How did Hans Norman’s cheating scheme work, and hot was he found out?
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Consulting chess engines while playing online. There is no proof that he has cheated “over the board” at this time. Hence the speculation and controversy.
It’s entirely speculation at this point. He won a match against arguably the best player in the world, and the loser quit the tournament and insinuated cheating took place. Everything outside of that is speculation built on rumors. Hans hasn’t been accused by the tournament organizers, and no evidence has been provided.
There are basically two separate accusations:
1. Hans cheated during online matches; and
2. Hans cheated during in-person matches.
Basically, there is no “caught-in-the-act” evidence for either, so no one knows how his cheating scheme worked for sure, or whether he even cheated at all.
As for the online accusations, the website on which he played (chess.com) kept logs of what his mouse and browser were doing during his matches. They found out that, just before all of his most brilliant moves during the most crucial times in his matches, he switched over to another tab in his browser.
They also viewed his stream footage on Twitch, and noticed during those exact times they saw the tab-switching in their logs, they could see his screen changing color, confirming that he was switching to another program or tab in his browser. Again, it is unknown what that program was, but he would only switch to it during crucial and difficult times in his matches, and then immediately afterwards, he would play a suspiciously brilliant move.
chess.com noted that this had happened with Hans Niemann’s chess.com account in more than 100 games, some of which were during online tournaments with prize money offered to the winners.
Again, we can’t say what happened *for sure*. Maybe his tab-switching just before brilliant moves is just a coincidence, or a nervous tic he has, or some kind of superstition he partakes in to gain confidence. We also don’t know what tab he was switching to. If he *were* to cheat, there are many programs out there that will let you input a chess position and it will tell you the best move to play in that position. But we don’t know if that’s what he was switching to — maybe he was just looking at a picture of his family to give him motivation or something, which would not be considered cheating.
It is all very odd behavior, behavior not seen by most other players, and behavior almost always seen with online cheaters. But since we don’t know what he was looking at, we cannot say with 100% certainty if he was cheating, or how he was cheating if he was cheating at all.
It should also be noted that Hans actually has confessed to cheating in the past in this exact way (using a program to tell him the best move), but he says it was only a couple of times when he was very young, not the over 100 times chess.com suspects him for.
As for accusations of cheating in-person, it is basically the same. The accusations are that he has suddenly been playing suspiciously well, supposedly rising in skill more rapidly than any other non-cheating chess player in history. Of course, this happens from time to time when new legends are born, but it is rare. Also, he has this strange history on chess.com. Also, he supposedly seems to be very relaxed during his games and not thinking very hard about his moves at all.
But that is all just suspicion. Maybe he is just a genius who does not need to try hard to beat the world chess champion; of course that is rare but possible. It is possible that perhaps he could have hid a device in his shoe connected remotely to a computer which would vibrate in a specific pattern to communicate the best move to play. But his shoes were not inspected before nor after the match, so we can’t confirm nor deny the presence of such a device.
It is certain that he cheated playing online, he confessed to it. However, many people consider online chess as a video game and not a serious matter.
Hans also happened to grow as a player during the same time, and his growth looks amazing due to many reasons such as the pandemic. His sudden improved strength led to people thinking he has cheated in board chess competitions as well, since he has cheated online before.
When the World Champion lost to him, he got paranoid and couldn’t believe he lost to the weakest player, which added on to the previous suspicion that Hans could be cheating he had earlier. Hence he withdrew from the tournament and basically accused him of cheating.
As of now despite people trying very hard, no one has found any evidence of him cheating when playing the world champion and other board competitions. Most credible people believe he didn’t cheat against the world champion, and most likely never cheated at all in real competitions.
However, the world champion has many fans and is a business partner with a big online chess company, all who want to protect his image. His fans will never accept that he lost to Hans fairly and was wrong in making false accusations. Add to the fact that many of the chess community plays chess online and encountered a lot of cheating, and some of them will love to see an online cheater burn. So Hans is getting plenty of heat for that despite there being zero evidence of cheating.
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