Oh? What? And GMs admit to cheating online? Why then is Niemann's possible/likely online cheating news and not the other GMs'?!
Fine, but let's say he's cheating online and that it's more a scandal than those GMs' cheating, and that it being more of a scandal than other GMs' cheating is not in itself a scandal. Now let's look at the OTB issue.
So they have no evidence of Niemann's cheating irl, OTB. And he beat Carlsen w/o cheating, OTB.
And Carlsen threw a fit.
So now chess.com is practically libeling Niemann. They can't prove he cheated even online, but then, Niemann can't prove that he didn't either, and we'll all believe that he probably did because... we'll believe most players do cheat online. And as for the OTB game with Carlsen, there's a video of that game. And Niemann's explanation of his pauses and his thinking in that game are sensible. So chess.com will not come right out and say he cheated OTB -- perhaps that would be a bridge too far in any possible libel case?
I don't know if Niemann cheated, and maybe I don't care because what this brouhaha is leading to up is this conclusion: online chess is so trivial to cheat at that money-making online contests and online game ratings should now be a thing of the past. And that is a conclusion chess.com does not want the public to reach, so they're trying real hard to look like they can do something about cheating at online chess.
Chess had a great revival these past two years because of covid. Chess is very accessible, easy to learn (to a point), very watchable, and trivial to make it playable online. But chess is also a practically a solved problem, with AI and non-AI chess engines that easily beat grand masters and world champions, and it has been a solved problem for quite some time, and now those engines are trivially available to people trying to learn, to analyze, and/or to cheat. That means that cheating will be trivial. No amount of focus change detection or whatever is going to help because you'd have to have cameras and microphones capturing the whole room that a player is in to keep most players from cheating.
Maybe it's time for chess to go back to being an in-person only thing for ratings and contests with real prizes.
Also, let's not talk of the ageism in chess.com's complaint that Niemann is too old to be that good at chess. It's true that generally speaking chess has to be learned early in order for one to get good at it, but there's always humans who defy the averages.