Calls grow to suspend world champ Magnus Carlsen after he throws game against Hans Niemann, imputing cheating
September 20, 2022, 10:43 AM IST
Chidanand Rajghatta is The Times of India’s US-based Foreign Editor
Calls are growing for chess officialdom to suspend world champion Magnus Carlsen from tournament play after he forfeited a game on Monday against rising American star Hans Niemann, whom he has wordlessly, implicitly, and without proof accused of cheating. Some two weeks after a personal across-the-board clash at the Sinquefield Cup in St Louis Missouri, in which a Niemann win led Carlsen to quit the tournament, the two men met again in the virtual domain at the online JuliusBaerGenerationCup. While the chess world held its breath about how the game would go after the turbulent events in US, Carlsen, playing black, resigned after just one move. No words were spoken, but the imputation was clear. Carlsen believes Niemann is cheating and he does not want to play him. As at St Louis, the world champion offered no explanation for his action, behavior that is starting to anger other chess players and fans. “Magnus Carlsen is trying to end Hans Niemann ‘s career in a way that makes it impossible for HN to defend himself. The burden of proof must lie with the prosecution, otherwise the accused finds himself in a kafkaian nightmare, unfair and unescapable. This is simply not right,” one fan wrote on Twitter. Welsh Grandmaster Nigel Davies went further and suggested Carlsen should be suspended pending either: 1) A clear statement that he wasn’t making an accusation, or 2) Hard evidence of cheating actually having occurred. “Who’s got the balls to do it?” he asked.
Organisers of the tournament apparently don’t, because minutes after he threw the game against Niemann, Carlsen returned to play Armenian-American GM Levon Aronian, whom he defeated, and Indian teenage GM, Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa, with whom he drew. The world champion was in a graceful mood, applauding Pragg’s game and giving him a thumbs up after withstanding a tough attack by the Indian prodigy who has defeated him four times this year. But when it comes to Niemann, Carlsen has condemned him with stone-faced silence, leaving other chess surrogates to make insinuations and innuendoes. Aronian, for instance, said he understood Carlsen’s frustration, telling the website chess24, ” I do believe Hans has not been the cleanest person when it comes to online chess. But he’s a young guy, hopefully this will be a lesson to him not to do any bad things online. Generally, I think this is a problem that requires a solution – and there are solutions.”
Niemann has admitted cheating in online games when he was 12 and 16, but the 19-year old from San Francisco insists he has learned his lesson and has since been clean. Wild theories were bandied online following his win against Carlsen in St Louis, including the use of anal beads that vibrated to electronic cues to make the right moves. Organisers of the current tournament, where Indian teenage sensations Arjun Erigaisi and Praggnanandhaa are in the top two positions followed by Carlsen, say they have taken tough security measures to prevent cheating in a tournament that is played online and where personal monitoring is hard. To begin with, all players have to be alone in the room they are playing in and they have to share the screen. Players cannot leave their desk while they’re playing and organisers have cameras pointing from the back to the desk so that they can see the entire area that the players are playing from, and the sound has to be on. Arbiters follow each game either at home with the players or digitally. The players also have to show their ears into the arbiter cameras. “We have some of the best analytics tools that can do analysis after the rounds and also we have some elements in addition to this that we want to keep for ourselves so that we have tools that are not known to the world as well,” one organiser explained to chess24.
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