squares I have a letter and a number, so like
you know, a through age and one through eight. You
could just cheat by sending someone a letter in a
number and it would tell them where to move you,
kind of like Morse code. This is entirely in the
realm of speculation because here's the thing. No one's ever
(10:53):
been caught doing this, and it might be because no
one's ever done it. So people have been caught cheating before,
but they do cock and maybe things like they go
to the bathroom, take out their phone, call Stockfish and
get the moves while they're in the bathroom. Like some
of the most famous examples are that there's ham handed
(11:14):
as that. Now, no one, as far as I've can tell,
has ever been caught with any kind of a device
in the socks or anywhere else that can convey the
messages that you're describing. You know, you could conceive of them,
you could imagine them easily, but they've never no one's
ever been caught with such a device, just part of
what makes Magnus Carlson's accusation so lunatic. Then there's a
(11:38):
rumor that spreads. I think it starts as a joke,
like all good conspiracy theories do, that Hans Nieman was
getting this information about where to move through vibrations in
anal beads. That's right, but this is like, yes, I mean,
this is a big rumor that a lot of people
are talking about, like it was kind of everywhere, right,
it was everywhere, and Elon Musk tweeted it, so that
(12:00):
might explain the part of the every awareness and no
one was really taking the analbead guess that seriously right?
That was inherently ridiculou It was inherently ridiculous. But it
was definitely the case that when Mangus Carlson got done
with this tweet, that people believed that Hans Nieman cheated us,
even if they had no workable, vible theorious to how
(12:23):
he did it, let alone any physical evidence that he
had done it. It's really kind of crazy. I went
to a sex toy store here in London. There's a
bunch of the story. It was completely unrelated. It's just
just purely I want to hear the story anyway, but
please Yeah. So I went there and I went around
to three of them, and I just asked them, is
(12:46):
there any device that you sell that would not show
up on a metal detector or any of these vibrating
devices metal free? And they all said, now, they all
have whatever would connect it to, whatever make it vibrate,
and whatever would make it receive a signal would have
to have some metal. So the question is then, like
(13:07):
gets pretty obscure. It's like, would would a metal detector?
Does it have enough metal to set off a metal detector?
All the people that I spoke to these sex toy
shops that absolutely would. It would set off the metal detector.
So good luck trying that particular ruse in a chess tournament.
Sex toy shop workers are a lot more technically reminded
(13:27):
than I would have guessed. Yeah, maybe you need to be. Yeah,
there's a lot of technology. There's like and they have
remote controls. I learned quite a bit. Wow, what a
great job you have. It's entertaining. Well. This debate over
whether he cheated or not kind of divides the whole
Chess World. When Magnus tweets these accusations, what is Hans's response.
(13:54):
By the time he sits down for his next interview
at the Sinkfield Cup, He's lived and he gives us
very impassioned speech, effectively a monologue, where he confesses to
a lot of things, including cheating at the age of
twelve and sixteen, and he says, here's why I cheated
because I wanted to play better players, I wanted better ratings,
(14:19):
I wanted to play I wanted to get more people
to watch my Twitch stream. He considers it a terrible
mistake and that he's spent the last two years trying
to make up for that mistake. And that's why he
says he's spent twelve hours a day playing chess, that
(14:39):
he was motivated to clear his name and to prove
to himself and the rest of the world that he
did not need artificial intelligence to play with the best
players in the world. And you can imagine being outrageous
to him at the very moment that he proves this
that he can play with the best players by beating
the greatest player arguably in history, and being accused of cheating,
that this would be incredibly aggravating and unnerving. Part of
(15:03):
that speech sounds a lot to me like Lance Armstrong
asking people to tell to Urine like this is a
quote from that speech, Nieman says, they want me to
strip fully naked, I'll do it. I don't care because
I know I'm clean. You want me to play in
a closed box with zero electronic and transmission. I don't care.
You know, name whatever you guys want. So think of
(15:25):
it from from Niemen's standpoint. There's nothing here that suggests cheating.
So if you're Hans Nieman, maybe that is an actual,
honest expression of your willingness to go the extra mile
to prove that, in fact, you did not cheat. Okay,
So these two guys, Hans and Magnus face off again
(15:46):
just a few weeks later at the Julius Bear Generation Cup.
I can't believe they play this often. What happens when
they start playing, They sit down to play this is
an online tournament, and Magnus Carlson made one move and
then he resigned. So he basically forfeits this game and
then releases a much longer tweet that says, I believe
(16:11):
that Nieman has cheated more and more recently than he
is publicly admitted is over the board progress has been unusual,
and throughout our game in the Sinkfield Cup, I had
the impression that he was intense or even fully concentrating
on the game in critical positions while out playing me
as Black in a way that I think only a
handful of players can do effectively. What he's saying is,
(16:33):
Hans was way too chilled out during our game. And
in fact, most people who play Magnus Carlson are kind
of like they're in a state of fear and anxiety
and they are concentrating fully. And it is true. You
can watch video of this game and you will see
Hans Niemen at the Sinkfield Cup playing Magnus Carlson and
(16:55):
he's looking around the room and he's chewing gum. It's
like he's waiting for a bus. Like if you told
me this kid who's waiting for a bus and be like, okay,
that's about right, not playing the greatest chess player in history.
So it's very peculiar. But you know what, everything about
Hans Zeman's pretty peculiar. Maybe just maybe it's not that
(17:16):
something was broken about Hans Nieman. Maybe instead, something was
breaking inside Magnus Carlson. But first, our sponsors are going
to sell you. I'm guessing some chess shaped sex toys.
I'd recommend starting with either upon or a bishop. Chess
(17:40):
dot Com, the biggest chess website, issued a seventy two
page report saying that Hans Nieman didn't just cheat twice online,
he cheated more than a hundred times, and they found
his quick improvement in real life games to be highly suspicious.
But Chess dot Com had just spent eighty two million
dollars to buy Magnus Carlson's site, Play Magnus, so they
(18:03):
weren't exactly a neutral observer. Hans Nieman responded to these
accusations with a surprising maturity and calmness. No, of course
he didn't. He sued everyone involved. So Hans is now
suing Magnus and Chess dot Com for a hundred million
dollars over their allegedly defamatory claims. Has Hans's career actually
(18:26):
suffered like one hundred million dollars worth as a result
of these allegations from Magnus. It's far from clear to
me that his life is ruined or that his chess
career is over. He is one of the most famous
chess players in the world now. There are a lot
of people who know his name that didn't know it before.
He's still going to tournaments and he's still doing really well.
So what do you think's going on? Why would Magnus
(18:47):
Carlson make this accusation? It was he just like butt hurt?
Was it just that he's getting older and may not
be as good and he's panicking or this seems like
he has such a reputation that this seems like a
huge risk for him to accuse someone of cheating if
they weren't. That is a great, great question. It's a
great mystery. So my assumption is that when Magnus carl
(19:09):
Wison played him at the FTX, he had heard the
rumors that Hans was a cheater, and by the time
he leaves Miami and the FTX and goes to Saint
Louis for the Sinfield Cup, he's decided that Hans is
a cheater and that really affected Magnus Carlson's performance. That's
I think what happened, because what is a greater psyche
(19:30):
out than to think that you were competing against an
unbeatable computer. And so I don't doubt that Magnus Carlson
is utterly sincere. He's just wrong. So this guy who's
ranked number thirty nine is the only one to beat
the number one best chess player of all time. And
the reason you're marshaling forward for that unbelievable defeat happening
(19:55):
twice is that Carlson psyched himsel out because they thought
he was playing computer. Yeah, that might be the greatest
psychological move of all time to convince people you're cheating
when you're not. Totally absolutely it's an incredible, brilliant like
psych out. Of course, it's not what Hans and Eman
intended at all. I think, no idea. Maybe by all
(20:18):
means in fur the worst. You know, we're clearly on
other sides of this whole thing. What's going on in
your life that you're such a Hans fan? What do
you think emotionally draws you towards him? What happened to
him is really kind of morally gross. It really is
kind of repugnant because he was accused of something that
he didn't do, and there's no way for him to
(20:41):
prove that he didn't do it other than all of
the circumstantial proof that's been marshalled on his behalf by
all sorts of grandmasters in the wake of this little calamity,
you feel really sure that he didn't cheat. Yeah, he
did not cheat. The interesting thing to me about these
stories is the pathos, the kind of like, you know,
the kind of internal mental anguish of this whole thing,
(21:02):
and the complexity and nuances of it. You know, there
were a lot of people who wondered about his mental
state when this whole Singfield Cup thing happened. You know,
do you have a support network? There was a Q
and A thing that happened at the Singfield Cup where
people got to type in their questions for Hans and
one of them was like, do you have people to
talk to? Because, like you can imagine, like he's just
(21:23):
this nineteen year old kid who's been accused of this
terrible thing by the most popular and most famous chess
player in the world. There are cheating scandals everywhere right now.
There's there's a cheating scandal in poker, there's a cheating
scandal in bridge. Like it feels like we're at a
moment when tech is threatening any kind of human interaction
(21:44):
that's big. That's a big bull statement you just made there,
My friend, that's what we do on the show. Yeah.
David Siegel is a reporter for The New York Times
and wrote he's the bad boy of chess, but did
he cheat? In The New York Times. David, thank you
so much. The story is great and it made me
interested in chess yet again. Thank you. It's a pleasure.
(22:08):
Thank you. People haven't cared this much about chess since
Bobby Fisher and he was fighting the Russians at the
height of the Cold War. The scandal's gotten people's attention
because we're afraid of smart people. Specifically, we're afraid that
they're using their smartness to do sneaky things for their
own advantage. Politicians, lawyers, podcasters. We assume they're using tricks
(22:33):
to run scams on the rest of us. So when
one of them gets caught or even accused, we feel vindicated.
We accuse others, even though we're all doing a little
cheating ourselves. We cheat a little in our taxes, we
exaggerate our resumes, we spell out oxyfenbutazone in words with friends,
and we do it because we assume everyone else's at
(23:02):
the end of the show, what's next for joel Stein.
Maybe he'll take a naver poke around online. Our show
today was produced by Kate mccaulliff, Mola Board and Nishev Bencutt.
It was edited by Robert Smith. Our engineer is Amanda
kay Wang and our executive producer is Katherine Giradol. And
(23:25):
our theme song was written and performed by Jonathan Colton.
And a special thanks to my voice coach Vicky Merrick
and my consulting producer laurenz Elasnick. To find more Pushkin podcast,
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you
listen to your podcasts. I'm Joel Stein and the story
of the week speaks for itself. So the craziest part
(23:48):
for me was at the sink Field Cup in Saint Louis.
There are Hans Nieman groupies there exactly. So this was,
you know, the backlash to the backlash I guess is
that a group of women showed up in matching cocktail
dresses and sunglasses, all bearing signs and said, you know,
we love Hans of his accent, we love his hair,
(24:11):
that sort of thing. Yeah, supporting them. They look like
the women from the Robert Palmer video, like the red
lipstick and the black hair and the black dresses, and
it just seems like this doesn't happen in chess, right,
never has happened before. In fact that when they interviewed
Nieman yet again for I think a third sit down
interview at the Sinkfield Cup, he said, look, this is
(24:33):
all very terrible and strange, but at least for the
first time in history, there are fangirls showing up at
a chess tournament, which has to be you know, a first.
Coming up next week, Hawaii's Crazy War over Zombie Cats,
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