Hans Report – 1
Hans Niemann Report Chess.com’s Current Research and Findings – October 2022 Over the last few weeks, the world has been following the major story regarding Hans Niemann, Magnus Carlsen, and cheating in chess. This has become a matter of significant public interest both inside and outside the chess world, and we present in this report our exploration of the events, circumstances, and data that have informed Chess.com’s decisions concerning the current controversy, as well as the issue of cheating in chess more generally. At the outset, we want to make clear that while these events highlight a critical topic in chess—cheating— the vast majority of chess games do not involve any cheating. We estimate that fewer than 0.14% of players on Chess.com ever cheat, and that our events are by and large free from cheating. We firmly believe that cheating in chess is rare, preventable, and much less pervasive than is currently being portrayed in the media. With that background, the following is a brief summary of our findings and takeaways: •
We present evidence in this report that Hans likely cheated online much more than his public statements suggest. However, while Hans has had a record-setting and remarkable rise in rating and strength, in our view there is a lack of concrete statistical evidence that he cheated in his game with Magnus or in any other over-the-board (“OTB”)—i.e., in-person—games. We are presenting our findings here and will cooperate with FIDE on any further investigation.
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We were never pressured by Magnus or his team whatsoever to remove Hans from Chess.com or revoke his invitation to the Chess.com Global Championship (“CGC”). Nor did we communicate with Magnus regarding our decisions on these issues before we made them. In fact, Magnus did not even know we were going to remove Hans until Hans went public with our private correspondence.
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We uninvited Hans from our upcoming major online event and revoked his access to our site based on our experience with him in the past, growing suspicions among top players and our team about his rapid rise of play, the strange circumstances and explanations of his win over Magnus, as well as Magnus’ unprecedented withdrawal. In order to have more time to investigate the OTB situation and our own internal concerns, we uninvited Hans from our event and prevented his access to Chess.com. We are open to continuing a dialogue with Hans to discuss his status on Chess.com.
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We believe that chess organizers, federations, companies, and players can all work together more effectively to create great—and assuredly fair—chess events.
I.
The Mission of Chess.com
Since the founding of Chess.com, our mission has always remained the same: to grow the game of chess and to help people enjoy their lives through playing, learning, and watching chess. We remain committed to that mission through the products, content, and events that we continue to produce. We aren’t just a business—we are passionate fans of the game and have spent years working to serve the needs of the chess community. We feel a deep sense of responsibility to act as trustworthy stewards of the game: for the nearly 100 million members who have signed up, the 20 million players who use our service each month, and the thousands of titled players, coaches, and chess professionals who rely on us to protect the game. We understand that the events of the last few weeks have been disappointing for many chess fans. Though we have tried to always act in line with our mission while doing our best to protect the integrity of the game, we recognize, as we analyzed and replayed the rapid series of events that took place, that we could have made several better moves, and we hope to have learned a lot in this process. Our hope is that this report will be a first step toward clearing up any confusion as to why we took certain steps in the wake of the September 4, 2022 Carlsen vs. Niemann match in St. Louis at the 2022 Sinquefield Cup.