Hans Niemann Teaches Magnus Carlsen the Way of the Rush.

 "Did I get 31 in 1 minute? I got 31 in 1 minute, I wasn't even paying attention..." - Hans Niemann

I was on the fourth live stream that week with Hans Niemann. He was trying to beat the Puzzle Rush world record. "I got 62, I'm not going to break the world record tonight folks!" And with that, Hans hastily ended the stream. He pinged me on DM afterwards, wanting to know how I found his show. I told him it was awesome as usual and that I'd be following the next day.

Hans Niemann is a precocious talent and is bursting with energy. When I got to know him he was a chess streamer and a very hardworking one at that. He would do a 6 hour stream, sign off to study chess then catch some sleep, all interspersed with school work. He was an IM and had ambitions to become a grandmaster but this was not his central focus.

On Facebook I had a community of 250,000 which he seemed mildly impressed with and he was interested in engaging with them.. I connected with his dad and did a tribute video for Hans, Lucas van Foreest and Casper Schoppen, who were the world's best at Puzzle Rush at the time.

The events of the last few days have got me thinking about those days when I was following the antics of Hans Niemann on Twitch. He was constantly working on his chess. He wasn't afraid of hard work. A good example of this was the fervor he had for learning Puzzle Rush patterns after chess.com had created a new database of puzzles, he mastered that one in less than a week and was posting world class scores again.

Magnus Carlsen underestimated Hans Niemann. That to me is clear. It would explain why he felt that a loss to Hans was too much to bear and that he would rather do the worst thing he has ever done in his career, withdraw from a tournament and make twitter posts leaving the door open to speculation that this chess junior was not behaving properly in some way. It was pretty horrific of Magnus to calculate that if he left the tournament before half way, Hans would lose his lead and Nepo would be gifted +1 score. It was utterly reprehensible.

The idea that Hans was cheating at Sinquefield Cup is straight up insane. Firstly, anyone who has actually been to the St Louis chess club would know it is virtually impossible for someone to smuggle something into the venue in the hope of using it successfully. Let alone have an interloper on the inside aiding you tacitly, as everyone is on top of each other in that tiny building.

Carlsen tweeted that he was withdrawing from the tournament after round 4 of the Sinquefield Cup after it had started. As if that wasn't enough, he posted a GIF of Jose Mourinho saying he couldn't speak because if he did he would be in big trouble.

Chess commentators had gone live without knowing what had happened and they all seemed stunned and bemused, then spent most of the first part of the broadcast speculating about what had happened. In some broadcasts they were telling us they wouldn't discuss what had happened but were discussing the things they weren't going to be speculating about! What a sorry affair. Magnus has been called all manner of names because of  his actions - conceited, entitled, arrogant, a prima-donna and much worse. 

The game began with Carlsen playing with the white pieces and entering what he thought was unfamiliar territory, the g3 Nimzo Indian. However, Hans explained clumsily in the post game interview that he had stumbled on the g3 Nimzo Indian variation before the game, and had seen Carlsen's horrendous move 13. Rfd1 was punished by 13...Be6! Hans said it was miraculous that he had seen all this before the game and he wanted Grandmaster Alejandro Ramirez and the online audience to believe that he had been able to predict a completely random opening chosen by Magnus Carlsen and not only that he had looked at the very line Magnus had played, but predicted that he would blunder and knew how to flawlessly respond to that blunder. This would be too much for the average chess fan to swallow, let alone the legions of Magnus Carlsen acolytes and sycophants. I'll be honest, it sounds very dodgy, as if he was making up a story and he didn't want to let us know he had a team of seconds working on every second rate variation of the major openings out there. Magnus Carlsen is known for his love of second rate opening lines and he is sometimes quite predictable in his choices. If one did a bit of analysis, you could identify lines which seemed Magnus friendly and set flagpoles all over the known opening theory. It sounds equally implausible until you remember that Hans Niemann has form for industrial scale memorisation. He did this for Puzzle Rush. He memorised up to 56,000 chess patterns for chess.com's first version of Puzzle Rush and for the second version, a further 100,000 plus a fresh  50,000 added  each week. That is a mammoth task, but one that Hans performed with relish and success. Since writing this blog. Hans Niemann has clarified this in a video interview with Grandmaster Alejandro Ramirez that he did in fact prep for Catalan transpositions and went through every single possible line that included the line Magnus Carlsen played that day. The full interview is here. Hans Niemann tells his story

Okay, so assuming you believe that Hans Niemann is basically like a human USB memory drive and can recall obscure opening moves at will. How in tarnations did he outplay Magnus Magnus Carlsen in the middlegame and play a virtuoso endgame against the Endgame Virtuoso? There is a chasm between getting a playable opening position or even a very good one and bossing it in the middlegame/endgame, which is exactly what Niemann did.

Another possible reason doing the rounds for Magnus Carlsen's swift departure from the tournament was that he suspected a member of his own team was leaking his prep to Hans Niemann. As ridiculous as this sounds, there are people that believe Magnus suspected Hans knew he was going to play the line that Magnus had prepared and somehow Magnus managed to lose anyway in his own prep with the white pieces, knowing that Hans would play down the line. 👀 Make of that what you will.

The Way of the Rush. A term I coined for Niemann's near maniacal devotion to assimilating chess patterns. I saw it first hand, for a joke he'd start a puzzle rush, recognise the pattern and playout the moves from memory without calculating a thing. He would also get into a pickle when he confidently began playing out a variation he thought was the solution to a particular puzzle, but found it was similar but not the right one and he would get a strike.

I don't believe Hans is cheating at the Sinquefield Cup. I don't think Hans Niemann would want to ever cheat at any chess activity because he loves it so much. The socials are full of allegations that Hans was banned a few times for cheating on chess.com then reinstated, but these allegations assume chess.com can flawlessly identify real cheaters and aren't using a flawed system as attested by the numbers of titled players who have similarly been banned for cheating and subsequently reinstated. However since writing this blog Hans Niemann has admitted that in two periods of his life when he cheated online on chess.com once when he was 12, in one session, should have known better and another more extended period time when he was 16 and tried to boost his rating in random games. He apologised for both and served the penalty and has issued a full apology now for erring in his youth. He confirmed that since then he has never cheated online and never OTB ever. The full interview is here. Hans Niemann tells his story

This brings us to Hikaru Nakamura, the self appointed chess sage who devoted several episodes of his YouTube show and Twitch streams talking about the matter. The essence of Hikaru's claim is that things are a bit "suspect". He said it was not Hans Niemann's moves in the games at Sinquefield Cup the were suspicious but the awkward and clumsy post mortem analysis with the ever probing Grandmaster Alejandro Ramirez. Hikaru kept shaking his head as he reacted to the video of Hans Niemann reeling off some "weird" variation to Alejandro, "this is not 2700 Elo analysis" he muttered. Apparently Hans was not analysing at the same standard or  level his  performances would indicate he was. Many ruled out Hikaru's rants as motivated by less than noble motives because Hans was an up and coming junior who was now taking Hikaru's spots at chess events and could be seen as his rival. It was also quite good content for Hikaru who needed to feed his online community with fresh chess drama on a regular basis.

In response to all the criticism, Hans Niemann's former chess trainer Jacob Aagaard posted a blog explaining how Hans was behaving consistently with what he knew about him. The over confidence in analysis, the clumsy suggestion of variations that didn't work in the post mortem with Grandmaster Alejandro Ramirez and the social awkwardness. 

Has there been any proof of cheating by Hans? No. Has there been anyone with any motives that might lead  Magnus Carlsen to leave a tournament which promotes Lichess.org the competitor to chess.com, a company who recently bought Magnus Carlsen and his Play Magnus Group? Maybe. The affair might be used to give Magnus Carlsen a reason to walk away from his Grand Chess Tour commitments for this leg of the tour and maybe for all of it. That might have eased negotiations with chess.com for the sale of Play Magnus for $84M. Dunno, it is just a speculation that Magnus would quit a contract with a bunch of chess.com competitors.to sweeten a deal, mere speculation.👀

In the meanwhile, chess.com, never ones to be shy of being front and centre of a good chess controversy, banned Hans Niemann for what looks like winning a game against Magnus Carlsen. He can no longer access his chess.com account and has been removed from chess.com Global Championship. This is extremely unfair and irrational from the world's most expensive chess website, chess.com. It reminds me of the time when Hans, Lucas and Casper we posting super high Puzzle Rush scores and chess.com banned them because the high scores broke their system, but later reinstated them as they realised their implementation of my puzzle game, Puzzle Rush, was sub-standard and the coding & puzzle database was too poor so had to be upgraded. Chess.com really do have a lot of soul searching to do.

Maybe after all is said and done, chess truth unlike chess drama really does speak for itself.