“If I started cheating, you would never know,” Magnus Carlsen, one of the greatest players in the sport, tells Joe Rogan on his podcast with a smirk.
It’s not just a throwaway line about cheating either. On a two-hour-long podcast, where he touches on mostly everything under the sun, Carlsen fixates on cheating in chess. He also details how a player of his calibre would need very little to cheat in chess.
“I would just get a move here and there (from an aide). Or maybe if I am playing in a tournament I just find a system where I get somebody to signal to me when there’s a critical moment: a certain moment where a certain move is much better than the others. That’s really all I would need to go from being the best to being practically unbeatable. There’s so little you need in chess (to cheat). It really is a scary situation,” Carlsen said before pointing out how in 2010 the captain of the French chess team was helping a teammate decide his next move at the Olympiad just by standing in specific spots around the table.
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The topic of cheating in chess is back in the headlines. More specifically, the infamous Magnus Carlsen versus Hans Niemann incident is back in the headlines after the World No.1 chose to reopen a three-year-old can of worms. After first exploding in 2022 — when Carlsen withdrew from the Sinquefield Cup tournament after a loss to Niemann before alleging that the American was cheating — the incident led to a $100 million lawsuit and an uneasy ceasefire. Every once in a while, some sparks of the feud would be reignited: when Carlsen faced Niemann in a game or when Niemann went on a rant about the Norwegian on his X handle. But they would die down soon enough.
But now, in one gasoline-soaked interview three years after the incident, Carlsen has restarted the fire even though there is no new evidence to sway public opinion either way about Niemann’s innocence. Carlsen even goes so far as to say that he does not believe in the popular theory that Niemann was cheating using anal beads and admits that the American has become a much better chess player since the incident. Immediately on the heels of the podcast, Hikaru Nakamura, who was the other player who openly spoke about Niemann cheating in 2022, also posted a long video on his YouTube channel.
So, why are the players keen to raise fresh hell about an old incident? It could be because there is a new Netflix documentary coming in April as part of the Untold series which will look into the cheating scandal that rocked the sport. Carlsen has reportedly spoken extensively in the documentary about the incident. Nakamura has also given an interview to the documentary makers. What must also be noted is that the episode on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast was sponsored by Netflix.
Documentary or not, chess grandmasters do stand out from athletes in most other sports. Athletes who are considered ambassadors or icons usually don’t want to be seen talking about a scandal that raises a stink about the integrity of their sport. Haven’t generations of cricketers gone stony-faced when asked about the match-fixing scandal?
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Chess stars, though, love talking about — and speculating — cheating in chess even though detecting cheating in chess is as hard as beating Carlsen on the board. You have a former world champion like Vladimir Kramnik who spends most days muckraking on social media about suspicious results of other players. It’s almost become his brand. Nakamura has snuck into the DMs of players like Arjun Erigaisi to accuse them of cheating in the past without any shred of evidence.
“If you’re not cheating in a dumb way, there rarely is going to be a smoking gun. And without that smoking gun it is going to be really hard to catch people,” Carlsen admits on the podcast.
On their part, chess events do try their best to prevent cheating. There is the pre-game wanding that players have to go through to prevent them from carrying any electronic device into the playing area. At certain events, players’ ears are checked to see if they’re wearing invisible earpieces. The live broadcasts of games are delayed by 15 minutes for big events so that players who want to game the system cannot get real-time advice from an aide from outside (which doesn’t amount to a lot when it’s a classical game where players can spend as much as 45 minutes at times mulling just one critical move). And at the World Championship, players compete in a sound-proof glass box where they cannot see outside. The measures for online detection involve multiple cameras and using other software.
These measures though clearly do little to disperse the thick stench of paranoia that hangs around the sport.
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‘I don’t trust Niemann’
“Top level chess has been based on trust a lot. I don’t trust Niemann. Other top players still don’t trust him and he doesn’t trust me,” says Carlsen. “There is still something off about him now. We played an over-the-board tournament in Paris last year where there was increased security and he didn’t play at nearly the same level there.”
Nakamura says that elite grandmasters were speculating that Niemann was cheating for two years before the Sinquefield Cup incident blew up. But he is quick to add: “Most top players do not believe that Hans cheated in that game against Magnus. Everyone knew Hans had been banned earlier for cheating in online games.”
The upcoming documentary is unlikely to offer any new perspective on the Sinquefield Cup incident. It probably won’t have any incriminating evidence that Niemann cheated in that game against Carlsen, or has cheated in over-the-board games since then. It will just be fresh he-said, he-said. But the documentary will guarantee that suspicions that elite grandmasters once spoke in backrooms in hushed tones will now play out on a major platform for the wider audience to consume.
“As long as there are monetary incentives for people to cheat, there will be cheating in chess,” says Carlsen on the podcast.
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The same rings true for talking about cheating in chess.
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