Hans Niemann sues World Champion Magnus Carlsen. Who is Hans Niemann? Mediocre chess player in my opinion. According to google search engine he is the most cited chess player with over 45 million search results compared to Magnus who has just over 10 million.
Why do I doubt that Niemann is not so good at chess as he appears? First of all, he was never a champion, not even once. He won some tournaments, but not any meaningful to the chess society. He is a guy who played some tournaments and quietly rose his rating. This summer out of the blue he was invited to play prestigious rapid chess tournament. The tournament was remembered, because he beat World Champion and created the chess meme. After that he was replacing Richard Rapport on the super tournament in Saint Louise. In this tournament he showed remarkable chess winning Magnus among others. Magnus quit the tournament after his loss to Niemann implying that Niemann was cheating. Carslen could not bring any evidence about the cheating however after some time Niemann sued him together with others (owners of www.chess.com and Hikaru Nakamura) accusing them of damaging his reputation. This unprecedented suing case has hit the news everywhere and looks like this is the reason why Niemann is the most popular chess player now on google. Immediately all so called chess data analysts were trying to prove that Niemann was cheating. They found some interesting data for example: ‘’Bobby Fischer’s peak rating is 2795 – he never got a 100% accurate game. Garry Kasparov’s peak rating is 2856 – he never got a 100% accurate game. Hans Niemann’s peak rating is 2699 – and he has had 10 games with 100% accuracy. One of those games was 42 consecutive perfect moves, and it was not a blowout type of game either. Doing that is pretty much impossible. Hans is 19 years old with 10 perfect games already, Magnus (peak rating 2882) is 31 and has had only 2 perfect games in his whole career. People that don’t think this is at least credible evidence are incredibly naive.’’
One of the biggest chess cheating data experts Kenneth Regan however could not find anything suspicious using his methodology. Let’s forgot the data analysts and suppose we can make some conclusions for ourselves. analyzing Niemann’s games. Can we find something human to prove that he was cheating. I am sure that most of the top players suspect that he was cheating, but they do not have any proof and statistical proof of course is not valid in court.
Let’s assume that he was cheating. We do not know how and this was mentioned also by Maxim Dlugy who was some time ago very close to Niemann, coach and mentor.