Hans Niemann isn’t one to let go of a grudge. Two years after a major cheating scandal, the 21-year-old American grandmaster has found himself sort of vindicated. Even so, straight after qualifying for the finals of the Speed Chess Championship in Paris, where just four players compete in the fastest version of the game, he started cranking up the tension. Few people in chess emerged unscathed. In some of his tamer outbursts, he described Chess.com, the game’s most popular platform, as “evil” and “corrupt”. Magnus Carlsen, widely regarded as the best chess player in history, was “deluded” and “sick”. “It’s impossible for someone to comprehend the insanity of what they have unleashed upon me,” Niemann said. The finals in Paris would give him the opportunity to “settle things”, whatever that meant, “because what I experienced was truly hell. And all for what?”
The scandal began in St Louis at the 2022 Sinquefield Cup, one of the most prestigious tournaments in the chess calendar. A group of 10 elite players were competing for $350,000 in prize money, including $100,000 for the winner. Like always, Carlsen was the clear favourite. At the time ranked number one for more than a decade, he was on an unprecedented winning streak of 53 games. On the other hand, Niemann, then ranked 51st in the world, was lucky to be there. He had been invited only at the last minute, to replace another grandmaster who suddenly dropped out. But Niemann surprised everyone by establishing an early edge and by doing so with the black pieces. (Carlsen had the white pieces and therefore took the first move, which is usually an advantage.) Throughout the game, Niemann chewed gum and looked bored. Carlsen later noted Niemann “wasn’t tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions.” Either way, Niemann played quickly and rushed Carlsen into a series of uncharacteristically rash moves.
They were playing in a secure room with only a handful of other people there. The chess photographer Lennart Ootes was one of them. Midway through the game, Carlsen stood up from the board, approached Ootes, and accused him of helping Niemann. By the polite standards of chess, it was an astonishing breach of etiquette. Carlsen eventually sat back down, but 57 moves later he resigned the game. Niemann said his opponent had played poorly. He also claimed that by a “miracle” he had that morning analysed the identical, and very rare, positions they reached during play. Maybe most revealing was the “possible” move he said he wanted to make, without realising it would in fact have almost certainly lost him the contest. A rookie error.
The next day, unsatisfied by Niemann’s explanation, Carlsen abruptly withdrew from the tournament 10 minutes before play was scheduled to start. Posting to his more than a million followers on Twitter, he didn’t directly call out Niemann for cheating, but he did embed a video of the football manager Jose Mourinho saying, “I prefer really not to speak. If I speak, I am in big trouble.”
The scandal became a witch hunt. One of the more ludicrous cheating accusations involved vibrating anal beads allegedly feeding Niemann computer-aided moves via Morse Code. This was the most outrageous thing to happen in chess in years, maybe ever. Wild theories flourished online, where grandmasters as well as upstarts are reinventing the game, becoming its most visible ambassadors and arguably its first entertainers.
Two weeks after the Sinquefield Cup, Carlsen and Niemann met again in an online tournament. In another dramatic gesture that by accident or design went viral, Carlsen resigned after making just one move, then immediately switched off his webcam. The commentators couldn’t figure out what they had just seen. Afterwards, Niemann, attempting to stifle the allegations, said that he had once cheated as a 12-year-old in an online tournament, and then in some “random games” when he was 16. But he denied he had ever cheated in tournament games or in front of an online audience. He said he had made huge sacrifices for chess, and never would he make the same mistakes again. Carlsen wasn’t having any of it. Rather, he clarified his cryptic allusions with an official statement that said he was unwilling to “play against people that have cheated repeatedly in the past,” and that he believed Niemann had cheated “more than he has admitted.”
The controversy redoubled when Chess.com published a 72-page report citing “a lack of concrete statistical evidence” that Niemann cheated in his game with Carlsen. The report did, however, also note that his over-the-board progress was “unusual” and that he “likely” cheated in more than 100 online games. With his fledgling career on the line, Niemann filed a $100m defamation lawsuit against Carlsen. A federal judge dismissed the case in 2023. Chess.com, which had kicked Niemann off the platform, reinstated him. All parties agreed to move forward with no further threat of legal action. But the bad blood between Niemann and Carlsen didn’t go away. The scandal now has its own Wikipedia page. A Netflix documentary is coming soon, plus a book from Ben Mezrich, a blockbuster writer with a proven track record of selling film rights to Hollywood for huge piles of money.
The final of the Speed Chess Championship in Paris was the first time that both players would be in the same room, facing off against each other. I arrived at 150 Rue de Rivoli, down the road from the Louvre, on a sunny afternoon. Inside the venue, in near darkness, electronic music was blaring. The green and blue light effects brought to mind a provincial nightclub. Mostly men arrived in ones and twos. Downstairs in the playing arena, the game between the world number two, Hikaru Nakamura, and the world number five, Alireza Firouzja, was already underway. Upstairs, the game was also being shown live on a giant screen. Beside me in the cheap seats was a fluffy-haired teenager, in a T-shirt showing Carlsen wearing a crown and holding a sceptre. “I called in sick so that I could be here,” he told me. “It’s the most talked-about rematch in the history of the game.”
It wasn’t much of an overstatement. None of the content creators—and there were many—spent any time at the bar. Instead they streamed live and direct. Among them was Levy Rozman, better known as GothamChess, wearing a suit and sparkling black loafers. The 28-year-old recently became the first chess YouTuber to surpass five million subscribers. He had flown in from New York to attend. Elsewhere, Danny Rensch, an online chess streamer and commentator for Chess.com, told the cameras how the event “was doing everything it possibly could” to make sure the players couldn’t cheat. I’m pretty sure I also heard him say “an expert at the intersection of military operations and tech” had been hired especially. So, no anal beads.
The event felt like a shameless bid for virality. More than a couple of chairs were knocked over in the rush when the DJ announced it was time to take photos with some of the content creators.
Streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube have upended the previously staid world of chess. Everyone was hooked by the neverending storylines away from the board, sharing their thoughts on their phones. I guessed the idea was for chess to emulate the fast-and-loose culture of esports and pro wrestling.
There were still a couple of hours until Carlsen and Niemann were scheduled to play. I called the 24-year-old streamer and world youth chess champion Qiyu Zhou, better known as Nemo or akaNemsko to her hundreds of thousands of social media followers. “Rivalries make great content, and it doesn’t get any bigger than this,” she told me from her home in Toronto. “Everyone loves a bad boy; the internet loves to hate.” Who was her money on? “Not to take away from Niemann, he’s a good player, and I’ve known him since he was seven, but Carlsen is the best.”
Nemo started playing chess when she was three years old. “To make it professionally, that’s normal,” she said. At age five she won the Finnish National Championships in the under-10 category, and at age 16 she became the first ever female grandmaster in Canada. Chess came “super naturally” to her, yet she still trained for at least six hours a day until she was 18. “I wouldn’t say I had the healthiest relationship with the game,” she said. “At the same time, never in my life did I ever think I’d become a chess content creator.” In 2020, Alexandra Botez, an American-Canadian chess player and then one of the game’s only streamers (with over a million followers on Twitch, plus millions more across other social media accounts), invited her to play a match online. “I crushed her 10-nil. I’m very competitive.” Around then, she continued, “chess started blowing up, so I decided to start my own channel.” To focus on making a career out of it, she quit pro chess. “If I lose now, it’s not so much of a big deal.” More of a big deal is the behind-the-scenes bitching and bickering that seems to follow chess everywhere online. ‘There’s a lot of shit-talking,’ she said, “but I don’t think chess is toxic or anything. NBA players call each other out all the time. It’s just that, in their sport, there’s always lots of other stuff happening so things move on. Whereas the chess community is still quite small, so the bitching seems louder than it is.”
Nemo is one of the biggest stars among the growing scene of chess players-turned-influencers, following in the footsteps of people who livestream themselves playing popular video games such as Fortnite or League of Legends. When she plays online, she talks to thousands of viewers, offering a mix of live commentary, trash talk and thanks to those who give her contributions. While chess is far smaller as an esport than video games, it has grown quickly over the past year. And with this consumption has come a lot of money, mostly donations from viewers, facilitated by platforms such as Twitch, but also in sponsorship. This is partly why so many players are now seeking careers away from the traditional chess circuit.
In the lead-up to the tournament, the chess journalist Leonard Barden told me that by far the most important streamer is Nakamura, whose game against Firouzja I left midway through. “He’s also the world number two, so very good at the day job,” Barden explained. At 96, Barden has seen it all. His weekly chess column in the Guardian began in September 1955—and has continued since with no breaks. He also had a weekly column in the Evening Standard for over six decades, plus a column that’s still running in the Financial Times. “I remember the hours I used to spend reporting world championship matches for the Guardian and ending up at the top of the building, working on the stone with the printers to try and produce an accurate game score,” he said. “But the world evolves and changes with technical innovations, and nonagenarians have to go with the flow like everybody else. The streamers have popularised the game among casual and weaker players, so that’s good.”
He continued: “Carlsen/Niemann isn’t an active rivalry in the normal sense, just permanent bad blood between two people. Paris is a rare occasion when Niemann qualified to meet Carlsen against the odds. To make more progress, Niemann needs to reach at least top 10. His position is not so good because although he doesn’t cheat—only a small minority, mainly uninformed public, still view him as a cheater—he has a reputation for being a difficult character, a hotel furniture trasher, and has a big ego. The jury is out.”
The tournament was being played in front of a live crowd for the first time. By the time I returned, Firouzja had already defeated Nakamura in the first semi-final. Shortly after 8.30pm, it felt like all the air went out of the room. Carlsen and Niemann walked in separately and took their seats without shaking hands or looking at each other. Both of them had on noise-cancelling headphones and listened to pre-selected playlists as they started playing on computers across from one another. As chess games go, it wasn’t brilliant. One of the only moments of overt tension came during an early break in play. As the players walked off stage, footage of Niemann appeared on the screens. He talked about how Carlsen was getting too old for chess and said something like, “My reign will go on for so long, he’s just going to have to watch me win tournament after tournament.” Online, it sent fans into interactive overdrive.
It was past one in the morning when the match finished. To the obvious delight of the audience, Carlsen won 17.5-12.5. He was 10 points ahead at one stage, but relaxed in the final few games once the overall outcome was decided. The players looked exhausted. Of course, there was no handshake. “Losing this would have been really bad,” Carlsen said in an interview off stage. “He blunders a lot and he talks a lot. Those are his big weaknesses. But he is better than he was two years ago.” He was less polite a couple of days later, when he posted a video on X. In it, he looks at his phone, which cuts away to a clip of Niemann saying “chess speaks for itself”; when the video returns to Carlsen, he is simply raising his eyebrows and smirking.
Levy Rozman, the popular chess streamer who was commentating on the match, told me that the time was now for chess to capitalise on its newfound popularity—perhaps by emulating the professional tennis tour model of a few big events each year. While the match we just watched wasn’t of the highest quality, he said, “overall the result was positive”. What mattered was the amount of interest the game had attracted, and the amount of content it would generate in the days, weeks and months ahead. ‘I hope one day chess becomes a multi-billion-dollar industry. Then I’ll look back admiringly at the time we were such a small, rag-tag team. Because that’s what it feels like right now. We’re all feeling our way through this,” he said. “The next generation will play an important role if chess is ever going to make the next step. Niemann is good at opening his mouth, but many others haven’t found their voice yet. If you only focus on the chess, you could be hard to sell to a wider audience. That doesn’t mean you have to slap your opponent the next time you play them. But I think a little more media training, and content creation and social media, would go a long way.”
Once upon a time, chess was about protecting the business of two people playing across the board. Everything else was noise. Today, seemingly, the opposite is true. The most important part is all the noise created by the millions of people who watched the online broadcasts and the subsequent hot takes, fallouts, trolling and memes.
In wrestling, the “heel” is an important character: the charismatic, rule-breaking non-conformists, who is invariably more compelling than the good guys. The heel’s job is to whip the audience into a frenzy, and generally involves cheating and pretty much any other manner of socially unacceptable behaviour that will get the job done. Ring any bells?
These days there are increasing numbers of new faces in chess, including professional players as well as streamers, who recognise the power of a good storyline. Erik Allebest, the CEO of Chess.com, agreed: “The TikTokification of chess, the esportification of chess—whatever you want to call it, sure,” he told me. “Chess is seeing the biggest boom it’s ever had, and the storylines have played an important role. People have to be invested in storylines away from the board, and those of us working in the industry have to lean into them.”
But there’s a limit to what you can do to create a good story. “We aren’t puppet masters behind the scenes. We didn’t want the anal beads—or the lawsuit.”
