The tournament where Magnus withdrew wasn’t a knockout tournament, it was a round robin where the player with the best record after everyone has played everyone else wins. Hans was in the lead after defeating Magnus with 2.5 points (2 wins and one draw) in 3 games, after the enhanced security was implemented he scored…

Niemann was a late replacement for another player. If he had been on the original invite list, it’s likely Magnus and others would have declined to play. Ian Nepomniatchi (who was runner up to Carlsen in the last World Championship and won the Candidates tournament again this year) has publicly stated he was also…

Also, the divide to me isn’t between old guard and young, it’s between those like Magnus who see cheating online and OTB as the same thing and those who think online is less serious or important (i.e. not “real” chess) and so cheating online as Hans has already admitted to is not a big deal.

It could be as simple as someone in the crowd having access to an engine and signaling to Hans when there’s only one good move available, or his opponent’s last move was actually a mistake that swung the evaluation bar. Most GMs - and no one is saying Hans isn’t a very talented player, just maybe not quite at the…

Two weeks later Magnus steamrolls through the preliminaries of a tournament, with his only loss in 15 games being the one he resigned deliberately against Niemann (every other player lost 3 or more games in the preliminaries), then rolls through the knockout phase losing one game out of 13 in three matches to win the…

To the dismissed troll: get help. Seriously.

ACAB.

Look at the fucking header picture, Count.

Most hacking falls into one of two categories:

I’m well on the wrong side of 40, and I agree with you. While I was still young enough in the early days of AOL to participate in the ritual of “A/S/L?”, the way I met people was by going out to places where people were. I met one woman I dated at a concert, and I met the woman I have been married to for almost 20…

Yeah, I agree with you. The point should be the rights of the actual human being making a medical decision, and not get caught up in arguing 6 weeks vs. 10 weeks vs. 15 weeks, all of which are intrusions on those rights. Kansas showed that the majority of voters, even in red states, support the right to choose. All…

Shouldn’t Subway be 6, below 5. Getting hit by a car?

What happened at CNN with Jeff Zucker is that their ratings went into the tank and the relationship was the excuse to fire him let him resign.

But did he tell anyone about the time he went backpacking through Western Europe?

True enough, I always figured Shrub’s “C student” thing was a tacit admission that his degrees were bought since most Ivy League students either excel or flunk out due to the pressure.

Yeah, this is how George W. Bush “won” the 2000 election - despite his Ivy League degrees, his folksy talk painted him as the “guy you’d rather have a beer with” compared with Al Gore, who was clearly more qualified to be President.

I’m getting good and tired of people continually talking about Niemann cheating “as a minor” as if that was in the distant past. He’s only 19 now and the second incident of cheating that he admitted to was by his own accounting “during the height of the pandemic” which would place it a little over two years ago, and…

This interview is long, but during the interview Hans claims to have cheated online once at age 12, and again at age 16 (the latter supposedly in what he called “meaningless” games), but never live over the board like in the game he won against Magnus in St. Louis.

If he’s “not that smart”, then how did he graduate as valedictorian of his high school class and graduate in the top 1% of his class at the University of Georgia, huh?...

Burying the lede: He wanted to name the baby after her if it was a boy?!?