Anal Chess
On September 4th, world champion and GM Magnus Carlsen would compete against weaker 19 year old GM Hans Niemann in the Sinquefield Cup. Hans was rated so much lower than Magnus that his victory over the champion put him in the top 50 ranking and upset millions around the world. Now this story only affects the Chess side of Twitch since the other world champion. Hikaru Nakamura, watched the battle on stream himself. Ludwig would state that Magnus has not lost a game in 53 plays and 2 years so “Basically it’s like losing to the Browns in ANYTHING”. After the loss, Magnus would withdraw from the tournament with a tweet insinuating foul play from Hans. Hikaru would back this up bringing up the fact that Hans had previously been banned from Chess.com before for cheating. Now the fandom came to arms. They were already suspicious at the upset and now they decided that Hans for sure cheated this time. Theories exploded of which the most prominent were that Hans used anal beads to make the right moves.
Charlie explained this part perfectly. In Chess technology, there have been computers and ai created that can predict opponents and the like. Then there’s Stockfish, a program that accurately makes the best possible move in any position of the pieces. One guy invented the Sockfish in which case you place the program on a sock. Wearing the sock in a game, it will basically vibrate to you information to make the perfect move. Now the inventor created it for shits and giggles and any cheating technology at all is banned in official tournaments. Now imagine you take the stockfish and put it in your ass.
Charlie states that the analfish theory started as just a meme on r/chess but news media picked it up as a viable theory so now it is all that the matchup is known for. One certain website even asked Hans to play naked for 1 million dollars to verify that he is not wearing he butt plug. Hans has rejected this theory though. Chess.com has also banned him since the claims of cheating. After that, Hans came out in an interview with two important parts.
Firstly, he has never cheated on an over the table game since the age of 12. Over the table refers to official irl games. He had cheated two or three times online but he strongly regrets it.
Secondly, he revealed that he was lucky and struck a miracle. Before the game against Magnus, Hans was studying some of Magnus’ old games. He specifically found a move and was able to create a counter. Magnus used that move and so Hans was well prepared. According to Charlie, Ludwig and Hikaru (and other actual chess commentators), Magnus has never even used this move before. In his life. So no one knows exactly what Hans if fucking talking about. How do you study a move that Magnus never played?
When they banned Hans, chess.com also released a statement explaining that they have evidence on him. They have not even alluded to the evidence nor has Magnus elaborated on his tweet. Just gamer rage I guess. A random commenter theorized that Magnus had a mole in his team who reveled the niche move to Hans before the game. The reason Magnus left the tournament is because he wanted to prevent the mole from ruining the rest of his games and possibly investigate them.
In my opinion, after watching the first game, I don’t think that niche move is the only reason Hans won. I’m a novice but I don’t even know what Magnus was doing half the time and then he had a few blunders towards the end. Even if it’s only tangential, it was a really funny story and it occurred over twitch so I had to include it in this saga.
tdwriter 