![]() ![]() Like bicycles and pet adoption, chess soared in popularity with the onset of the pandemic and the Netflix hit “The Queen’s Gambit.” Since the start of 2020, daily user figures have quintupled to five million at, and memberships have tripled to 94 million, according to the platform. It was the bizarro start of a ruckus that is still rattling the echo chamber of podcasts, Twitch streams and YouTube channels devoted to chess. With the internet filled with theories that he’d used a sex toy rigged to receive signals from a confederate, he was ready to take dramatic measures to prove his innocence. He had never, he stated emphatically, cheated in a live match. But he had learned his lesson and toiled for redemption. Yes, he had confessed to cheating on, the largest online playing platform, once when he was 12 and again at 16, to expand his online following and compete against better players. Niemann sat for a post-match interview with a Sinquefield commentator two days later, he was livid. Niemann was getting help from some kind of electronic device, secreted on, or maybe in, his body.īy the time that Mr. The cheating implication was so obvious that Sinquefield organizers quickly added a 15-minute delay to the online broadcast of games and players were checked with a radio frequency scanner. He announced in a tweet that he was quitting the Cup and appended a video clip of a well-known professional soccer coach saying, “If I speak, I am in big trouble.” ![]() ![]() Instead, he accused his opponent of cheating, though he didn’t say so outright. Carlsen did not take this setback quietly. Niemann occurred at the Sinquefield Cup, a prestigious round robin tournament in St. Carlsen went on to win five world championships as well as mainstream celebrity, including a stint as a spokesmodel for the fashion brand G-Star Raw. Niemann defeated Magnus Carlsen, an even-tempered, 32-year-old Norwegian who had become a grandmaster at 13, earning him the nickname “the Mozart of chess.” Mr. Niemann brushed off all advice, predicting he’d soon play at such an exceptional level that he’d get invited to tournaments no matter how boorishly he behaved. “I tried to talk to him about it,” said Jacob Aagaard, a Danish grandmaster who has taught Mr. Like that time in June, when he’d lost in the finals of a tournament in Prague, then stood in the ballroom of the hotel where the event was held and ranted against the city and the accommodations. The day before he beat the greatest chess player in the world, Hans Niemann was a curly-haired 19-year-old American known only to serious fans of the game and mostly as an abrasive jerk. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. ![]()
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