Chessgate: Grand Master Magnus Carlsen may have opened a can of worms when he refused to play with Hans Niemann

Grand Master Magnus Carlsen. (Image: Twitter/MagnusCarlsen)

Cheating in a sport is one thing. Deciphering morse code vibrations through a sex toy—anal beads—hidden in your nether region to counter the world’s best chess player is a Wes Anderson film (imagine Bill Murray as the cheating chess player with beads in his…you know where…subtly shifting facial muscles as he receives instructions).

Just in case you haven’t been following this story, here are the salient points of a drama that has been sending shockwaves through the chess world since September: On September 4, a 19-year-old chess sensation from the US, Hans Niemann, caused a major upset by defeating Norwegian world champion Magnus Carlsen in a prestigious tournament in St Louis. The next day, Carlsen made the unprecedented move of withdrawing from the tournament, followed by a cryptic tweet—a video of football manager Jose Mourinho saying “If I speak, I am in big trouble.”

Though of course he didn’t have to. Chess forums were immediately on fire with cheating allegations against Niemann, which led to a GM joking about the possible method of said cheating, saying that Niemann must have used vibrating anal beads to receive signals from his accomplice. Unfortunately, that’s the origin of the sex toy story, and there is zero evidence that this was indeed the modus operandi, though the idea is not fanciful—anyone cheating in over-the-board chess games will have to do it with the help of an accomplice who is feeding the game into a computer chess program or “engine” to get the best possible move, and then relaying that move through a coded message back to the player. An undetectable, wireless vibrating device hidden inside the body is perfect for such a scenario. Anyway, the chief arbiter of the St Louis tournament (Sinquefield Cup) put out a statement saying that there was no evidence that anyone in the tournament cheated.

Niemann gave an interview saying that yes, he had cheated in chess, but only a couple of times when he was younger, and only during online games (where it’s ridiculously easy to keep a chess engine running parallelly, say, on a phone app).

“If they want me to strip fully naked, I will do it. I don’t care. Because I know I am clean,” Niemann said. “You want me to play in a closed box with zero electronic transmission? I don’t care. I’m here to win, and that is my goal regardless.”

Yet, a few days later, Carlsen and Niemann were again in the limelight when the world champion resigned from an online game against the teenager after a single move. On September 26, Carlsen tweeted a statement talking about how he was concerned about cheating in chess, and that he believed that “Niemann has cheated more, and more recently, than he has publicly admitted”—a thinly veiled accusation that Niemann was cheating in St Louis.

My statement regarding the last few weeks. pic.twitter.com/KY34DbcjLo

— Magnus Carlsen (@MagnusCarlsen) September 26, 2022

It is almost impossible to definitely prove that there was cheating involved in the Niemann-Carlsen match in St Louis. The game’s governing body, FIDE, uses computer analysis of games to see if a player has made unusual moves by his or her recent standards, or has made too many “perfect” moves—basically the move that a chess engine would make in the same situation—during the course of a game. That’s about as far as the evidence can go.

But the incident has put a spotlight back on cheating in chess, and how rampant it may be ever since the global pandemic and lockdowns around the world led to a Big Bang level explosion of interest in online chess.

Cheating in chess is not new. There are multiple accounts of how the Viking king Canute the Great and his chieftain Earl Ulf had a fallout over accusations of unfair play during a chess game in the year 1026, resulting in Ulf being killed the next day on the king’s orders.

About a thousand years later, the Indian GM Umakant Sharma was caught using a Bluetooth device stitched inside a cap that he habitually wore during tournaments. An accomplice was relaying moves from a chess engine to him via the device. He was handed a 10-year ban.

Chess is merely as susceptible to cheating as any other sport. This month, a video surfaced of a furious altercation during a fishing competition in Cleveland, US, when it was found out that one team had stuffed the belly of their fish with lead balls. Don’t scoff at this—the two-member team would have won USD 30,000 if they came first—which they had, in three other tournaments in the area this year before they got caught.

Attitudes to cheating are also culture- and sport-specific. Get caught putting weights in fish, and you may never be able to show your face at another fishing tournament in the US. Get caught diving and feigning an injury on a football field, and it will make hardly a dent in your reputation as one of the best players to have ever played the game—think Neymar, or, Cristiano Ronaldo, who, a minute-by-minute analysis of every game during the 2010 World Cup showed, was the third most prolific faker of fouls.

Or, you could have uniquely nonsensical situations under the shadow of perceived “cheating” like the Indian cricketer Deepti Sharma running out the non-striker during India’s recent and historic series win in England. The so-called “Mankading” is a perfectly legal way of dismissing a batter, codified by the laws of cricket. Yet, many in the cricketing world, following a “gentlemanly” English tradition, consider it a moral outrage to employ this method of dismissal. Moral outrage can be, and often is, completely arbitrary, most certainly so in this case. A batter is not supposed to leave the crease till the ball is released by the bowler, or she/he risks being run out as per the law, since getting a head-start on a run before the ball is delivered is seen by the laws of the game as an “unfair practice”. Yet, listen to English cricketers past and present and it would seem like the opposite is true. “Gentlemanly” is a concept that belonged to the time when colonialism was seen as a civilizing force, slavery was legal, and white supremacy was unquestioned. Let’s not go there.

One thing is for sure. Deception is an integral part of being human. Moral outrage or not, cheating in sport can never go away. There have been some excellent studies in the field of psychology that shed light on this—cheating is incentivized by competition, and by the desire to win. Modern, professional sports is all about winning. How can you avoid this human drive to gain unfair advantages in a competitive environment, especially when you also have mind-bending monetary gains to be made from winning? Sports administrators know that morality is worthless here, which is why there is so much technology now to try and prevent it. VAR in football to check for handballs and diving, for example. Super slow motion, hi-definition cameras, audio programs and heat cameras to check everything from nicked edges to cleanly taken catches in cricket, the “gentleman’s game”. The rapidly advancing and strict anti-doping controls in most sports, trying forever to keep pace with the even more rapidly developing forms of doping.

Even in something like performance-enhancing drugs, which, on the surface, seems so universally morally condemnable, there is a case to be made. Social scientists have grappled with the question of why doping is considered an unfair advantage while the outlier genes that the truly once-in-a-lifetime athletes are gifted with—Usain Bolt or Michael Jordan or Michael Phelps—is not. Or why better training environments and budgets are not unfair to those athletes or nations that can’t match up. Just the fact that doping is so rampant, sometimes state-sponsored, and almost always happens with the knowledge of coaches and fellow athletes, despite the stringent repercussions—life bans, public outrage, loss of medals and sponsorships, etc.—reveals how deeply ingrained the incentive to cheat in sports is.

A fair playing field is something to aspire to, but without a dash of cheating, sports may lose the power of mimicking life.