The cheating scandal that’s rocking the world of chess
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English Lesson number 513, the telephone area code for Cincinnati, Ohio. My first cell phone number ever started with 513, back when I lived in Ohio. That was a long time ago.
JR is in Chicago, he’s the producer, and he has uploaded this full lesson to PlainEnglish.com/513.
Coming up today: the world’s number one chess player lost to a player ranked fortieth in the world. And then the champion, Magnus Carlsen, accused that other player of cheating. The allegation has divided the chess world in two.
In the second half of the lesson, we’ll talk about the English expression “stop short of” and we have a song of the week. Let’s make our first move now.
Cheating allegation rocks competitive chess
The International Chess Federation, or FIDE, for its French initials, is the world’s governing body of chess. It’s like FIFA, only for chess. The Federation awards titles and rankings to chess players. Grandmaster is the highest title; there are about 1,700 grandmasters in the world. Russia has 256 grandmasters; the United States is a distant second with 101; Germany, in third place, has 96.
The world’s number-one player is Magnus Carlsen. He’s Norwegian and 31 years old. He has a mop of wavy dark hair and even in candid photographs, he looks like he’s in deep concentration.
He has been the world’s number-one ranked chess player since 2011. He reached the highest rating of any chess player in history, besting Gary Kasparov’s highest career rating. He’s won the World Chess Championships five times, including in 2021, the most recent tournament. And if that’s not enough, he’s also a champion of rapid chess and blitz chess, which place time constraints on every move.
But Magnus Carlsen is now in the news for something other than his play: he has accused a 19-year-old American player of cheating.
The controversy started at the Sinquefield Cup in St. Louis, Missouri, this September. At that tournament, Hans Niemann, the American teenager currently ranked fortieth in the world, beat Carlsen in a shocking upset. Carlsen had won 53 consecutive games; the world champion then lost to a player considered far inferior.
Even after losing that game, Carlsen was still in the tournament. There were six rounds to go . But he withdrew from the Sinquefield Cup. And on Twitter, he released a cryptic quote from a soccer coach, which said, “If I speak, I am in trouble.” Many people considered that tweet to be a veiled accusation that Hans Niemann had cheated.
The two met again in an online tournament later that same month. The game started and each made his first move. But then Carlsen withdrew from the game after his opening move. It was a public repudiation of his opponent.
After withdrawing from that one game, Carlsen went on to win that tournament. But he made veiled references to cheating in the game of chess, saying that “cheating should be dealt with seriously.” Again, he stopped short of directly accusing Niemann of cheating, but there was no doubt about what he meant to say.
Days later, however, Carlsen released a lengthy statement that did outright accuse Niemann of cheating. The statement said that Niemann has made suspiciously fast progress in recent years. Carlsen said that during the match he lost, Niemann didn’t even appear to be concentrating during key moments of the game. And he said that Niemann had outplayed him—Carlsen—in a way that only a handful of players in the game could do.
There was one thing conspicuously missing from the statement, however: any evidence. The statement didn’t suggest how Niemann might have cheated. The only concrete thing in the statement was a reference to Niemann’s past. You see, Niemann has admitted to cheating at chess before, when he was 12 and when he was 16. Both times were online. He admitted the mistake and said he had never cheated at over-the-board chess.
Cheating at chess can take a few forms. Some of them might be familiar to anyone who has cheated on a test in school. At the 2006 World Chess Championship, one player accused another of taking suspiciously long bathroom breaks. Chess championships are closely monitored with cameras and microphones, but the players’ private bathrooms were not monitored at all . After that, tournament organizers agreed that bathrooms should be shared among all players.
In 2013, Bulgarian Boris Ivanov was accused of using a cheating device in his shoe. His opponents believed a computer was hard-wired into his shoe, and that he moved his toes to program the moves in Morse code, receiving back clues about which moves to make next. He was seen limping around the tournament, something his opponents thought was proof that he couldn’t walk on his toes because of the computer.
At that tournament, one of his opponents took off his own shoes and socks, challenging Ivanov to do the same. Ivanov refused to take off his shoes, saying his socks were smelly. He was disqualified. At a later tournament, Ivanov did take off his shoes…but he had a bulge in his back and refused to be body searched. He was stripped of his chess ranking.
Chess tournaments are broadcast on television, so it would be possible for someone watching on television to transmit information, illegally, to the player. This has happened in poker before. Chess tournaments are broadcast with a delay, so any clues wouldn’t be in real time. Still, a high-ranking chess player doesn’t need to be told what to do on every move. Even a single clue at a key juncture could make the difference between victory and defeat.
The FIDE, chess’s governing body, has launched an investigation into the cheating allegations. So far , there’s no evidence that Hans Niemann has cheated. Niemann has even offered to play Carlsen naked to prove he’s honest.
Could you get that out of your head?
This is tricky. I definitely think Niemann should be considered innocent until proven guilty. I don’t think Carlsen’s mysterious statements were helpful at all. The long accusation had no evidence; it was just Carlsen’s own intuition. It seems pretty flimsy.
But imagine being a top chess player and you suspect your opponent is cheating. You could never get that out of your head. You could never concentrate on the game enough if you thought the other person could just beat you with computer assistance.
In chess, the same powers that let a person cheat can also discover cheating. Every move in a tournament can be analyzed. Artificial intelligence can discover when someone is cheating at online chess, by comparing each move to the player’s expected move based on the player’s history. And you can bet future tournaments will have even more sensors and safeguards.
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