Bengaluru: After their now-famed Sinquefield Cup game in 2022, Magnus Carlsen considered knocking on Hans Niemann’s door and asking: “What’s going on?” It’s one of the few, revealing bits of information in the Netflix documentary ‘Untold: Chess Mates’. Most of the 75-minute documentary on the cheating controversy that rocked the chess world is largely a rehash of what chess fans and followers already know – the accusations, lawsuit, and of course the inexplicably absurd anal beads.
Carlsen, world No1, five-time world champion and the most dominant chess player of the modern generation opens with – “I’ve sometimes found it a bit surprising that I’m the best in the world at something. I know I’m relatively bright, but I’m not a genius. I only know that when I sit down at the board, I’m better than the other guy.”
Then there’s Niemann – American Grandmaster, world top 20 player, filmed in his unkempt New York apartment and striding down Parisian streets, leaning into his chess villain image and vowing to be a “stone-cold killer”.
“I just cannot wait for Magnus, when he’s old and disheveled, and going further deep into his insanity and I’m going to be young, and improving, and he’s gonna have to watch it,” Niemann says.
Niemann was barely out of his teens when his life was upturned and his name made its way to headlines, late-night talk shows and bizarre anal bead discussions.
It all supposedly began when Niemann defeated Carlsen twice – in the FTX Crypto Cup in Miami and over the board in Round 5 of the Sinquefield Cup, where he was the lowest-ranked player in the field.
“I felt that I was not playing a human,” Carlsen says, referring to the young American’s precise moves with Black in a risky, obscure line, during their Sinquefield Cup game.
Carlsen caused a stir by withdrawing from the Sinquefield Cup after losing to the then teenaged Niemann. After pulling out, he tweeted a video of Jose Mourinho saying: “If I speak I’m in big trouble.” It was interpreted as him accusing Niemann of cheating. A meme on Twitch suggesting Niemann used anal beads to receive signals regarding the best moves during his over-the-board game against Carlsen, blew up and went viral.
The American went on to admit that he had cheated a couple of times in online games when he was younger, but swore he had never done it in any over the board game.
“If you are asking me how many games I cheated in online when I was 12 or 13, it was nine games,” Niemann says in the documentary “Around the age of 16, maybe 20 to 30…You make mistakes as a kid. That doesn’t mean that everything you do for the rest of your life should be discredited.”
Niemann was banned temporarily from Chess.com right after the Sinquefield episode. Chess.com and Carlsen were turning business partners around the same time as the controversy broke, with the platform acquiring the world No 1’s Play Magnus group. Niemann describes it as being caught in the “cross-hairs of some very powerful people”.
Even before they sat across from each other, Carlsen says he was disconcerted by Niemann. In the tournament opening ceremony, the American had declared that he was “ready to replace the world champion.”
“I know that I was way in my own head. I recognised that then and I recognise it now,” Carlsen says, pointing out that both in Miami and the Sinquefield Cup he felt that Niemann was “someone who had the ability to cheat”.
Chess.com’s 72-page report that followed the investigation they launched against Niemann, concluded that they found no incriminating evidence to suggest that he had cheated over the board. “In the end, it looked like we f****d up,” Chess.com’s Chief Chess Officer Danny Rensch, says.
Niemann filed a $100 million lawsuit alleging defamation and collusion, in which Carlsen and Chess.com were defendants.
It was eventually settled out of court. Carlsen throws up his hands and says he never wanted to settle, but was forced to because the “US legal system sucks and it’s pretty expensive.”
He expressed being let down by Chess.com – who he says led him to think that they had the “smoking gun” (evidence against Niemann cheating over the board)
“I felt pretty bad. I felt had been sort of gaslight by Danny and Chess.com into thinking that they had the evidence, which they really didn’t,” says Carlsen.
“That’s the sort of ace that I felt I had all the time.”
It’s been nearly four years since the Sinquefield Cup where the controversy first broke. Not a whole lot has changed. The mistrust and misgivings still linger, and the documentary pretty much leaves us where we were at earlier – wishing anal beads and chess didn’t end up in the same sentence.
