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Chess Brat
A year after an outrageous scandal, the grandmaster Hans Niemann has been kinda-sorta vindicated. So how is he more disliked than ever?
Photo: Devin Oktar Yalkin
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On the second day of this year’s Grenke Chess Open, Europe’s largest tournament, the 20-year-old grandmaster Hans Niemann woke before dawn with a stabbing pain in both ears. The trouble had started on the flight to Germany, when Niemann, who is the 46th-best player in chess and its most reviled villain, got extreme vertigo and vomited. “Screaming in agony,” he later told me, he went to two hospitals but found the staff at both places rude and unwilling to treat him before a 9 a.m. match. Niemann went to the tournament chess hall and, ears throbbing, beat two weaker opponents before getting ahold of some antibiotics. By the end of the competition, Niemann had been diagnosed with a double middle-ear infection, lost zero games, won first place, and received a check for €20,000.
“Over the past few years, I’ve played a lot of games under extreme stress and obviously not being entirely focused,” Niemann told me on a video call in early April as he was recovering at home in London. The American looked pale and tired with messy curls casting shadows over his gray eyes, blue-black circles beneath them like bruises. “I’ve become accustomed to performing under duress, when all the odds are stacked against me.”
Niemann has been a pariah since the fall of 2022, when Magnus Carlsen, the world’s No. 1 player, accused him of cheating. Now, if Niemann plays poorly, his rivals take it as proof he’s a fraud; if he plays brilliantly, it only fuels their suspicions that he is somehow relying on AI. He is effectively blacklisted from most of the best tournaments. Even the Grenke win was tainted. The tournament has two tiers: an invitation-only draw for the world’s most elite players and the Open for amateurs. Passed over for the former, Niemann had to hassle the organizers to be accepted into the latter, wiring them €100 just to get them to respond to his emails and process his registration.
“I certainly have much grander plans for vindication than one tournament,” Niemann said, smirking and swiveling in a high-backed gaming chair. His idol is Bobby Fischer, the only American to ever become world champion, and Niemann has set the same goal for himself. On YouTube, where he publishes regular video installments about his quest, he recently predicted that he would win the crown exactly 301 days later. “I’ve already manifested it,” he says in the video. “That’s me, prophesizing in my usual insanity.” At the same time, Niemann realizes how severely the cheating scandal has complicated his dream. “I don’t think that anyone can debate that my life, by objective metrics, has been destroyed,” he told me, glancing down from the camera, his voice seething.
The crisis began in St. Louis at the 2022 Sinquefield Cup, a ten-player round-robin that is one of the most prestigious tournaments in America. Niemann was competing for the first time, and in the third round he paired with Carlsen. The 33-year-old Norwegian has been ranked No. 1 for more than a dozen years, a run that includes an unprecedented winning streak of 125 games, and he is widely considered to be the greatest player in the history of the game. In St. Louis, Niemann shocked everyone by establishing an early edge and by doing so with the black pieces, which is usually a disadvantage. Carlsen stared at the board, shifting his chin and forehead between his palms, as though his brain had grown too heavy for his neck. Niemann was chewing gum and looked bored.
The two were in a secure, isolated room. The only other people present were Al Lawrence, the managing director of the U.S. Chess Trust, and a few individuals working for the tournament, including the renowned chess photographer Lennart Ootes. Toward the end of the game, Carlsen got up, approached Ootes, and accused him of aiding Niemann, saying there was a “massive tell.” It was a startling breach of decorum with zero evidence to support the charge. “You might as well accuse the tournament director of cheating,” says Lawrence. (When I asked Carlsen to clarify his suspicions, his father, Henrik, replied with a series of insult-laden emails. “You have obviously learned very little,” he wrote. “I call bullshit on you. Case closed. Do not contact us again.”) Carlsen sat down again and, after 57 moves, resigned the game.
The next day, Carlsen withdrew from the tournament and heavily insinuated to his more than 1 million followers on social media that Niemann had rigged the game. This was by far the most exciting thing to happen in chess in years, and the absence of information — including from Niemann, who seemed unable to explain the thinking behind some of the moves he’d made — allowed wild theories to flourish. An influential grandmaster and streamer mused about whether Niemann could have used electronic anal beads, vibrating with the recommendations of an artificially intelligent chess engine. It was a joke, but it still went viral, especially after Elon Musk weighed in by paraphrasing Schopenhauer: “Talent hits a target no one else can hit, genius hits a target no one can see (cause it’s in ur butt).”
Attempting to quell the speculation, Niemann gave an interview and confessed to some past sins, acknowledging that he had cheated online when he was 12 and 16 years old. He explained that a friend had come over with an iPad and fed him moves from a chess engine. “I just wanted to get higher rated so I could play stronger players,” he said. He swore he had not cheated since and never in person, in what are known as over-the-board games. “If they want me to strip fully naked, I’ll do it,” he added. “I don’t care because I know that I’m clean.” But few were inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. A month later, Chess.com, the game’s most popular platform, released a report saying that while there was no concrete evidence showing Niemann had ever cheated in over-the-board play, its algorithmic and statistical analysis said he had “likely cheated in more than 100 online chess games, including several prize money events.”
That was more than a year and a half ago, and Niemann is still widely regarded as a cheater. (Musk continues to tweet about the butt stuff.) Yet Niemann’s account has largely been corroborated by tournament officials and chess statisticians, who have found no indication he broke the rules at the Sinquefield Cup or any other live competition. Niemann brought a $100 million defamation lawsuit against Chess.com and Carlsen; they settled with him out of court, acknowledging that there was “no determinative evidence” that he had played dishonestly in over-the-board games. In December, FIDE, the top governing body in chess, concluded an investigation into the controversy that found nothing suspicious in Niemann’s play at any live tournament over the previous three years. FIDE also found Carlsen guilty of withdrawing from the Sinquefield Cup “without valid reason” and fined him €10,000.
There are three disciplines in which scientists believe prodigies exist: math, music, and chess. And from the point of view of Niemann’s earliest and most ardent supporters, his story is one of powerful people trying to crush one of the strongest players of his generation for mistakes he made as a child. “Hans is the hugest talent since Bobby Fischer,” says Shernaz Kennedy, who was Fischer’s friend and manager and who hired Niemann to teach at her chess school. “He doesn’t have to cheat. And he is going to be world champ. I’m telling you: Out of every kid I’ve taught for years, this guy has really got it.”
And yet talent may not be enough to rehabilitate Niemann. Long before the scandal, he was notorious for his volatile demeanor and widely disliked. He plays with the face of a bull preparing to charge: raw rage in his scowl, bug-eyed glare, nostrils flaring. Livestreams of his games often end with Niemann screaming and pounding his computer, making the speakers explode with feedback and the webcam tumble down in a blur of lights. In one video, a neighbor bangs angrily on his door, cursing him for the noise. In another, a live heart-rate monitor spikes to 163 beats per minute. “How. Am I. This! Fucking! Good?!” he once shrieked in staccato. “Holy shit! I am the fucking best!”
Niemann’s antics can sometimes seem like a performance. “I take pleasure in their pain,” he recently said of his opponents, sounding like a B-movie villain. “There are no friendships on the chessboard. It is a continuous, perpetual game of chess-until-death.” Niemann cultivates this unsympathetic persona even as it costs him allies who might otherwise grant him second chances and colors him as untrustworthy even when the facts appear to be on his side. In a game where parents often stay by their children’s side well into adulthood, Niemann is estranged from his family and largely alone. Niemann’s recent off-the-board behavior has alarmed many in the chess community, who note that Fischer was not just gifted but reclusive and mentally unwell. “Hans is an extremely troubled young man. It is clear he needs help, and we don’t mean with his chess,” says one top grandmaster. “No one wants to hurt him. No need to. Destroying himself is what he does best. Hans’s story is a tragedy.”
Hans Niemann in his prodigy days, as shared on his social media. Photo: hans_niemann/Instagram
When he was about 8 years old, Hans Niemann decided he was a “super-genius.” He was born in San Francisco and spent his early childhood in Laguna Beach, the eldest of four, but his father — a home builder — lost $10 million in the 2008 financial crisis and filed for bankruptcy. Hans’s mother worked for a European company, and they moved to the Netherlands for a fresh start, staying in a hostel for weeks. “Any form of normalcy” in his life stopped, he later said. After a year, he took an IQ test that could not measure his intelligence because its scale stopped at 145. “I became quite arrogant after that,” he told me. He enrolled at a gifted school, with mandatory chess classes, and was the best player by the time the Niemanns moved back to California in 2012.
In the Bay Area chess scene, Niemann was a skilled but irritating figure. There was a lot of foulmouthed shit-talking in a prepubescent pitch. “Chess kids are usually very deferential and shy. He was an outlier,” says another grandmaster, who knew Niemann at the time. “He was a bratty, bratty kid. He’s still very bratty.” Once, when the head of BayAreaChess told Niemann he was being too loud at a tournament, Niemann called him an asshole and was kicked out. (He sobbed an apology and was allowed back in.) But Niemann’s rating doubled to almost 2,000 in about a year, a jump more abrupt than some scouts had ever seen. (In general, beginners have scores under 1,000, and grandmasters are 2,500 and above.) “I didn’t know who he was, but I looked at the graph and it was just a very fast rise — like, abnormal,” says Greg Shahade, the founder of the U.S. Chess School. “There was a chance that this random kid is maybe some big talent.” Shahade invited Hans, age 10, to his annual camp in St. Louis. “It was like extreme pain every time he would lose a game. That happens to a lot of kids, but it was another level for him,” says Shahade. He didn’t necessarily see it as a bad thing: “I feel like when you hate losing that much, your chances of being great are a little higher.”
Unlike prodigies of previous generations, who honed their skills playing at local clubs and studied moves in books, Niemann grew up in the era of online chess and unbeatable engines. In 2005, two graduates of Brigham Young University founded Chess.com, which now hosts as many as 1 billion games per month. In 2008, a free app called Stockfish debuted with an AI engine that has evolved to be rated hundreds of points higher than any human. Novice players could play far more games against far stronger opponents than ever before. And in 2014, another resource, ChessBase, released a searchable archive of millions of games. At tournaments, players use it to cram in the minutes after pairings are announced. They scroll through their opponents’ historical moves and use AI engines to come up with optimal lines of play, often not coming to the board until precious time has slipped off their clocks. “These young kids are coming in late because they’re looking us up,” says Kennedy, who recalls losing at a tournament to a child who had studied her moves. “It’s like half an hour before your exam, your questions are online, so you know how to prepare.”
Niemann was better at it than most. When he was 11, he met Maxim Dlugy, a grandmaster and coach in New York, who would give him strategic sets of moves to play at tournaments. “He just executed perfectly. It was mind-blowing,” Dlugy says. But Niemann was more than a mimic. Whereas many developing players deploy canonical openings, like the Queen’s Gambit or the King’s Indian, Niemann added original twists, playing moves that had no names. In chess notation, they would be cited as !N, for novelty. “Just his ideas — these are old, old, old things that Capablanca and all these old-world champions would play to death, and he would come up with a new one that is his own signature,” says Kennedy. “He’s rethinking opening theory.”
In 2015, the Niemanns moved to Weston, Connecticut, so that Hans could play the more competitive New York scene. The prize purses he won at tournaments allowed him to buy things he could flaunt at the local high school: $500 LEGO sets, iPads, collectible Nikes. In his junior year, he won a scholarship to Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School, which had one of the best scholastic chess programs in the country. At 16, he moved out of the family home and to the city by himself — “practically emancipated,” he later said. He rented a small $1,500 apartment on the Upper West Side with no kitchen or stove, just a fridge with a microwave and hot pot stacked on top. “Managing everything was quite difficult,” he told me. He saw his family occasionally. He taught chess for $200 per lesson, ate “as much as I could” from the school’s buffet, and picked up $5 Subway heros for dinner.
Playing against legends at New York’s Marshall Chess Club, Niemann’s mind seemed to work differently from his competitors — specifically, more like AI. Chess engines are able to recommend ideal moves by peering deeply into multiple futures. But why they are ideal may not be apparent to humans until a handful of turns later. “A lot of players don’t feel comfortable when they have to take it down the line, but Hans seems to be comfortable,” says Bruce Pandolfini, a famed New York chess teacher portrayed by Ben Kingsley in the 1993 film Searching for Bobby Fischer. “I’m not sure that Hans himself can describe it. He just does it naturally. In that sense, it’s intuitive; it’s more aesthetic and artistic.” Recently, he saw Niemann move his knight in a way that was “so counterintuitive it seems to go against all that chess theory teaches us to do,” yet it worked out brilliantly. “Hans could not have seen that in a crystal-clear way,” Pandolfini says. “There would have been a cloudiness to it, but he would have felt at home in that cloudiness.”
Shahade, who watched Niemann’s game develop at his camp for years, agrees that there is something uncanny about his style. “He had a weird way of thinking about chess,” he says. Niemann would often play the right move but be unable to articulate it, or he would outline a strategy that sounded like nonsense. Shahade didn’t dwell on it. “He was so confident, so quick. It was a style I just don’t see very often when playing other people. He just kind of put the pieces in the right squares very quickly,” he says. “The thing I know is he is good. The moves show he understands something.”
Even as chess technology raced ahead, the culture of the game remained conservative and gentlemanly. Skilled or not, Niemann acted like a jerk. As a teenager at the U.S. Chess School camp, he belittled 8- and 9-year-olds mercilessly. Niemann was the opponent other young students hated playing the most, says Pandolfini. “Not only is he incredibly good, he has this very intimidating, fearless style. They used to call it ‘Fischer fear.’ He manifests bellicosity or belligerence at the board, and that just wears people down.”
When COVID shut down Columbia Prep and the tournament circuit in early 2020, Niemann quarantined with internet chess. He rocketed up the online rankings and streamed games on Twitch, where his bullying style drew followers and generated a modest income. Later that year, when over-the-board play resumed, he flew to Europe and surprised competitors by playing well above his old level. He became a grand-master in January 2021 at age 17.
He spent six months abroad, and when he returned he started giving interviews in a strange new voice — an intonation that’s hard to place but sounds vaguely Soviet. Childhood acquaintances say they’d never heard it before. “He doesn’t have an accent at all. He just puts that persona on,” says Vincent Baker, a high-school opponent. “That’s not how he talked when he was playing with us.” Grandmaster status may have gone to Niemann’s head. He filmed himself in Washington Square Park refusing an invitation to play in a charity tournament because the organizers, contrary to tradition, would not comp his $5 fee. “Grandmasters don’t pay entry fee,” Niemann says in the video. “I’m sorry, but, like, I’m not gonna hear your charity bullshit. Like, Hello!”
Being searched before the 2022 U.S. Chess Championship.
Photo: STLChessClub/YouTube
Just as the pandemic was a boon to online chess, it was also a time of unprecedented chess cheating: Everyone was playing in their rooms, alone. By the summer of 2020, Chess.com was closing more than 500 accounts per day for violating its rules. The platform has a “fair play” division of more than 30 employees, who have tools to detect if a novice is suddenly using the Nimzo-Indian Defense or, more tellingly, if they are toggling back and forth between another browser window that might be running an AI engine.
In August 2020, Chess.com closed Niemann’s account for cheating. Danny Rensch, whose title at the company is chief chess officer, delivered the news to him over Zoom. Rensch was an unusually empathetic figure: A former chess prodigy himself, he’d grown up in an abusive Arizona cult, then battled drug and alcohol problems before becoming a father at 20. The call got emotional, and according to Chess.com, Niemann confessed, though he didn’t discuss the number of games he’d rigged or how he’d done it. Rensch gave him a second chance with a six-month probation to be followed by a clean account with a new screen name. “I worked hard to both advise you on this process and to protect you as much as I could,” Rensch later wrote. “I would do that again for you or any young player I deemed to have lost their way and wanted to choose a better path forward.”
Niemann’s ban was a poorly kept secret. In November 2020, he told Rensch that one of his Twitch followers had accused him of cheating during a livestream. “My entire chat started speculating,” he wrote. “Not even my closest friends have given me the benefit of the doubt.”
The grandmaster Awonder Liang played Niemann around this time, and Liang found that his awareness of the incident had wormed its way far into his head. “He played very quickly and confidently in a line that he didn’t know very well,” Liang recalls. (Lines — and variations — are known sets of moves, and the best players track which strategies their opponents have mastered.) “I remember thinking during the game that it was very suspicious. I was befuddled.” Niemann crushed him. But afterward, Liang analyzed the moves and found nothing out of the ordinary: “The main lesson I took from that is I shouldn’t let some rumors or what I hear about people affect me.”
In July 2021, Niemann won the U.S. Junior Championship, and the following summer he finally ascended to the same stage as the masters he had long idolized. He was invited to the FTX Crypto Cup in Miami, where top players mingled with insiders from Sam Bankman-Fried’s soon-to-be-infamous company. Niemann faced Magnus Carlsen in person for the first time. The format was a best-of-four-games bout of rapid chess in which each player has only 15 minutes on their clock. In the first game, Niemann beat the world champion with black. Analysts marveled at how one-sided the play had been, but Niemann, uncharacteristically, didn’t seem to revel in his success. He muttered just four words to a waiting interviewer: “Chess speaks for itself.”
Niemann went on to lose the Carlsen match as well as the rest of his matches at the tournament. Holed up alone in his hotel room, neighbors heard him screaming and banging on walls throughout the night. One morning, Niemann and other players gathered outside the hotel for a Puma promotional event in which a golf pro was juggling chess pieces. “Suddenly, Hans loses it completely,” says a person who was there. Niemann tried to use a golf club like a baseball bat to knock pieces out of the air; then he started pitching them into a brick wall as hard as he could.
“This was his first chance to play against the top players in the world — and he was butchering it,” says the person, who saw how Niemann’s collapse fueled suspicions among the game’s elite. “If they’re a 2,700-plus player, they all thought he was a cheater. Either he’s an absolute massive genius who has such limitations on other aspects that it’s just unheard of or he’s a cheater.”
That was the context in which Niemann headed to St. Louis a couple of weeks later for the Sinquefield Cup. But when Carlsen leveled his accusation that Niemann had cheated, it was so sensational that it obscured a basic question: How would Niemann have physically pulled it off?
It’s relatively simple to cheat at chess online, even while streaming, by using a hidden accomplice or a second screen to access an AI program. Cheating over-the-board is another story entirely. At high-level tournaments, players usually pass through metal detectors or other scans, and many competitions enforce a 15-minute delay on broadcasting to the public to prevent outsiders from suggesting moves to players in real time. Any safeguard can be defeated in theory, but cheating consistently over time without getting caught would seem to require an advanced level of spycraft. Yet Niemann’s reputation among his fellow players was so low that many of them truly believed he’d figured out a way to rig games in person. “Most people around Magnus actually tried to dissuade him from withdrawing from the tournament because they wanted to try to catch, rather than warn, Hans,” says one grandmaster.
The night that Carlsen withdrew from the Sinquefield competition, Chess.com emailed Niemann to say it was suspending his account and revoking his eligibility to play in an upcoming online tournament, the Chess.com Global Championship, with a $1 million prize. Carlsen kept antagonizing Niemann. The next time they played each other, an online match that was part of the Champions Chess Tour, Carlsen escalated the feud by logging off after a single move. He then put out a statement: “I believe that Niemann has cheated more — and more recently — than he has publicly admitted. His over the board progress has been unusual, and throughout our game in the Sinquefield Cup I had the impression that he wasn’t tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions, while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do.”
Carlsen also cast aspersions on Niemann’s former coach, Dlugy, and soon afterward Vice published private emails between Chess.com and Dlugy in which he confessed to cheating on two occasions. (Dlugy said that in the first case, he had unknowingly played moves from an engine that a student relayed during a lesson. He later said that in the second case, he was coerced into confessing because it was the only way to keep his account open.) When Chess.com issued its report saying that Niemann had “likely cheated in more than 100 online chess games,” the platform took pains to say it was not in Carlsen’s pocket, but there was no getting around the fact that Carlsen was the game’s most bankable star. Chess.com had recently signed a deal to acquire his app company, Play Magnus.
For many, the Chess.com report established that Niemann was a cheater, full stop. Days later, Niemann was attending a European tournament when chants erupted of “Jukse Hans” — Norwegian for “Cheater Hans.” Invitations to real-world tournaments evaporated. Niemann got a lawyer and sued Carlsen, Chess.com, and Hikaru Nakamura, a grandmaster and popular streamer who had amplified Carlsen’s version of events. When I spoke to Niemann recently, he said that he had an “undying and unwavering resolve” to prove his doubters wrong. “Unfortunately,” he said, “I’m going to be their biggest nightmare for the rest of their lives.”
His redemption tour has included first-place finishes and abysmal losses. Photo: GRENKEChess/YouTube
Around the same time that Niemann became a chess outcast, he fell out with his family. He declined to discuss that part of his life with me, but confidants say he hasn’t spoken with his father since. “I’ve urged him to think about that relationship. I said, at some point, ‘I think you should mend it,’” says Dlugy. “I know whatever happened was probably painful for some reason, but it’s always good to mend fences.”
Niemann spent the better part of a year in the chess wilderness, playing in mid-tier tournaments in places like Kazakhstan and the United Arab Emirates. Meanwhile, holes began to appear in Carlsen and Chess.com’s allegations. Kenneth W. Regan, the leading authority on identifying chess cheaters, who was cited in the Chess.com report, now says that he sees little or nothing to suggest Niemann played dishonestly in 45 of the games in question and that a further 23 games are only debatable. The number of games he’s confident involved cheating is 32. That’s still a lot, and Niemann has not helped matters by refusing to clarify (including to me) whether his claim of cheating only twice, at ages 12 and 16, meant two individual matches or two stretches of time. Regan considers Niemann a “marked man,” noting that it’s unusual to cheat on occasions several years apart. But fair-play detectors have been wrong before. Chess.com once erroneously closed the account of Alireza Firouzja, the 20-year-old grandmaster who is now ranked 16th in the world. The ban was overturned after further review. “Turns out he was just a genius,” Rensch said on a podcast.
Even some of the people Niemann is alleged to have cheated against aren’t sure he did. I spoke to one of them, who said, after reviewing the game in question, “There was no suspicious behavior, no suspicious moves, no suspicious time usage, et cetera. And lots of mistakes.” Separately, Niemann contacted him to promise he had not cheated. “I’m inclined to believe him,” the player said. “But believing him doesn’t mean I’m not leaving open the possibility that I’m wrong and he’s lying.”
It’s impossible to prove a negative, and there is still the chance that Niemann somehow arranged to get a subtle signal during over-the-board play. But even those who are convinced Niemann is bent are stumped about who could have been his partner in crime. Niemann once said self-deprecatingly on YouTube that he was thinking about installing a Ping-Pong robot in his apartment because he has “no friends.”
Niemann settled his lawsuit in August. He was allowed back on Chess.com, and while no monetary terms were disclosed, he acted in ways that made it look as though he’d won a considerable sum. Niemann bought a tuxedo, announced he was giving away a $10,000 scholarship, and gave several players the impression that he’d bought a penthouse in the heart of London. He sent Dlugy a photo of an £18,000 Rolex he said he was considering buying. The spending was conspicuous by the relatively modest standards of professional chess. “It’s almost like he’s trying to send a message: ‘I’m bound by a confidentiality agreement not to disclose what happened, but here’s my cigar,’” says Malcolm Pein, the organizer of the London Chess Classic, which Niemann attended late last year. (Niemann told me the flat is a six-month rental, and a recent picture shows what appears to be a $60 Timex Weekender on his wrist.)
In October, Niemann returned to St. Louis for the U.S. Chess Championship and what he hoped would be his triumphant return to chess. But according to people close to him, he was weighed down by the fact that his mother’s cancer, which she’d been fighting for years, had returned. He blew several key games, once blundering his queen directly into a trap. “I was throwing away first place, destroying my entire tournament, destroying my biggest opportunity after an entire year of zero opportunities,” he told me. “You know, you’re going to be emotional and upset.” In his hotel room, over the course of several days, he broke two TV remotes, an umbrella, and a lamp; loosened an ironing board from the wall; and shattered two picture frames, possibly piercing a sofa. When he checked out, he warned the front desk and tried to leave a credit-card number for the damages. “I basically was throwing a shoe at this sort of glass painting, then it was shattering the glass,” Niemann told me. “But come on — it’s a glass frame; how much does it cost to replace two glass frames? This 100-year-old couch — no offense to this hotel, but it’s not exactly high-class furniture.” He guessed it was “a maximum $500 of damages.” He later got an invoice for $5,000 and word that he’d been banned from the hotel.
The Saint Louis Chess Club, which also runs the Sinquefield Cup and other top competitions, announced that Niemann was not welcome at any of its 2024 events. (Niemann estimates that this alone could cost him $100,000 in income.) At the same time, a tournament arbiter moved to kick Niemann out of the U.S. Chess Federation altogether, filing an official ethics complaint against him. If found guilty, Niemann could become ineligible for all national tournaments.
“Only because it’s me do I get treated like some child that needs to be disciplined,” Niemann said. “I understand, of course, that I shouldn’t break things. But my private actions in a hotel room, where I’m acting out of anger, should have absolutely no bearing on my chess career.”
After St. Louis, Niemann flew to a tournament on the Isle of Man and booked a suite at an upscale hotel. At the bar, he waved around thousands of pounds and bought rounds for dozens of people, except for two players he labeled “rats.” Around 4 a.m., Niemann was seen walking the beachfront, yelling, “I’m the best! I’m the king of the world!”
In November, Niemann delivered a near-perfect performance to win the Tournament of Peace in Zagreb, with moves that were almost identical to what a computer would have recommended. “It is hard to fight 98 accuracy,” Ivan Sokolov, one of the grandmasters he defeated, complained on X. He added that the competition had no anti-cheating measures in place. But neither organizers nor Regan’s analysis found anything suspicious.
Tournament champions are typically guaranteed an invitation to the following year’s contest, but Krešimir Podravec, the secretary of the Zagreb chess federation, told me that he would likely not welcome Niemann back. “Cheater or not, he clearly has some mental problems,” Podravec wrote. When Niemann arrived, he had insisted on seeing the room Bobby Fischer had stayed in when he played the Tournament of Peace a half-century earlier. Podravec told him it wasn’t possible: An earthquake had recently reduced the hotel to rubble, and only a construction crew was allowed in. Podravec recalled that Niemann wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, saying, “I have money. I’ll pay the workers to let me in.” “What’s the point in continuing conversation with that kind of a person?” Podravec told me.
Zagreb was just one in a string of what an observer calls “borderline bipolar chess performances.” In January, Niemann stumbled his way through the Tata Steel Chess Tournament in the Netherlands. But he continued to excel in a format called blitz chess, in which players start with just a few minutes on their clocks and must make split-second decisions. Niemann has won Chess.com’s weekly tournament twice this year, which briefly put him at No. 2 on its global blitz rankings, just above Carlsen, with no suspicion of cheating. After his first win, he was ecstatic. He recorded a breathless video: “When you know that all of your hard work, all of your sacrifice, when everything just clicks and it all comes together — that’s what it feels like when you’ve been working and suffering for so long, and finally what you’ve been searching for, in this dark tunnel, you see a glimmer of light.”
Especially online, Niemann remains the brashest, most confrontational player in the game.
Photo: HansNiemannChess/YouTube
In March, Niemann came to New York for a few days to pack up his apartment and apply for a new passport, which he had lost. He asked Dlugy to be a witness to his identity at the post office. Niemann didn’t see his family during the visit, instead sending a moving truck full of his stuff to their home. “I prefer to live in America,” he said, “but I can’t justify it if I’m not really treated as an American chess player.”
As I spoke with many titled chess players, they often told me it was hard to separate their feelings about Niemann from their suspicions. He’d annoyed them with his hubris and relentless derision, particularly when they felt he hadn’t yet earned the right. He’d broken their code in numerous ways, and many preferred to just be rid of him. “He has this irreverent, bad-boy tone, saying ‘They ain’t shit,’ and it’s a tone that I think pissed off a lot of the top players. They’re like, ‘Yeah, I think this fucker’s cheating,’” says a grandmaster. “A lot of them didn’t really approach the situation objectively.”
Still, the controversies in which Niemann continues to find himself are largely of his own making. He didn’t have to cheat or confess to it publicly; he didn’t have to smash up a luxury hotel. Says another grandmaster’s manager, who is convinced Niemann is a fraud, “He is a decent but average player, but he is not a genius. This game is about genius, and genius is not something that can be forced or bought or even worked hard for. Hans is sadly like many, many other players who have dedicated their lives to a game that does not particularly love them. It can make you spend each night in your room screaming at a god who does not hear you.”
Meanwhile, the scandal has helped Chess.com thrive. “That whole thing put the chess world on the map again for the biggest chess boom that we’ve ever had,” CEO Erik Allebest said on a podcast earlier this year. General Atlantic, the private-equity firm, and Endeavor, the parent of sports and entertainment agency WME, have invested undisclosed amounts, and Allebest is talking about taking the company public.
Certainly the bad press has made Niemann much more famous than his rating alone would justify. That will likely continue: A24 is reportedly planning a movie about the scandal, Checkmate, based on a book proposal by Ben Mezrich, whose previous stories of underdogs taking on entrenched power became The Social Network and Dumb Money.
Niemann continues to cultivate a brand modeled after his idol, Fischer — a choice that overlooks how Fischer very likely went insane, was federally indicted for violating economic sanctions against Yugoslavia, and died in exile. “I accept and I encourage any further attacks on my career and life. Yes, yes,” Niemann told me. “By trying to destroy me, you know, someone who is so innocent, it only destroys themselves from within. So I hope that they continue. Because they’re just feeding the monster.”
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