Elite chess players keep accusing each other of cheating
Sign up now: Get the biggest sports news in your inbox
The latest episode of cheating in the sport concerns top star Hikaru Nakamura and former world champion Vladimir Kramnik.
PHOTO: TAMIL MURASU
Follow topic:
NEW YORK – This is an era of milk and honey for those who live, breathe and make their livelihood from chess. But, like family members fighting over a piece of bread at the dinner table, the top players cannot seem to stop getting into disputes about the integrity of the game.
The latest episode concerns Hikaru Nakamura, one of chess’ top stars, and Vladimir Kramnik, who was world champion from 2000 to 2007. In November, in a series of blog posts on Chess.com, the world’s most popular chess site, the Russian insinuated that Nakamura had probably cheated while playing on the site.
In one post that he subsequently deleted, Kramnik, without mentioning Nakamura by name, wrote that in one streak of 46 games, “a player” had won 45 games and drawn one. He then wrote: “I believe that everyone would find this interesting.”
After it became apparent that Kramnik was referring to Nakamura, he added in another post on Nov 21, “Having checked Hikaru’s statistics carefully, I have found NUMEROUS low probabilities performance both of him and some of his opponents.” In other words: He implied that Nakamura’s results were very suspicious.
When reached for comment on Dec 22, Kramnik said that he never meant to say that. When it was pointed out to him that his words could be misunderstood, he said, “Of course it is not an accusation,” adding that people could interpret his comments however they wished.
American Nakamura did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
On Dec 24, Chess.com closed Kramnik’s blog and muted his account. In a statement posted to social media, Chess.com said it had met the 48-year-old “numerous times” and added: “Our team carefully investigated many dozens of players about which GM Kramnik raised suspicions. In the vast majority of cases, we found his accusations baseless.”
Kramnik said in an e-mail that he had received news of the account closure from an associate, not directly from Chess.com. He added that there was no warning and said that for the past couple of months, there had not been “a single communication attempt from them”.
Nakamura is not only one of the world’s top players, but he is also one of the game’s most popular streamers, with about two million followers on both his Twitch and YouTube channels. He did not take Kramnik’s claim lightly.
The 36-year-old said that Kramnik was “cherry-picking” the statistics that he was using, and he said on one of his streaming casts: “You don’t get to make false accusations when you are not an expert. You don’t get to make false accusations when you don’t have data to back yourself up.”
Given the high profiles of the two players, the controversy has swept across the chess world. Mathematicians and amateur players have weighed in with their opinions and statistical analyses.
Chess.com, which has its own system for detecting cheating, posted a statement saying: “We take all cheating accusations seriously. In the case of the recent accusations against Hikaru Nakamura by Vladimir Kramnik, we have generated nearly 2,000 individual reports on Hikaru’s games in our Fair Play system and have found no incidents of cheating.”
Kramnik was incensed by the statement. In a blog post on the same day, he wrote, “Calling my recent efforts on help improving anti-cheating efficiency of chess.com platform ‘accusations of Hikaru Nakamura by Vladimir Kramnik’ is a clear public disinformation which obviously can cause a huge image damages to me.” He demanded that Chess.com retract its statement, threatening to sue if it did not.
To date, Chess.com has not done that.
Before his account was muted, Kramnik told The New York Times that he was “shocked” by the reaction of Nakamura and Chess.com to what he wrote and that he had suffered damage to his reputation as well as personally to his family.
He said he had received at least one death threat on Chess.com and that when he reported it to the site’s administrators, they banned the person who sent it. He added that the website took no action beyond that and did not apologise to him.
“It seems to me that they are not doing what they can do to fight against cheating,” Kramnik said, “so I will continue to do it myself.” He added that he intends to file a lawsuit against Chess.com and against Nakamura; he is preparing the case now.
There is some significance in Nakamura being involved in a brouhaha in which he is accused of cheating, because the roles were reversed in 2022.
That case involved Magnus Carlsen, the world’s top-ranked player and the then world champion, who accused Hans Niemann, a rising American star, of cheating
Soon after, Chess.com released a report saying that Niemann had cheated in as many as 100 games while playing on its site over the years. But Niemann admitted to cheating only twice on the site and years before the game against Carlsen.
A representative for Carlsen did not respond to a request for comment.
Nakamura was a vocal supporter of Carlsen during the episode, pointing to the Chess.com report as proof that Niemann, then 19, could not be trusted.
In the uproar that followed, Niemann filed a lawsuit against Carlsen,
The lawsuit was settled in August on undisclosed terms,
In an interview, Erik Allebest, one of Chess.com’s founders and its CEO, described the relationship now between the site and Niemann as “very professional”, though he admitted that Niemann had “ghosted” him and Danny Rensch, the site’s chief chess officer, since the reinstatement.
In December, the federation, which had delayed weighing in so as to allow the lawsuit to run its course, released its report. It was more of a whimper than a bang.
The federation concluded that Niemann had not cheated against Carlsen during their game in St Louis. It also found that Carlsen had behaved improperly when he withdrew from the tournament.
The federation has a code that prohibits players from recklessly accusing others of cheating, but it found that the admission of earlier online cheating by Niemann and Chess.com’s report had given Carlsen sufficient reason to doubt Niemann’s veracity.
The federation also found that Carlsen had not disparaged Niemann’s reputation or brought ill-repute on the game. Indeed, the report suggested the attention from the controversy had been positive because it “may have piqued the interests and awareness of many persons” about the game.
Carlsen was fined €10,000 for his withdrawal from the tournament for what it deemed was an invalid reason. Carlsen has earned tens of millions from chess, so the fine is not likely to set him back.
“I am happy to be finished with the case,” Carlsen told TV 2 in Toronto, where he was playing in the Champions Chess Tour final in December. “It’s clear that there were worse scenarios.”
Terrence Oved, a lawyer for Niemann, wrote in an e-mail on Dec 22 that Niemann was not satisfied with the federation’s ruling against Carlsen. Oved said the federation had the facts wrong because Carlsen accused Niemann of cheating before Niemann admitted that he had done so in the past and before Chess.com released its report. Oved added that his client thought the fine was too low given the damage caused by Carlsen’s accusations.
As for Niemann, he had a bad competitive streak over the last 12 months as the lawsuit and controversy played out, and his world ranking slipped.
But in a tournament that ended Dec 1 in Zagreb, Croatia, Niemann had an exceptional performance. In a competition filled with strong grandmasters, he won seven games and drew two, losing none. He finished in first place, three points ahead of his nearest competitor. It was the equivalent of a runner in a 1,600-metre (mile) race lapping the field when crossing the finish line.
Afterwards, Niemann posted on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, a photo of himself alongside a photo of Bobby Fischer, the American world champion who had a dominant performance in the same city 53 years ago, with the comment, “Two lone Americans up against the world, facing immeasurable odds.”
That might have been the end of it, but one of the players he beat, Ivan Sokolov, said in a post that Niemann’s moves matched those of the best chess engines 98 per cent of the time. Sokolov also wrote that there were few anti-cheating measures during the tournament.
Sokolov could not be immediately reached for comment.
The event organizers also posted on X and seemed to implicate Niemann: “Niemann’s performance is out of this world, but we have no definite proof that he is cheating. We have some indications, but we don’t know if anyone wants to report him.”
The event’s organisers did not respond to a request for comment.
Oved, Niemann’s lawyer, said the comment from the organisers was part of the continuing fallout from the episode with Carlsen.
“Any time that Hans wins, someone will probably accuse him of cheating,” he said. “But Hans has proven to be incredibly resilient and strong.”
In the background of all of this, tournaments have bigger prize pools and more spectators than ever before. Chess.com just wrapped up the Champions Chess Tour, a year-long series of tournaments featuring the game’s top players, with US$2 million in prizes. It was won by Carlsen. The site is also approaching 160 million members.
Allebest said that Chess.com was doing what it could to stamp out cheating and was evolving its methods to find cheats. He admitted that some people did still get away with it, though he was certain that number was very small.
What Kramnik has done is not helpful, Allebest said. “Being suspicious is not the same thing as being certain,” he added. “It doesn’t frankly help to spread suspicion. You create hysteria by going public.” NYTIMES
