Andrew McGettigan

Bloggers, podcasters and streamers have pored over Hans Niemann’s more recent efforts, competing to produce an analysis that lays to rest the debates over reform or recidivism. None has really cut it. Now Chess.com have released an internal report alleging that Niemann cheated in more than a hundred online games in the lead-up to his second ban from the site in 2020.

‘Chess speaks for itself,’ Hans Niemann said last month after unexpectedly defeating the world number one, Magnus Carlsen, in Miami. He beat him again in the Sinquefield Cup in St Louis on 4 September. The following day Carlsen pulled out of the tournament, announcing his withdrawal on Twitter ten minutes before play was scheduled to start. He wouldn’t give a reason, but embedded a YouTube clip of Jose Mourinho saying: ‘If I speak, I am in big trouble.’

The 44th chess Olympiad concluded in Chennai last week with Ukraine’s women edging out Georgia and Uzbekistan winning the open competition with a team fielding only one player over the age of twenty. A raft of teenagers dominated the headlines with the sixteen-year-old Indian sensation Gukesh D taking the gold medal for best performance on the top board and almost leading India’s B-team – in effect an under-21 side – to gold. He was left to rue a blunder in the penultimate round against the Uzbeki seventeen-year-old Nodirbek Abdusattorov. Gukesh was so distraught he held his head in his hands and allowed his clock to run out rather than resign. His team left with bronze, one place ahead of India A.

As Friday 3 December ticked over into Saturday morning in Dubai, Magnus Carlsen edged ahead with the sixth game of his title defence against Ian Nepomniachtchi. After five draws, Carlsen broke the deadlock by winning the longest game in World Chess Championship history: nearly eight hours of play and more than 130 moves each. The extremely high levels of play from both players in the first week of the contest promised well for the second half of the fourteen-game match. But less than a week later it was all over: Nepomniachtchi contrived to lose three of the next five games, and Carlsen was declared the champion for the fifth time on Friday 10 December.

Three years after his last title match in London, the world chess champion, Magnus Carlsen, is defending his crown for the fourth time in Dubai. He will turn 31 at the end of the month, on the day of the fourth of fourteen scheduled match games. He has been world number one continuously since his late teens. His challenger is Ian Nepomniachtchi, currently ranked fifth in the world. They are the same age and have been playing each other for nearly twenty years. Nepomniachtchi won twice in youth tournaments before both became grandmasters and in their thirteen classical encounters Carlsen has won only once. But the last of Nepomniachtchi’s four victories was in 2017, when Carlsen was said to have been suffering with a cold.