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- Chess champ Magnus Carlsen, 32, lost to 19-year-old Hans Niemann at the 2022 Sinquefield Cup, sparking Carlsen’s cheating claims.
- Niemann, who admitted to prior online cheating, faced a wild “anal beads” theory for his win that went viral.
- Niemann’s $100 million defamation lawsuit against Carlsen and Chess.com was dismissed, leading to a confidential settlement.
In September of 2022, Magnus Carlsen had won 53 consecutive classical chess matches.Then, he sat down across from Hans Niemann.
Carlsen, then 32 and a five-time World Championship, was widely considered the greatest player in the millennium-and-a-half history of the sport. The Norwegian had an Elo rating — a system that calculates a player’s relative skill level — no human being had ever reached.
Niemann was a 19-year old nobody from San Francisco. He hadn’t even been invited to the tournament — the prestigious Sinquefield Cup — which pitted him against Carlsen. He was just there as a last-minute replacement, but he was formidable.
When Carlsen tried to throw him off with an unconventional opening — the Fianchetto Variation, aimed at disrupting Niemann’s Nimzo-Indian defense — Niemann countered it perfectly. Carlsen started to lose ground and the kid kept winning, despite gazing around the hall spacily and chewing gum.
At move 42, Niemann’s knight escaped a bishop attack that only a handful of players in the world could have avoided. At move 48, he caught Carlsen in a rare error and capitalized. Piece by piece, the teenager was dismantling the greatest player alive.
After 57 moves, Magnus resigned and Niemman won. The stunned silence in the room said everything.
“A 2860 Elo against a 2650,” writes Ben Mezrich in his new book, “Checkmate: Genius, Lies, Ambition, and the Biggest Scandal in Chess” (Grand Central, out Tuesday). “White pieces against black. The number one player in the world against the fortieth. It couldn’t be real.”
Carlsen rose from the table and stalked out of the hall. He went straight to his father and, according to Mezrich, said, “This guy was cheating.”
It wasn’t evidence so much as instinct — Niemann’s near-perfect play, the odd distraction, a 19-year-old who barely glanced at the board yet had an answer for everything. Carlsen couldn’t prove it, but he felt certain.
Niemann had a reputation as the bad boy of chess, known for profanity-laced interviews and a meteoric ratings rise that other grandmasters noted was statistically extraordinary.
Going into the match, the champion had concerns.
“Magnus heard rumors about cheating allegations,” Mezrich told The Post in an exclusive interview.
Those rumors had a foundation that the public couldn’t see. Chess.com, the dominant online platform valued at over $1 billion, had quietly suspended Niemann’s account for cheating in online games years earlier — something Niemann has publicly admitted and does not dispute — and had since monitored him closely. None of that suspension was on any public record. It lived in servers and internal reports, known to Chess.com‘s chief chess officer Danny Rensch and few others.
But Niemann has consistently denied cheating during in-person chess games, including the match against Carlsen. “I have never cheated in an over-the-board game,” he said in a press conference after his victory. He added that if anyone doubted him, he was willing to “strip fully naked” to prove it. Niemann did not respond to a request for comment.
Carlsen went on to win the tournament, but his loss to Niemann and the potential that the teen cheated lingered.
Within days, according to Mezrich’s reporting, an anonymous internet troll named Steve Smyth, who worked on the railways in Liverpool, began workshopping theories about how Niemann might’ve cheated. He and his fellow trolls on Reddit’s Anarchy Chess forum eventually landed on the idea of a hidden device, concealed somewhere on Niemann’s body, that would vibrate coded signals indicating the correct moves — a theory that was never proven and that Niemann has called “not a serious theory.”
But for Smyth, it was all about maximum impact. “Prostate massager” was the first idea, but the group agreed it was too clinical and too vague. Smyth arrived at something simpler, more visual and considerably funnier, and posted it to Twitter: “Currently obsessed with the notion that Hans Niemann has been cheating at the Sinquefield Cup chess tournament using wireless anal beads that vibrate him the correct moves.”
He posted it and watched it go nowhere overnight. But then a British newspaper picked it up. Then American outlets. Then Elon Musk retweeted it to 100 million followers, attributing a joke to the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “Talent hits a target no one else can hit, genius hits a target no one can see (cause it’s in ur butt).”
The theory that Niemann had cheated at the Sinquefield Cup using wirelessly connected anal beads that vibrated chess moves to him during the game was now major news.
“This hilarious internet troll in Liverpool just knew that anything involving the rectum could make this story international,” Mezrich siad. “Without the anal beads, I believe this story would’ve just disappeared.”
Chess.com eventually released a 72-page report on Niemann, which found that he’d likely cheated in more than 100 online games — identified using anti-cheating algorithms that flagged statistically improbable patterns in his move choices. In many of the online matches, prize money was up grabs. But the report couldn’t establish whether he’d cheated against Magnus over the board at the Sinquefield Cup.
Mezrich sees the question as unresolved. “There is no smoking gun, so based on the report alone, you can’t say that he cheated at the Sinquefield,” he told The Post. “He feels that’s exoneration, but it’s simply a failure to prove one way or another whether it happened.”
In October 2022, Niemann filed a $100 million lawsuit in the Eastern District of Missouri against Carlsen, Chess.com and streaming grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, alleging defamation and unlawful collusion — claiming the defendants had conspired to blacklist him from chess and rigged the Chess.com report to destroy his career. The lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge in June 2023. Two months later, all parties reached a confidential settlement, the financial terms of which were never disclosed. As part of that settlement, Niemann’s Chess.com account was fully reinstated.
“This is a story where there are multiple points of view about what actually happened, and it’s going to be up to people reading it to decide what truth they want to believe,” Mezrich said. “Everything is subjective.”
But while the lawsuit was working its way through the courts, Niemann’s life was getting uglier by the day. At one tournament, a fellow grandmaster picked up Niemann’s king piece mid-game, snapped the crown off and suggested they settle things in the bathroom. They met in the parking lot instead, but what emerged was less a fistfight than a confrontation between a young man who felt the entire chess world had turned against him and an opponent who seemed to agree that it should.
“You’re toxic,” the grandmaster told him. “Even if you’re clean now. You’re toxic.”
Niemann didn’t flinch. “Then stop breathing my air,” he said.
Another time, according to an addition to Niemann’s lawsuit, Norwegian grandmaster Aryan Tari — a close friend of Carlsen’s — rose at an international tournament’s closing ceremony in Austria and shouted “Jukse Hans,” Norwegian for “Cheater Hans.”
The crowd took up the chant, spilling into the village and filling the local pub, the taunt echoing through the rafters. Death threats arrived by the hundreds on social media.
The book ends at Chess.com’s Speed Chess Championship in Paris in September 2024, where Magnus, still ranked number 1 in the world, and Niemann, ranked in the teens, faced each other over computer screens for the first time since the Sinquefield Cup. Magnus beat him efficiently.
Freshly defeated, the young man walked out of the Paris arena and down the Rue de Rivoli, past the glowing glass pyramid of the Louvre. “Full speed into the delusion,” Mezrich writes, “full speed into the darkness, full speed into — whatever — came — next.”
Then, the book’s focus shifts. A man named Noland Arbaugh, who eight years earlier had been left unable to move from the shoulders down after a swimming accident, rolls into the arena in a wheelchair. Arbaugh had volunteered to be the first human being to receive a Neuralink brain chip, the device developed by Elon Musk that creates a direct connection between a person’s brain and a computer.
By concentrating his thoughts, without touching a keyboard or a mouse or a screen, Arbaugh moves a chess piece. The crowd cheers. Magnus watches and understands exactly what he’s seeing.
“The Neuralink chip in Noland’s head didn’t really need Noland at all,” Mezrich writes. “One day, that chip alone would be able to move the pieces on the chessboard. One day, that chip alone would be able to beat Magnus as firmly as Magnus had destroyed Hans.”
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