 Never in a million years did I ever think that I'd be adding to the conversation about the happenings in the chess world, but here we are. Earlier today, I saw that Magnus Carlson released a statement about resigning when playing Hans Nieman and although I had no clue who either of these guys was, my recovering attic brain got hooked. I ended up going down a rabbit hole to learn everything I could about the situation and now know more about professional chess than I ever thought I would. This is a story of cheating, past behavior, the pseudoscience of body language reading, due process and so much more. Although I'm not someone in the chess world, I think it's important to get an outside perspective. Oftentimes, someone who isn't quote-unquote in it can provide a different angle of thought to a conversation and that's why I decided to sit down and discuss this story that's been dominating headlines. This seems like the consensus is that Hans cheated, I'm going to be taking the opposite end of the argument. I come from the world of debunking conspiracy theories and trying to teach people how to become better thinkers. The best way to disprove a hypothesis is to come up with alternate explanations and to challenge the hell out of it. So it is 100% possible that Hans cheated, but we need to put the quote-unquote evidence up to scrutiny to see how it holds up and also see if there are alternate explanations. And the reason I'm saying this is because I don't want anybody coming across this video to assume that I'm saying Hans is innocent. I'm not saying that, I'm getting that out of the way early, so please do not leave a comment that says you're defending Hans and saying he hasn't cheated. What I'm going to argue is that we do not know and there are details of this story that we need to take into consideration. Because another topic that I am extremely invested in is wrongful convictions and most of the time wrongful convictions happen because entire juries and even prosecutors can't think of any alternate explanations. Well, prosecutors can sometimes just be trying to get a conviction, but oftentimes they are overlooking alternate explanations. For those of you who are unaware, let's get you caught up to speed. Magnus Carlson is one of the best chess players in the world, if not the best. While getting caught up on this story and the main characters in it, I also learned that Magnus's mental health hasn't been doing well. This is important to note and we'll come back to it soon because there are some things going on that definitely need to be taken into consideration when stepping back and getting a full view of this story. The other main character in this story is Hans Nieman, an extremely young chess player who has been seeing a meteoric rise in success. What I didn't know about Hans is that he admitted to cheating when he was about 12 or 13 years old. While this may seem like it was a long time ago, Hans is currently only 19. So this is something to note as well. Not long ago, Hans and Magnus played in a quote-unquote over-the-board match, which to my understanding is basically just a live match because now in the internet age a lot of matches are taking place online, so over the board they were playing live and in person. During this match, Hans wins and rather than continuing in the tournament, Magnus decides to just straight up end his run and leave. As you know, this story involves cheating accusations, but there's also something to be said about someone like Magnus Carlson leaving the tournament after losing. It's important to ask questions when viewing this story in order to get closer to the truth. After his loss, it's easy to say Magnus left because Hans must have been cheating and Magnus has been suspicious for a while. But more importantly, we need to ask, would Magnus have reacted the same if the match was closer or would he have acted the same if someone else had beaten him? We don't know, but is it possible? Magnus is a multi-millionaire world champion chess player. It's hard to imagine not having a massive ego when that's what you're working with. Magnus is a sort of celebrity and hangs out with billionaires. But we may not know how he would have acted if the loss played out in a different way. I'm not sure how well he would have taken the loss against someone as young as Hans in any other situation. After this, Hans and Magnus played in a different tournament online. Based on how the system is set up, Magnus had to play at least one move before leaving and that's exactly what he did. He resigned from the tournament after one move and then he went silent. Today, at the time of recording this, after a lot of silence and speculation from the public, he released this lengthy statement. And if you've already read this, feel free to skip to the next part. I'll leave it at timestamp code down below. But for those of you who haven't, I'm going to go through and read this real quick. Dear Chess World, at the 2022 Sinkfield Cup, I made the unprecedented professional decision to withdraw from the tournament after my round three game against Hans Nieman. A week later, during the champion's chess tour, I resigned against Hans Nieman after playing only one move. I know that my actions may have frustrated many in the chess community. I'm frustrated. I want to play chess. I want to continue to play chess at the highest level in the best events. I believe that cheating and chess is a big deal and an existential threat to the game. I also believe that chess organizers and all those who care about the sanctity of the game we love should seriously consider increasing security measures and methods of cheat detection for over-the-board chess. When Nieman was invited last minute to the 2022 Sinkfield Cup, I strongly considered withdrawing prior to the event. I ultimately chose to play. I believe that Nieman has cheated more and more recently than he has publicly admitted. His over-the-board progress has been unusual and throughout our game in the Sinkfield Cup, I had the impression that he wasn't tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions. While playing me as Black in a way I think only a handful of players could do. This game contributed to changing my perspective. We must do something about cheating and for my part going forward, I don't want to play against people that have cheated repeatedly in the past because I don't know what they're capable of doing in the future. There is more that I would like to say. Unfortunately at this time I am limited in what I can say without explicit permission from Nieman to speak openly. So far I've only been able to speak with my actions and those actions have stated clearly that I am not willing to play chess with Nieman. I hope the truth on this matter comes out whatever it may be. Sincerely, Magnus Carlson, world chess champion. This is when I became interested in the story because I saw multiple people talking about it. I became extremely curious about what's going on. The primary question that I had as an outsider was how do you cheat at chess? So quick little backstory. In my younger days, I was there for the start of competitive esports with the game Counter-Strike. This game came after some others like Quake, but it's really what started taking esports to the next level. I used to travel around the world to different tournaments and all that fun stuff. So due to these games being played on computers, there were various ways to cheat. I was a writer, but I eventually became the coach of one of the best teams in the world. So I needed to know about the different ways people could cheat in the game. Of course, it was a lot easier to cheat online, but most international tournaments were in person on LAN, a local area network. Still, people would cheat. I will never forget going to a tournament where a team from Kazakhstan was caught cheating. If I remember correctly, they were either using thumb drives to try and upload illegal configs or their coach or somebody affiliated with the team was up in the stands behind opponents and signaling to them. Chess is completely different. When you play in person, it's just two people and a game board. So I had to learn all the ways a person could possibly cheat. As I dove into this story, the first thing that shocked me by the way was just how many people love chess. Every video I came across about this story on YouTube had tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of views. Some of these channels discussing chess even had hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and one even had over a million. I don't know if this has been going on for a while or if like the Queen's Gambit really made chess more mainstream. But the first video that I came across had the strongest quote unquote evidence that I found of cheating. And it made a little bit more sense to me about what's going on. And I'm going to do my best to explain it to my capability. But I'm going to link the video down in the description below, just in case you care to watch because I'm sure that they probably explain it a lot better than I ever could. So basically humans can only be so good at chess. Computers, on the other hand, can do all sorts of math much faster than any human. Computers can come up with probabilities and all that jazz. Well, this program can check how a human played and compare that to a computer. It gives a correlation percentage. And to put it into perspective, here's the correlations for some of the best matches and the best people in the world. Bobby Fisher during his 20 game consecutive winning streak had a 72 percent. Magnus Carlson, the guy we're talking about today at his best had 70 percent. Super top tier players, aka grandmasters, get about 62 to 67 percent. And the average top tier players in the grandmasters, they average about 57 to 62 percent. One guy named Sebastian Feller got a 98 percent correlation in Paris 2010 and that guy was caught cheating. Well, when they did this for Neiman, they found that this dude was getting 100 percent on quite a few games, which is insanely suspicious. And I will fully admit that, but albeit suspicious, we need to also take a look at the probabilities. Anyone who's read a single book on probabilities has probably heard of Nasim Taleb's bestselling book that everyone and their mom references, The Black Swan. The subtitle of this book is The Impact of Highly Improbable Events. Why, you may ask? Well, up until a certain point, people thought that there were only white swans. Then, boom, someone saw a black swan. We need to separate the difference between impossible and improbable. Throughout this book, Taleb lists a slew of quote-unquote black swan events that nobody expected nor prepared for. Well, I'm not a mathematician. I think we can all get the basics down for probabilities. Do you have any idea how many people believe in the supernatural and other strange things because they don't understand probabilities? They think that just because they thought about an old friend the other day and then that friend calls them that it's some kind of sign. They don't take into consideration all the times that they thought of a friend and they never got a phone call. The best way that I heard this explained was someone saying that there are over eight million people in New York City. That means that every single day, something happens to somebody that had a one in eight million chance. Now, with chess, this is different. Accidentally stumbling into such a crazy correlation rate isn't the same as a coincidence. But I don't see anyone asking if this is even possible. As an outsider, I'm curious about how this algorithm works. What's it comparing it to? Does it need to be updated? Is it updated? And is it possible that it's outdated? I know nothing about how this software works and maybe it's bulletproof. But again, we need to come back to asking how does one cheat at chess? Chess is massive and it gets a ton of viewers. They even checked Hans to see if he was smuggling in some kind of device into the tournament area, but nothing was found. Hans admitted that when he was 12, he cheated using a chess engine. Now it's seven years later and nothing was found on him when he played this over the board match. And what's funny is I'm now learning why I saw anal beads trending on Twitter the other week. There's speculation that Hans must have used some sort of anal device to cheat. If this were the case, it involved a second person who could morse code moves to him. While possible, I personally cannot imagine asking a friend to control that sort of device for me. So as of now, the best evidence we have is Hans' chess engine correlation and the speculation of this guy using some next level efforts to cheat at chess. What I also learned is that Hans has made chess his life and it's pretty much what he eats and breathes. The same is obviously said for Magnus, but since Magnus has been in it for so long, it's getting to him when he's not at his best. This is common amongst anyone who is playing at the highest level of any sport and we regularly hear stories of top athletes having mental breakdowns. When I came across this one video, I saw a clip of an interview Magnus did where he discusses how he's been questioning his abilities since 2017. He also discusses how this led to a deep depression which resulted in him curling up in a fetal position and just not knowing how he's going to manage going forward. By the time these two played, you have Magnus on the decline and Neiman on the rise. I don't think it's too crazy to think Magnus wouldn't take the loss very well in any circumstance. What I also learned while researching this story was that Magnus was the owner of Play Magnus which was bought out for $85.5 million by Chess.com. Chess.com is another big character in this story and they banned Hans shortly after he beat Magnus. As someone who has very little trust for the rich and anyone dealing with tens of millions of dollars, this all seems extremely shady to me. And as a top player, Hans clearly brings in a lot of money whenever he plays at these events. I think everyone should be fairly skeptical as they learn about these details. Let's say that we're 100% sure that Hans cheated. Even if that's the case, this is beyond unethical. I'm starting to wonder how Magnus can even be a player with such a massive conflict of interest. For anyone in the chess community, I'd be extremely concerned that Magnus has so much sway that he can get people banned without evidence. I don't know much about this guy's character but that doesn't even really matter. Anyone with that much power that can influence decisions is never a good thing. It's why I'm strongly against financial capitalism. Do we really want billionaires in control of who gets resources and who needs help? No thanks. It's never good when that much power is concentrated. What bothers me the most about this story is the body language reading and mind reading going on. Body language experts are some of the biggest grifters out there and the fact that people think that they can detect deception is just heartbreaking. Does body language prove that Hans Nieman cheated to beat the reigning chess champion? Find out next. And we're back shakers. Time and time again, it's been proven that even experts barely fare better than chance when trying to detect deception. And if you don't believe me, I highly recommend you go read the book Duped by Tim Levine as well as How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett. While researching the story, I kept coming across amateur body language experts and human lie detectors pointing at different things Hans has done or said as their quote unquote evidence of cheating. I know I'm gonna piss some of you chess players out there off with what I'm about to say but it needs to be said. Chess players are seen as being extremely intelligent, which they are, but if you're in the chess community and thinking that you can read body language, you really need to widen your scope of knowledge. Even in Magnus's statement, he points to body language reading. In his statement, he says the following, his over the board progress has been unusual. And throughout our game in the Sinkfield Cup, I had the impression that he wasn't tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do. If I'm being honest, what made me sit down to record this was seeing a tweet with thousands of likes saying something along the lines of, imagine thinking you have better intuition than Magnus Carlson and that he wouldn't know when someone's acting strange. Like, do you people realize that some of the smartest people in the world believe in conspiracy theories? I truly don't think people understand how insanely stupid smart people can be. Throughout the entire COVID pandemic, we have seen people with literal medical degrees push conspiracy theories. There are stories of Nobel Prize winners believing in insane things and geniuses getting conned by their long distance girlfriends that they've never even met who turned out being dudes who were scamming them. So yes, Magnus has years of experience in countless hours playing against people, but there's also a little thing called confirmation bias that nobody is immune to. Walking into a match against someone you already assume is cheating, everything they do is going to look like cheating. Why do you think the cops focus on the wrong suspect for 12 hours straight of interrogations? They lock in on someone and then everything the person does is just further evidence that they did the crime. Let's also think about this for just a minute. Sit back and I want you to get into the mind of a cheater. Magnus says that Hans wasn't quote unquote fully concentrating during their match. Now, if it were you, if you were going to cheat against one of the best players in the world, don't you think that you'd be concentrating? And if you were cheating, would you make it this blatantly obvious? Not only would Hans need to be the best cheater in the world, but he'd also need to be the dumbest. This really reminds me of conspiracy theorists thinking that these shadow organizations and the Illuminati are hiding clues in plain sight. If these people were actually trying to take over the world, why would they leave clues to get caught? Yes, it is possible that Hans cheated, but the guy would have to be a certified moron to be that obvious when knowing that the entire chess world would be looking and scrutinizing this match repeatedly if he won against Magnus. As mentioned earlier, I'm a recovering addict, so I get what it's like to royally screw up. Hans screwed up when he was 12 and I saw one YouTuber actually bring up the point that people grow and change. It's one of the reasons that I'm very pro-prism reform. We have this crazy idea that people can't change. Meanwhile, even you, yes, you can recognize how much you've changed over the years. Should someone be banned from chess forever for cheating when they're 12? Let's say even if they cheated when they were in their 30s or 40s and quote unquote, no better, is it justified to ban the person forever due to the crazy idea that they can't change? I saw some people say that if you don't have harsh punishments, it won't deter other cheaters. That's a terrible argument. In the United States, we have capital punishment, yet murders still happen. Clearly punishment isn't the best deterrent. This is why increasing sentences is such a dumb idea to reduce crime. And I doubt it'd be much different if you did it with chess. Again, it's 1,000% possible that Hans cheated. Maybe he has some Bluetooth anal beads and a really good friend. But as a stand, there's no evidence. And this multimillionaire is blowing up this kid's life. The burden of proof has somehow been shifted to the accused rather than the accuser. And that is scary. Maybe you haven't been in that position before, but I sure have been and it's awful. So hopefully you gain some new perspective on the situation and hopefully people can chill out before assuming this kid is guilty without any real evidence. All right, everybody, I hope you enjoyed that video. If you're new here, make sure you subscribe. I make a ton of videos, a bunch of different video essays. I'm very curious and interested in a lot of topics. Like I said, I just happened to go down this rabbit hole and wanted to talk about it, so make sure you're subscribed. And whether you're subscribed or not, make sure you follow me over on Instagram and Twitter at the Rewired Soul. That way you don't miss any updates. Aside from creating these YouTube videos, I also write a ton and I work on other projects. So follow me on social media and more importantly, I love chatting with all of you. So make sure you follow me at the Rewired Soul. All right, but anyways, that's all I got for this video. Have an amazing rest of your day and I'll see you next time. You next time.