Chess Legend Magnus Carlsen Lost to Upstart Hans Niemann—Then All Hell Broke Loose

Ten minutes past one in the afternoon—and Magnus Carlsen’s world was crashing down around him. This can’t be happening. Magnus ran a hand through his disheveled mane of auburn hair, a chaotic halo framing his disbelief. He was hunched over, his shoulders rounded beneath the material of his dark blue blazer; his strong, square features were glistening with sweat. One of his hands covered the lower half of his face, as if he could hide himself from the scene unfolding in front of him and somehow make it less real. Impossible. The pieces on the board seemed to dance and blur before his eyes. Usually, when he looked at a chessboard, the clarity was almost painful; he wouldn’t just see the pieces where they were, but where they were supposed to be. People who watched him play (and since before he could remember, people had always been watching him play) often described what he did at a chessboard as clairvoyant. He didn’t just see a dozen moves ahead, he saw to the end of the game, and often through the next game and the game after that. Magnus Carlsen wasn’t just another chess player. Nor was he merely the reigning champion of this particular tournament—the Sinquefield Cup, one of the most prestigious chess Grandmaster events in the United States. Magnus Carlsen was, quite simply, the greatest player in the millennium-and-a-half history of chess. He had begun his career as the youngest Grandmaster ever at the age of thirteen. Coming into the Sinquefield Cup, he’d won a staggering fifty-three consecutive in-person games. And unlike most of his colleagues, he was a burgeoning celebrity away from the chessboard, with crossover, international appeal. His sponsorships included Mastercard, Unibet, and a bottled water company based in his home country of Norway. His own chess app, Play Magnus, was listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange with a valuation of over $100 million. Even among his fellow Grandmasters he was roundly considered the most dominant player to have ever played the game. And yet, if the chess pieces currently swimming in front of his eyes weren’t some sort of terrible mirage, Magnus was losing. Magnus blinked hard, trying to see a way out, and when that failed, he did what he’d been avoiding for the past ten minutes and glanced across the table at his opponent. Immediately, he tasted bile rising up the inside of his throat. The damn kid doesn’t even seem to be paying attention. Yes, a kid, barely nineteen years old, squarely a member of the next generation who had come of age in the midst of the pandemic, during which chess was almost exclusively a game of pixels on a screen. A nobody with a shock of wild, curly hair that made Magnus’s own seem tame. Beneath that hair: narrow eyes, pursed lips, rounded chin. He wasn’t even looking at the board; he was gazing around the hall, distracted. Hell, he appeared to be chewing gum. The truth was, Hans Niemann shouldn’t have been sitting across from a living legend like Magnus Carlsen. Niemann hadn’t even initially been invited to the Sinquefield tournament; although he was a Grandmaster, he had been added to the roster as a last-minute replacement for Richárd Rapport, a player at the time ranked sixteenth in the world, who had been caught up in COVID-related restrictions. Hans was barely ranked fortieth going into the Sinquefield, the lowest-placed competitor in the tournament. Hans was the one who should have been trembling in his seat. He was the one who should have been drenched in sweat, fighting for his life. Magnus had heard stories about Hans’s behavior outside of the game. There were plenty of wild rumors: profanity-laden interviews, trashed hotel rooms, grandiose pronouncements that were in no way backed up by tournament play. Some members of the industry were already calling him the current “bad boy of chess,” the sort of thing that made competitors at Magnus’s level roll their eyes. Players like Hans came and went, propped up more by the drama surrounding their antics than their game play. Hans was a provocateur, not a prodigy—and certainly not a threat. Yet piece by piece, Hans was now outplaying the world champion. This nobody—this fucking kid—was beating him. And it dawned on Magnus, as he calculated back through Hans Niemann’s nearly perfect play, the kid’s odd, distracted behavior as he made move after seemingly perfect move, perhaps there was something more going on. Of course, he had lost chess games before. Dozens of games, perhaps hundreds, over the years. Magnus wasn’t a computer, only the closest thing humanity had to one; he was fallible. But this kid had taken Magnus apart as if it had been no more difficult than putting on a pair of socks. Even now, with Magnus’s king surrounded and on the run, Hans was barely paying attention. He didn’t look amazed at what he had just accomplished, destroying the greatest player at the peak of his prowess. He looked—bored. Magnus shook his head, his damp hair flopping against the back of his neck. This was impossible, but this was happening—so what did that mean? What was he missing? He glanced past Hans, toward the match’s arbiter, and then toward photographer Lennart Ootes, one of the most respected lensmen in the chess world. Magnus had noticed that Ootes spent a lot of time hovering around his match, sometimes on his feet, sometimes sitting on one of the couches that faced Hans. Had Ootes been watching the pieces as the game had devolved? Had he understood what was happening on the board? Could he have inadvertently reacted to something he’d seen? Could he have given Hans information without meaning to, or even worse—could he have—could he have— It was a ridiculous thought. But still, it nagged at Magnus, and even before he’d thought it through he was suddenly walking toward Ootes. Magnus looked at the photographer, and then the camera. “If you take photos of a specific game, that is a massive tell.” It wasn’t an accusation, exactly, but Magnus’s frustration coming out in angry words. Information can be passed, even by accident. And Ootes—well, Ootes had a laptop, he had access to the internet—but even without the internet, he could have seen something, could have reacted, Hans could have noticed— Then Magnus turned and stormed back to his seat. He was still fuming, but there was nothing else to say. Staring at the swirling pieces, swallowing back the bitter taste rising in his chest—Magnus knew; it was over. Hans had won. The small audience gasped as Magnus resigned from the game, rose from the table, and stalked out of the hall. *** September 5, 2022 Hans, leading the field after his upset the day before, was well on his way to making chess history, totally locked in and mentally on point, ready to fucking go, go, go. And that’s when he realized that something was wrong. It was a feeling at first; the playing hall had gone oddly silent. It was Hans’s move, but when he glanced up at his opponent Ali Firouzja, he saw that Firouzja wasn’t looking back at him, or at the board between them. Firouzja was peering behind Hans. Everyone else in the room seemed to be looking in the same direction as Firouzja. At an empty chair. Magnus Carlsen’s empty chair. Magnus had also been set to play that afternoon, but he hadn’t shown up. Maybe he was sick. Maybe something personal had happened that had kept him from the gaming hall. Maybe, maybe, maybe— Hans turned back to his board, red splotches rising on his cheeks. Now he realized everyone in the gaming hall was looking at him. Some with furtive glances, some outright staring. And he knew. Magnus hadn’t shown up to play in the fourth round of the tournament—because of him. Two hours later, Hans stormed out of the gaming hall and raced past the Chess Hall of Fame. There were people at the tables on the stone patio in front of the building, and some of them looked up as he went past—one or two were even pointing—but he kept his head down and his eyes on the sidewalk. By the time he’d made it to the entrance of the Chase Hotel he had his phone out. The first text he saw was from a friend—the Iranian chess player Amin Tabatabaei. It told him what he had already guessed: Magnus had officially dropped out of the Sinquefield Cup. That alone would have set the chess world spinning, but there was more. Magnus had also posted a tweet to his one million followers a few minutes after the fourth round of the tournament had begun:

I’ve withdrawn from the tournament. I’ve always enjoyed playing in the @STLChessClub, and hope to be back in the future.

Attached to the tweet was a YouTube video of soccer coach José Mourinho uttering what had since become a famous quote: “I prefer not to speak. If I speak, I am in big trouble. In big trouble. And I don’t want to be in big trouble.” The implication of his words was that something nefarious had been going on. By not speaking, he was saying an awful lot. Scrolling through Magnus’s feed, Hans could see that everyone had come to the same conclusion: Magnus was accusing Hans of cheating. The idea was spreading, like an infection. Videos all over YouTube were analyzing the game between him and Magnus, poring over his history as a player, and even taking apart the interview he’d done right after his victory. People were commenting on Hans’s admittedly poor analysis of how he’d beaten Magnus: how he had predicted, by some “miracle,” that Magnus would use an unconventional opening move from a previous game; how during the interview he’d suddenly seemed to be speaking in a clipped, vaguely European accent. Hans had spent a big part of his childhood in Europe, and much of his adult life hopping between various eastern European cities: when he was tired, or overexcited, or both, sometimes his words found a cadence all their own. Hans’s fingers tightened against his phone as he threw himself down onto the couch, his anger rising. He thought back to when he’d first entered the gaming arena that early afternoon. Of course he’d noticed that the security measures had been increased; at the start of the game, he’d also been told that there would now be a fifteen-minute delay on the livestream of the matches. But it hadn’t, at the time, dawned on him that though it affected all of the players equally, the increased security had really been aimed at him. His thoughts were interrupted as his gaze inadvertently slid to a notification along the border of his laptop screen—a new email, this message not from a friend or a family member or an ex-girlfriend, but from Chess.com. Hans opened the email. His eyes went wide:

Sept 6, 6:20 PM

Dear Hans,

Chess.com has elected to privately remove access from your account on Chess.com, and we are rescinding the invitation to join the CGC per your qualified spot.

Chess.com retains the right to close/remove access to any account at anytime without explanation . . .

We will however be providing you with your full compensation of $5,000.00 US dollars for the

qualified spot in the CGC. You can claim your prize here . . .

Best wishes.

Chess.com Team—

Chess.com had kicked him off the site. Just as bad, if not worse—they had taken him out of their upcoming flagship tournament, which he had qualified for with his online blitz play. “Rescinding the invitation”? That was utter bullshit. Hans had earned his spot in the tournament. And they’d offered him a paltry $5,000? The prize money for the CGC was a million dollars. This was a conspiracy, this was the Chess.com mafia working together to destroy him. He knew—the whole chess world knew—that Chess.com and its co-founder Danny Rensch had just bought Magnus’s company. Magnus had insinuated that Hans had beaten him by cheating—and now Chess.com was putting its support behind him. Even if he had cheated—even if he’d somehow gotten a few moves from some chess engine, or gotten a message from a partner watching the livestream through some device in his ear, or in his sock, or taped to the back of his spine, or even if he’d gotten an inadvertent tell from someone in the room, or somehow X-rayed Magnus Carlsen’s fucking skull and read his mind—they were coming after him with no evidence, just on the word, the suspicion, of the world champion. And now they weren’t just protesting a game in a tournament, they were deliberately setting out to destroy him. His reputation, his career, his entire life. He had somehow beaten Magnus, ruined his winning streak, embarrassed him in front of the chess world, and now Magnus and his mafia partners at Chess.com were going to break Hans into a million pieces. *** September 7, 2022 Babs, as a professional internet troll, lived for this sort of thing. Not professional in the sense that he made any money posting things that weren’t exactly true to get a rise out of people—but it was how he spent the majority of his time. By day, he worked on the railroad, taking tickets from barely conscious commuters. But at night and on most weekends and sometimes even during his lunch break he was on his phone or laptop, making hay. Usually, politics was his main game; the Liverpool native was a liberal in the English sense of the word, which meant he was on the verge of being a socialist. But tonight he’d fancied a little change in his routine and had wandered over to a corner of the web that dealt with one of his side hobbies: a subreddit, actually, called Anarchy Chess. Babs played a little, but watched a lot, especially since the pandemic—and the six months when the trains were basically shut down. Watching people online waging battles with chess pieces seemed a whole lot safer than dealing with the reality of a global plague. Anarchy Chess was one of his favorite subreddits dedicated to the growing e-sport, and tonight, it did not disappoint. The chat room was on fire, because Magnus Carlsen had lost to the kid—Hans Niemann—and then implied that Hans had cheated. The subreddit was going wild trying to come up with ways Hans could have done so, from the mundane—a receiver in his ear or an RFD ring on a toe—to the more creative. As an amateur, Babs had no idea if Hans had cheated or not; frankly, he didn’t care. He doubted anyone on the subreddit knew enough about chess to make an intelligent guess. But that wasn’t what any of this was about. You didn’t score points with intelligence; you scored points with humor, and by throwing bricks. One brick, in particular, had really caught Babs’s attention: Someone had raised the idea that maybe Hans had used some sort of prostate massager to get information. Babs had nearly jumped up in his seat. For a professional internet troll, nothing hit the sweet spot like a comment that involved a human rectum. It was pure trolling art: it offended and titillated at exactly the same rate. Even so, Babs could tell that the comment wasn’t quite there yet.“Prostate massager” was wordy, unbalanced, vague, and, above all, complicated. Not everyone knew what a prostate was, or why anyone would want to massage one. Besides, the visual was off; who the hell knew what a prostate massager looked like? He and his friends on the subreddit began workshopping, throwing out different ways to rephrase the concept, even pulling up pictures from various adult websites and catalogs. The hours ticked by, the traffic slowing on the narrow street outside his maisonette’s window and the telly getting louder as Babs’s girlfriend got deeper into her stories. And then suddenly, he had it: Anal beads. It was perfect. Simple, visual—nay, cinematic—and objectively funny. Everyone on the subreddit agreed it had the makings of a perfect viral post. One hand still over his mouth, holding back his laughter, Babs used his other hand to tell his buddies to close out of the Anarchy Chess subreddit and swipe over to one of his favorite chess streams—a YouTube channel called Chessbrah that was hosted by a couple of Canadian Grandmasters, Eric Hansen and Aman Hambleton. Once Babs was in the chat—and saw a bunch of his friends from the subreddit join in right after him—the game began. All of them, at once, began commenting back and forth about the Hans Niemann–Magnus Carlsen match, and specifically, one at a time, mentioning their theory—that maybe Hans had made use of anal beads to cheat. At the moment, Hansen was the lone host, which meant he was more likely to be reading off the comments. Babs and his friends all came up with different ways of saying it, but all that really mattered was that they were, indeed, saying it. And then, exactly as Babs had predicted, Hansen just couldn’t help himself— “That’s probably a good one, right? An anal bead probably would beat the thing. I’m serious. If the engine—it would probably—I don’t know. I really don’t know. Like think about it. I don’t know. I told you it was a prostate missile. But I’m not an expert at that stuff. I’m not the one.” Babs banged a fist against his desk. His girlfriend glared over her shoulder at him. He quickly hit keys and captured Hansen’s comments, just twenty-two seconds of stream time, the perfect clip. Getting it just right took a little time, a lot of effort, but this was what separated the pros from the wankers. This was his art. Now it was just a matter of getting the tweet right. He made the post about a minute after ten:

Currently obsessed with the notion that Hans Niemann has been cheating at the Sinquefield Cup chess tournament using wireless anal beads that vibrate him the correct moves.

And attached right there, the video clip of Hansen saying basically the same thing. It was a work of beauty. Babs stared at it for a full minute and then hit refresh on his feed. A few little hearts appeared beneath the tweet, a handful of likes. He refreshed again. Another like, one retweet. Again. A trickle more—and then, nothing. But by lunchtime the next day, he had thousands of likes, thousands of retweets—God damn, this was it, the Holy Grail. His tweet had gone viral. The comments beneath his tweet were going even more mental, not because of the tweet itself, but because of a retweet, and he opened the retweet, and he saw who had retweeted him, and his eyes went wide and his toastie fell onto his lap with a plop— Elon Musk. Musk had retweeted him, adding a comment of his own, in the form of a quote:

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit, genius hits a target no one can see (cause it’s in ur butt)”

— Schopenhauer

His tweet was now working its way into mainstream media all over the world. Morning and midday talk shows, actual print papers, even television news—the idea that Hans Niemann might have cheated using anal beads was exploding through the public consciousness. Eventually, he had no doubt, it would be on the nighttime comedy shows, the Colberts and the Fallons and the Kimmels, maybe even SNL. He’d really done it. He’d created something that had not only gone viral but had leaked out into the physical world. Everyone was talking about Hans Niemann cheating with anal beads. In a way, Magnus’s vague insinuations had now turned into something real. Maybe it wasn’t “A Day in the Life,” but he’d made an impression; he’d done something that was now resonating through the mainstream. Kind of like the kinetic waves that might reverberate off the world’s biggest set of— Babs grinned, then started laughing again, so loud it shook him in his seat. Excerpted from CHECKMATE: Genius, Lies, Ambition, and the Biggest Scandal in Chess by Ben Mezrich, published on June 2, 2026. Copyright © 2026 by Mezco, Inc. Used by arrangement with Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.