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Chess Grandmaster Hans Niemann, 19, studies the board during a match against Grandmaster Christopher Yoo, 15, at the U.S. Chess Championship in St. Louis last week. Niemann is at the center of an alleged cheating scandal that has rocked the chess world.
Remember the good old days when sports cheating involved actual sports, like baseball, and all it took was for a member of the 1919 Chicago Black Sox to pretend to drop a pop fly?
Sports-cheating scandals today are more complicated, afflicting high-dollar “sports” that you do sitting, and potentially involving tools like radio transmitters and artificial intelligence. Recent cheating scandals in competitive chess, professional poker and tournament fishing demonstrate, once again, that American ingenuity knows no bounds.
First, chess, because it’s close to home. St. Louis is the chess capital of the U.S. and a major presence in world competition — which has put the city at the center of a global scandal that could only happen today.
Once upon a time, significant cheating in chess competitions would have been practically impossible. But today, computer chess programs can beat any human, and data can be covertly transmitted in all sorts of ways. Even at an in-person tournament with an audience, a player working with a partner and the right technology could, in theory, secretly receive virtual assistance to determine the best moves.
At St. Louis’ prestigious Sinquefield Cup chess tournament last month, reigning five-time World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway — among the best ever to play the game — was beaten by a lower-ranked 19-year-old American named Hans Moke Niemann, shocking the chess world. The shock deepened when Carlsen suddenly dropped out of the tournament in what looked like a protest. Then event organizers quickly instituted new anti-cheating measures, including a 15-minute broadcast delay, scans for radio transmissions, and metal-detector wanding of players.
“You can almost hear that snap of the rubber glove before chess match cavity searches,” tweeted the ever-helpful Tesla billionaire Elon Musk. Indeed, Niemann, the American player, angrily pushed back on implications that he’d cheated with a hidden electronic receiver or something, and announced he’d be willing to dispel the rumors by playing chess naked. (Which I guess might qualify as yet another “sport”?)
There is still no solid evidence that Niemann cheated in St. Louis, but circumstantial evidence of previous cheating in online tournaments has grown to the point that he’s been banned from the world’s top online chess site, Chess.com. The site has produced a lengthy report, revealed by The Wall Street Journal last week, which analyzed Niemann’s play and concluded he likely received illegal assistance in more than 100 online chess games, many of them with money at stake. The report reached that conclusion in part by analyzing his “statistically extraordinary” level of improvement over a short time.
Even as the staid chess world was dealing with its cheating scandal, a similar one was roiling the not-so-staid world of professional poker.
In the old West, getting caught cheating at cards could put you on the business end of a rope. Today, it’s the business end of some nasty tweets. That was just part of the fallout from a high-stakes, live-streamed poker game at a California casino last month in which — again — a relative novice beat a top champion in a way that observers found unlikely.
The novice in this case, one Robbi Jade Lew, called the bet on a $269,000 pot in a game of Texas Hold ’Em, though she had only a jack-high. If you don’t know the game, suffice it to say, you don’t do that — unless you, um, somehow know, for sure, that the other players have even less than you do. When Lew won the pot with her unlikely play, opponent Garrett Adelstein, one of the world’s top players, fixed her with what she would later call a “death stare,” and it went downhill from there.
In a confrontation that was partly caught on camera and later played out on Twitter, Adelstein claimed he’d been “clearly cheated.” He speculated that Lew had been getting electronic signals from an accomplice viewing his cards on the live stream, though he admitted he had no evidence. Lew countered that she’d won only because she could “read” him — though she probably didn’t help her case when she gave him his money back after the game. The host casino is investigating.
In both scandals, the alleged perpetrators drew scrutiny not just because they won but because they won so audaciously. The same could be said of two competitive fishermen who, as fishermen are apt to do, engaged in some obvious exaggeration.
Jacob Runyan and Chase Cominsky appeared to have won a recent Ohio fishing tournament and more than $28,000 in prizes for their haul of five walleye that weighed in at around 7 pounds each. Small problem: The modest-sized fish looked like they should have weighed about half that.
“We got weights in fish!” yelled a tournament official, who noticed the discrepancy and began cutting the fish open — and extracting egg-sized metal balls.
Had the cheaters added just enough weight to win by ounces instead of pounds, they might have gotten away with it. But we Americans like to Go All-In, Run the Board, Land the Big One. What we possess in ingenuity, we lack in subtlety.
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Kevin McDermott is a member of the Post-Dispatch Editorial Board.
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Chess Grandmaster Hans Niemann, 19, studies the board during a match against Grandmaster Christopher Yoo, 15, at the U.S. Chess Championship in St. Louis last week. Niemann is at the center of an alleged cheating scandal that has rocked the chess world.
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