Chess grandmaster Hans Niemann denies using vibrating sex toy to cheat | Hacker News Reader

Chess grandmaster Hans Niemann denies using vibrating sex toy to cheat

bbc.com

47 pointsRickJWagner68 comments

This has gotten so ridiculous to the point that I actually feel bad for Neimann.

He has admitted to cheating, there's no debate about that. But he maintains that he has cheated in two isolated incidents, at age 12 and 16. These are mistakes, and given he is a titled player, very serious mistakes.

But, beyond barring him from chess.com (a platform with whom his chief accuser has significant business ties), they've absolutely dragged his reputation through the mud many times over. All of this, it seems, based on a "feeling" that Magnus had OTB on a particular game (for which no evidence of cheating has been found).

It wreaks of witchhunt, and has damaged his reputation in a likely unrepairable fashion. I understand he's made mistakes, but it seems we've all tacitly agreed that it is ok to drag someone through the mud because he seems a bit obnoxious and made mistakes while a child. I hope we'd be better than that.

I mean Chess.com has made a fairly strong claim that it's not just two incidents.

Also which part of the lawsuit [1] do you think was decided wrongly?

[1]: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/65592749/niemann-v-carl...

Did you actually read the final decision [1]?

The case was dismissed by a federal court because the plaintiff failed to show a plausible Sherman Act antitrust violation and because the remaining defamation, libel, tortious interference, etc. claims should be litigated in state courts.

They didn’t actually determine whether the cheating claims were true or not. They didn’t even consider the question.

[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.moed.19...

When you said "at age 16" it made me feel the guy was 40 or so and it was long ago.

Not that the cheating took place only two year before the game against Carlsen, which is close enough to keep the same behaviors..

It wouldn’t be the same behavior, though. No one is able to really come up with a good explanation of how Niemann cheated in a game where he was being watched by a crowd of people. Hence the sex toy theory; one has to come up with some outlandish guesses to make it work. Cheating on an online chess game is a completely different beast.

It would be like if a team was losing to the Patriots, and they walked away and claimed that all the Patriots were on steroids, and their only evidence was that they deflated the footballs against an opposing team some years before. Is that evidence of unsavory behavior? Sure. Is it a carte blanche to throw any accusation at them and walk away when they win claiming they cheated? That seems insane.

If an archeologist gets caught trying to pass off an orangutan jaw as an ancient human bone, concedes that he's done so, then two years later announces that he found another ancient human skull, do you really care to waste your time figuring out what kind of monkey he used this time? He's a known liar, so throw his paper in the trash and forget about it.

It shouldn't matter how Niemann cheated this time, or even if he did at all. He already admitted to cheating in the past so ban him and forget about him.

I find it odd that Magnus didn't have a problem competing against Niemann up until the point he lost.

Conversely, Magnus loses against other people regularly, so why single out Niemann?

No it would be like making the same exact accusation, as if the Patriots got caught using steroids two years before and now two years later you suspect they are still using them.

It's literally impossible for him to cheat in the exact same way. An online cheater tabs out to an engine to see the move and act accordingly. You simply can't do that in an in person match with a crowd of people watching. Hence why there’s talk about sex toys - people are trying to come up with some way that some sort of signal could be sent to Niemann while he was being watched by a crowd of people, without a single person noticing. It’s an entirely different level from tabbing in your browser to an engine while sitting at your computer at home.

It doesn't need to be a sex toy, obviously. $5 worth of parts from Ali Baba could be assembled into a signaling tool:

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Type-C-Bluetooth-5-0-...

There's even prebuilt solutions for things like poker:

https://www.cardslenses.com/remote-contorl-poker-game-vibrat...

https://elie.net/blog/security/royal-flush-an-in-depth-look-...

You don't need much of a signal.

At that level, a simple signal that "Your opponent made a mistake and there is a line greater than +3 right now! Look for it." would be a huge advantage.

> only two year before

He's 20 today, and the convroversy was last year.

It seems more like three years, in a period of one's life where a person probably does the most changing.

(FWIW, I don't play chess or have side, it's just an interesting issue.)

Did he get caught then and suffer actual consequences? Because if not it's not as if character development happens automatically, especially if there are significant gains to be had from cheating.

I don't pretend to know what causes people to change, so I can't answer your question where it seems like you're implying that he would only change if that was the case.

All I know is that he admited to it, so if that's "getting caught", I imagine he has receicved consequences from his admission.

chess.com should release the cheating probabilities of every titled player who has ever registered and verified on chess.com . That would be the only fair thing to do. It should be in fact updated dynamically and visible on a player's profile at all times.

I agree, but the standard rebuttal is that this would allow cheaters to quickly learn the algorithm, which relies heavily on secrecy to disguise the tools they use to detect cheating. What say you?

Whatsoever algorithm they use is some variation of taking the diff of engine moves vs. historically played moves vs. moves played at a certain rating. This is not complicated, contentious nor does it sound like it is worth of a trade secret.

Even if they do wish to use a private or proprietary standard to ban or suspend a user officially, they can still use a public standard (can even publish the code on Github for example) and show a standing statistic on a player's profile page using that public algorithm.

That would be an extremely uncreative implementation. Positional complexity, time taken, mouse position/movement/clicks/arrows drawn, piece 'touch' instances, and historical performance in similar positions are all things that could conceivably be easily tracked and potentially serve as legitimacy signals.

Yeah, if you make your security features public, it is so much easier to circumvent them.

Particularly since the report says that dozens of other Grandmasters cheated as well[1], and we’re not even being told who they are.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/chess-cheating-hans-niemann-rep...

That’s the thing about trust, ain’t it

We all did mistakes when we were teenagers, its part of the process. It takes courage to admit that. Whats the lesson to be learned here? Never be honest in the public ever again?

"Never be honest in the public ever again?"

Yes and demand for right to be forgotten to maintain the facade /s

Side note, but do you mean it reeks of a witch hunt? (Just making sure.)

I... did mean that. And, I have a suspicion I may have written it incorrectly many other times in the past, so thanks for pointing it out!

It's really gross that the BBC are taking the shamelessly crass question by Piers Morgan during his interview and running it in their headline. It's a classic case of "damned if you, damned if you don't" for Niemann. No one has ever seriously believed this accusation, but this is the first time he's been asked the question point blank and so he had to give an answer. I don't expect any less from Piers Morgan, but we should leave the shameless style of interview question to his corner of journalism and not promote it.

He also specifically asked if he used "anal beads", which are a specific thing, so even if he did use a different sex toy to cheat, he could've answered that honestly.

This is a real lame story for the BBC, and hypocritical of them to be using a Piers Morgan "scoop" as the basis.

Nobody takes the original joke seriously as a suggestion and this whole story was recently resolved with a truce after the regrettable bullying of him (for past transgressions) by Carlsen, Nakamura and others.

That resolution is newsworthy, this rubbish isn't.

The Daily Star really pulls it's weight.

The original claim was just "cheating", it was the jokey British Tabloid press that made up the sex toy angle.

The daily star isn't supposed to be taken seriously, but somehow it spread and took off a life of it's own.

It was Eric Hansen's (chessbrah) stream that made up the sex toy angle. Everyone else just riffed on that original joke.

Yeah, for non-British people, this is the newspaper which ran headlines such as:

* Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster

* Freddie Starr DIDN'T eat my hamster

* Freddie Starr dead - but did comedian really eat a hamster?

They can be safely ignored.

In my local Sainsbury's, the Guardian and the Independent are on the top row just above comfortable eye level. Staring you in the face is the Star, Sun and Daily Mail.

Almost as good as the classic Sunday Sport headlines:

> World War 2 Bomber Found on Moon, 14 August 1988.

> World War 2 Bomber Found on Moon Vanishes, 21 August 1988.

FYI: Possessive its.

I'll bet they know that. I know that. Getting it wrong is gonna happen, because (stated anecdotally/without proof) there is a phonetic component to typing muscle memory. In a casual written conversation, I'm not hammering out keys on my QWERTY keyboard thinking about spelling. I am mindful of spelling, it's just not the primary foreground process.

IMO, of all the English misspellings to cringe over, this one is the easiest one to apply forbearance & focus on the message.

He's a confirmed cheater. We just don't know for sure that he cheated in that match in particular.

I'm used to games where if someone is caught cheating they're just banned from competitive aspects of the activity going forward. giving them a chance to get better at hiding their cheating doesn't work for games like chess. He should just go to a different pursuit.

I read the argument last that he would have needed "James Bond-level tech" to cheat against Magnus, but I'm skeptical.

There’s a reason teledildonics are strictly controlled by ITAR export regulations. We must protect the integrity of global sports! Only our closest NATO allies are allowed access to our weaponized buttplugs.

So bluetooth, wifi, or 4g?

> He's a confirmed cheater.

No; it's confirmed that he has cheated. If you believe that this is a quality of a person that cannot be changed or rehabilitated, that is fine, but you should take ownership of it and not attempt to represent it as a fact.

I too often compete in environments where a single confirmed act of cheating bars the player from any future participation. It isn't about the individual, it's about the sport. I think losing access to a sport is a valid punishment for confirmed cheating. In this specific situation, I will admit that being a minor muddies the issue.

* The confirmed cheater is more likely to cheat in the future than a normal player, which in my mind puts an asterisk next to all of their future accomplishments.

* The act of cheating is such a massive act of disrespect towards their competitors, the competition organizers, and the game itself that it merits such a long term loss of privilege.

* Every game has rules. It seems fair to let players and organizers of the game decide on consequences for breaking the rules.

* If the punishment for being caught cheating is low, you are changing the risk/reward ratio for cheating in favor of more cheating. This is especially true in a competition like chess where money is on the line.

Why was Niemann allowed to play up until the point that he beat Magnus then?

I'm not too familiar with Chess' specific rules. I'm just saying that they are more lenient on cheating than many of the compeitive communities I participate in.

I think it's more about protecting ourselves. I believe people have the capacity to change but I weigh that against the FACT that there will be people who don't. 20 cheaters (of which 19 would have changed their ways) not getting to compete is preferable to the damage that 1 cheater would inflict.

Un wow, that’s pretty drastic. Luckily you don’t run your country’s judiciary by the same criteria. Oh wait

The whole vibrating sex toy thing was a joke in a single comment by some random person in Twitch chat.

Amazing how it blew up and spread over the globe.

Haha. I first read that headline as "Hans Niemann dies using vibrating sex toy"

"It took our doctors two hours just to get the smile off his face."

Me too. What a way to go.

I never believed this for a moment, and I think the accusation was so disingenuous and in poor taste that it borders on obnoxiousness.

Carlsen has an ego problem. To be fair, Neimann has been accused of cheating when he was a teenager, but based on the world champions behavior I'm willing to give Neimann the benefit of the doubt. Magnus got beat and he couldn't handle it.

> I think the accusation was so disingenuous and in poor taste

It was literally a joke from Eric Hansen (Chessbrah). The media: "hey, anal beads, that's good. Let's run with it."

Wasn't it originally from a random chatter in Eric's Twitch stream, not GM Hansen himself?

Perhaps. I don't quite remember fully, but I was indeed watching that stream.

> Magnus got beat and he couldn't handle it.

I've repeatedly seen Carlsen delighted when someone beats him.

> To be fair, Neimann has been accused of cheating when he was a teenager

Niemann has admitted to cheating when he was a teenager. And this wasn't in the distant mists of time, as this sort of phrasing implies. Niemann was still a teenager when Carlsen's accusation occurred.

Now, I think it's likely he's cheated more than he's admitted to, but I don't know that it's likely that he's ever cheated OTB.

The game Carlsen lost against Niemann was very different though. Basically Carlsen lost while playing in Carlsen's style of chess, which a a very different type of loss than some blunder loss or opening loss.

Neimann openly admitted to cheating on chess.com matches (and chess.com released a lot of evidence to the same end). It's not a boogieman.

It gets complicated as Carlson has large monetary investment in chess.com https://www.chess.com/news/view/chesscom-acquires-pmg

It's not some independent platform or non profit. It muddys the water at least.

> Niemann has admitted to cheating in online chess matches when he was 12 and 16 years old but has denied ever doing so in during tournaments involving prize money.

Nobody made him say this! How is chess.com's ownership related?

https://www.reuters.com/legal/carlsen-chesscom-make-opening-...

> It gets complicated as Carlson has large monetary investment in chess.com

How does that complicate the fact that Niemann admitted cheating on games he played on chess.com?

I'm willing to be there are a lot of other GMs who has cheated on chess.com but their identities haven't been revealed by chess.com because they weren't accused by Carlsen, a partial owner of chess.com.

The chess community is entirely too forgiving. This entire affair should have been over and done with as soon as Niemann admitted to cheating at 16 for profit in prize matches. Chess orgs/competitions should ban him for life and move on, it's not like there's some shortage of other people to play chess with.

The reaction of top level players in many cases has been so pathetic. Mostly notably Kramnik who released this[0] baffling video wherein he tortures every single datapoint that he think might support his argument that Niemann is cheating and ignoring the possibility that he's not and ignoring that the entire game was streamed, which would have explained some of the 'weirdness' he saw.

At this point Hans has played tons of tournaments - the kind that other top GMs avoid (hence Niemann is v often top/near top seed) because playing these oftentimes v underrated 2400s is risky - under severe scrutiny, has had his rating peak during this no doubt incredibly stressful period of scrutiny (as seen imo by his behaviour and personality shift to cope with it), and is clearly a high-level GM who doesn't use assistance. Sure, there's THAT[1] interview at SLCC after the Magnus incident where he gives pretty terrible analysis (under a lot of stress, in the public eye, before he has experience with public speaking), but if having an embarrassing analysis when Stockfish is turned off makes you a cheater then Kram is a spinbot[2].

Speaking of spinbots, I think it's worth bringing up CSGO, what some people regard as an infamously toxic game, where cheaters ruin games. But even despite that, the best CSGO player of all time, s1mple, got banned for cheating when he was a teenager in 1.6 and a community of young, heated players can accept that this happens with young players.

Professional CSGO has a pseudo-official system for pick-up games among pro-level players. Occasionally, unknown players can get promoted into this league. A new Estonian player got promoted into it, got accused of cheating, was frequently destroying top level opponents with unconventional plays such that it was 'obvious' that he was cheating, publicly complaining and making accusations on stream[3].

League admins, rather than placating the established professionals who have a vested interest in striking down upcoming talent, instead chose to fly him to their offices where he'd play on a PC set up by the league, under the watch of league staff. Lo-and-behold he was that good, much to the amazement of sceptics (some contemporary reactions caught in this thread[4]).

Accusers had no leg to stand on - what more could they want? Apologies soon ensued[5].

That player was ropz, who today 6 years on has been consistently a top 20 overall player for the duration of his career, and currently at over $1MM of prize money earned[6].

Hans deserved a similar opportunity at the time. He offered to play naked. He wanted to prove himself. He had the game of his career that should have been the happiest moment of his life, instead it turned in to a brutal trial-by-social-media wherein everything he did or said was brutally analyzed and top level creators with massive audiences opined with vague accusations. The world was fixated on a dumb (but funny) rumour on whether this 19 year old's crowning achievement was achieved with a vibrating sex toy up his own ass or not. Organisers chose not to invite Hans to placate Magnus and other top players, hence his last year in random tournaments.

I don't know whether Niemann cheated vs Magnus or not, but I think there's more than enough reasonable doubt that he didn't cheat. And if he didn't cheat, and this is what he has had to go through - public humilation from his former idols, international attention focused on his sphincter, constantly speculated about by people seeking to profit off the controversy - it's such a sad story and an absolute tragedy.

I hope there's never another case like Niemann again.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYgUp9AGo5k

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXO-mIk4w5Q

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGOqFVNfhhY

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H08x9MfsY_w

[4]: https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/62lyvf/rop...

[5]: https://twitter.com/JW1/status/955624592944631809 Same player in the above clip

[6]: https://www.esportsearnings.com/players/31594-ropz-robin-koo...

This story is stupid. Meanwhile, the BBC covered-up the late Jimmy Saville's rape of disabled children for decades.

Wasn't this the basis of one of the latest It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode?

Wasn't this an Always Sunny episode?

yes, it makes reference to this allegation.

Am I the only one who read denies as dies...

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