Why Cheating in Chess is Like Steph Curry's Shot
Milking the last bit of content out of the Hans Niemann Controversy
Here is a quick recap for those that somehow follow me and don’t know about the Magnus Carlsen / Hans Niemann chess controversy.
Hans Niemann is a top US chess player.
Magnus Carlsen is the best chess player ever and defending World Champion.
In the Sinquefield Cup, a prestigious chess tournament, Hans Niemann defeated Magnus Carlsen soundly with black, an amazing accomplishment.
The next day Magnus Carlsen withdrew from the tournament unexpectedly. This was the first time in his professional career he’d done such a thing. His Twitter insinuated he suspected Hans of cheating, but he’d risk getting in trouble saying more.
Hikaru Nakamura, a top US chess player, and the most famous chess streamer, on his stream, noted Magnus thought Hans cheated and that he knew Hans had issues with cheating online in the past.
Chess.com, the top online chess company, banned Hans Niemann from their site and uninvited him from a big tournament after Magnus’ withdrawal.
Hans gave an interview at the Sinquefield Cup, admitted he’d cheated in the past online but never over the board and that Magnus, Hikaru, and Chess.com were impugning his honor.
Chess.com released a 72-page report detailing Hans’ cheating on their site, which was much more extensive than Hans stated. And while they couldn’t prove he cheated over the board, his performance for his age was atypical.
Magnus eventually released a statement saying he felt Hans’ performance against him was suspicious, and he didn’t want to play with someone who had cheated so much in the past.
Hans filed a $100 million lawsuit against Magnus, Hikaru, and Chess.com for ruining his career.
And, amidst all that, a Reddit post pointing out Hans could have cheated via anal beads wirelessly vibrating took over the internet.
Are we good? Let’s talk cheating in chess and tie it to basketball!
Chess is Solved
In 1997 IBM created a computer named Deep Blue designed to play chess. It defeated Gary Kasparov, the greatest chess player in the World at the time. Since that time, chess technology has improved to the degree where anyone’s cellphone would easily beat the best chess players in the world.
A case in point above is an image from my cell phone quickly analyzing a game from the recent US Championship (a tournament Hans Niemann competed in despite, somehow, claiming to have a ruined career). We’ll get back to that shortly.
There are two major chess avenues. The first is over-the-board chess. Two players sit across from each other and move pieces. Think, the Queen’s Gambit — if you haven’t seen it, definitely check it out.
The second is online chess. Two players, using a computer interface, play each other over the internet. This form of chess got very popular during the pandemic and was helped by players like Hikaru Nakamura streaming it on platforms like Twitch.
Cheating online is fairly easy, but paradoxically, it is easier to detect. A good basketball example is a study I often reference. Art Rondeau helped Allan Houston’s shooting in the 1999-2000 NBA season. Years later, he asked me to analyze it — check that out here. When he approached me, I noted it would be difficult to verify if he helped Allan’s performance. But, something “lucky” — for the data study, not Art — happened. Allan had reservations about Art and randomly would decide he didn’t need his help. As such, we got a large sample of games with Allan using Art’s coaching and without. And comparing the two statistically significant samples and using some straightforward statistics tests showed that, yes, Allan was dramatically better when Art coached him.
Allan being coached by Art is a lot like an online player randomly using a chess engine to “help” their play. When a player plays lots of games online, it is very easy to look for anomalies in their games. Also, sites like chess.com can keep track of if players toggle off their site, how long they spend on moves, and how much they move their mouse. And with a big enough sample size, they can say - yes, this player looks like they’re getting help! And because players play from the comfort of their homes, it isn’t hard to “smuggle” in a chess engine. As I noted, every cell phone with an internet connection has one.
Steph Curry’s Shot
Cheating over the board gets more difficult for obvious reasons. But here’s the kicker, for a good chess player, the bar for what cheating would help is super low.
Let’s pivot to basketball for a second. While something I routinely do is criticize how well a player shoots, that’s in the context of a team game. I’ll posit any player in the NBA would likely destroy most people at a game of HORSE. It is only because they are only given a few seconds to take a shot in an NBA game that they struggle.
John Starks is known for a horrible game 7 in the 1994 NBA Finals. But much rougher, in game 6, he almost had the game-winner for the series! But he was too close to Hakeem Olajuwon, who got the block. If only he’d known he was guarded!
Pretend we could give any NBA player a very simple bit of information at any given point. Let’s pretend they knew if they'd have time to get a shot off. Such a player might look amazing as they could shoot from anywhere, almost at will.
Mike Beouy made a fantastic infographic a few years back comparing the release team of some top NBA players. Check out Steph Curry’s! He has one of the most consistent and, more importantly, fastest shots in the NBA. I’ve noted that on many plays, it looks like Curry is guarded; he’s wide open. He knows his defender has no hope of closing out on him, and as a result, he takes his shot a lot and has become the most dominant shooter ever.
Let’s return to our graphic from earlier from the US Chess Championship.
On move 18, Ray Robson makes a blunder playing e5. The computer says if Jeffrey Xiong plays Ne4, he’ll have a major edge less than 20 moves into the game. That’d be like going into the second half, up 20 in the NBA. Jeffery doesn’t find it, and the game ends in a draw.
So when you think of cheating, you might imagine someone watching the game using a savvy computer and feeding Jeffery the correct move to play, possibly via some clever device, like morse code in a vibrating device. But it’s much simpler. If Jeffery could somehow know when his opponent made a mistake, he would know to look harder for a crushing move. And, the technology to detect such a thing has gotten very, very fast and very, very small.
Jeffery is a top chess player, he doesn’t need someone to walk him through every move. The top chess players have many of the first moves of the game memorized. But, if you could randomly tell them - “The computer says you’re winning here by a lot,” in a position that seemed normal? Well, that’s like giving Curry an extra half-second on the three-point line.
Over-the-board games take a lot of time. And as such, even heavy tournament players like Hans are limited in how many they can play. And, it isn’t outside the realm of possibility they’d find a good move, cheating or not. And, if you gave a player ranked 2600 such an edge? It might push them into the top 50 in the world. And, for what it’s worth, that’s what Chess.com’s 72-page report alleges by repeatedly noting Hans’ rise in performance is anomalous, to put it lightly.
Danny Rensch, a higher-up of Chess.com, finished off this analogy beautifully for me. He noted the Houston Astros cheating in baseball. As noted, a player getting information could know when to swing (or shoot in our Curry metaphor). But, the same player would be less likely to take big swings at unsafe pitches, safe in the knowledge they’d eventually get the correct go-ahead signal. A top chess player is the same. They can know to play safer and wait for the signal that their opponent messed up and spend more time thinking on the move.
So, over-the-board chess is hard to check for cheating because if it’s just one or two moves in a few games, with the player making sound moves most of the time? That’s very difficult to find.
Reminder Fans Like Sports
This article came about because my friend Ty was interested in cheating in chess, and it was funny to me to reflect on how low the bar for effectively cheating at the top level was. But, a note to leave you with. While there might be fear that cheating allegations could ruin chess? I don’t buy it. The Patriots won titles after Deflategate. The NBA kept trucking after one of their top refs was revealed to be fixing games. The Houston Astros are back in the World Series. The funny reality is Hans’ controversy has vaulted chess into the limelight, and as long as chess can keep producing entertaining games, it’ll be fine. But, any fan with utter certainty a player couldn’t have cheated, which many seem to allege about Hans, maybe a tad overconfident in their beliefs. But that’s nothing new for sports!
-Dre