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Comment by planetsprite | Hacker News Reader

His rate of improvement, assuming no cheating since his ban in 2020, is a faster ascendance than any other player in history, including Bobby Fischer. So yes, assuming he suddenly quit cheating cold turkey, his performance would indicate he is a once in a generation talent and could easily become the best in the world, according to the Chess.com report.

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I'm a huge Hans fan. (F him for cheating, but setting that aside.) His play is objectively insane. Either he's somehow been cheating this whole time via shoefish, or he's the real deal.

GothamChess has had excellent coverage of his games.

Like seriously, look at this one: https://youtu.be/ainUWFboMLs?t=1490

Hans threw a masterful knockout punch at the end, one which his opponent completely overlooked, and was solely a single move. There wasn't cheating-like high level strategy involved -- it was a one-move fatality.

Whatever else the kid has done, he is one hell of a chess player. I find it hard not to root for him, even knowing his history.

I love that this video has over 300k views.

GothamChess is amazing in general. He’ll be casting an upcoming chess tournament (kind of like football commentators, but chess). So hyped for it. If you haven’t seen him before, check out some of his other vids too — he does a variety of styles, like “Guess the ELO” and 1:1 chess tutorials with other popular non-chess streamers.

I think the most impressive thing is that he’s posted a video every single day for… I don’t know how long. He makes it a point of pride not to miss one.

At some point I would expect the younger players to start doing this more often. After all, they have the ability to grow up learning to play from/like an engine. It just seems obvious that their play should diverge from what was traditionally canon.

> His play is objectively insane

But he doesn't do himself any favors with comments like "the chess speaks for itself", or offering what according to other GMs is a lackluster analysis of those astounding moves.

Whether it's immaturity or cheating remains to be seen.

Definitely. Though I wouldn’t have done any better at 19. Teens aren’t known for eloquence or having the proper amount of confidence.

Please listen to Duda,Keymer, Ali reza do post game analysis. They can speak very well about their ideas. It is not normal to be a 2700 and be unable to give your thoughts on the game you just played.

Yeah, because being a GM is a completely normal thing in the first place.

Bobby Fischer was one of the top chess players of all time and was a certifiably insane nut job. There’s nothing normal about being a GM in the first place.

Niemann literally just won the biggest game of his life. He did something none of Duda, Alireza, etc have achieved. His situation was not normal. Trying to judge his actions based on whether it’s what Duda, etc would have done themselves in a situation they’ve never found themselves despite having had many opportunities to do so is silly.

This whole idea of le crazy chess grandmaster is so silly. Fischer, even as he was declining precipitously, was producing cogent analysis and annotations on grandmaster level games.

>He did something none of Duda, Alireza, etc have achieved.

Only if you mean winning in Classical with Black.

Duda beating Carlsen in Classical

https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=2010697

His interview. The quality of the broadcast is a bit bad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fchM2Dcr5mU

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Ali Reza beating Carlsen in Rapid with a beautiful checkmate https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=2072900

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Pragg beating Carlsen in Rapid at 16 https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=2252714 Giving an interview at age 16 at 3 am after beating Carlsen https://www.chessbase.in/news/Praggnanandhaa-beats-Magnus-Ca...

His performance at the US chess championship with strict anti-cheating measures in place proves beyond a reasonable doubt that he's as good as his rating. This whole "improved too fast" as proof of cheating is nonsense.

He might have still cheated to beat Magnus but there's no proof.

As ridiculous as it sounds, did the US chess championship explicitly check to prevent the vibrating buttplug that has been jokingly thrown around as a theory?

It's an honest question. I didn't follow this closely and don't know whether a metal detector could find metal inside a human body.

Games were on a 30 minute broadcast delay with no in person audience. Vibrating butt plug works for receive but can't think of a plausible way for Hans to send the moves out.

> can't think of a plausible way for Hans to send the moves out.

He doesn't have to send the moves out, he just has to send them in.

How is his co-conspirator going to feed him moves without knowing the board state

Who said there has to be a co-conspirator? He could have a small computer inside him, if you really want to believe he's cheating.

To be clear, I'm not saying I believe this.

Still has to feed the computer moves

There are plenty of muscles you can use to give input.

So you'd rather believe he is a genius bio hci engineer? Which is more likely?

You don't need to be a genius engineer, you need to be a competent stage magician. And competent stage magicians are more common than 2700 Elo chess players, so it's not by itself unreasonable to suspect.

Clench in morse code?

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader if morse code via butt clenching counts as "plausible"

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader if morse code via butt clenching counts as "pleasurable"

If it can cure depression, I don't see why it can't also improve your chess game.[0]

[0]https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/331807.How_to_Good_By...

He writes with such conviction it's difficult to not believe him. Going to give this a go, wish me luck.

I knew what book that was going to be :D

No, not in morse code. Instead, the computer will (through vibration) cycle through a list of likely last moves, and you confirm the opponent's last move by clenching right after it comes up. This minimizes the considerable risk of incorrect move entry.

The list will also include a special entry indicating "none of the above", which will make the computer switch to the next set of less likely moves.

This scheme could be refined be having some move partitioning on top. For example, an initial list that has only ["pawn move", "light piece move", "heavy piece move"].

Yes, you can see it in the body scan video.

This isn't really true. He started later then most other high level players, and then the pandemic meant he was studying and playing online a lot without raising his OTB rating. He's a good player but I don't think there is any real argument that he might ever be world champion.

This is just not true. Check out the analysis here [0], for example. His rating improvement has been steep but he's also played a very large number of games, so his rating gain per game as opposed to per unit of time is not so crazy.

Also, no one seriously expects Hans to be a world championship contender.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/x9bgtx/how_quickly_d...

Every chess player plays a lot of games, Hans' have just been more public/documented ones. You really don't think that every 2400+ player is treating chess like a full time job, and Hans just simply is just outworking them?

Based on his performance at the US Chess Championship that just concluded, I would say either that, talent, or both.

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