Chess.com banned Hans after beating Magnus. Why?

By the way I'm still leaning towards he's innocent OTB.

But I completely believe chess.com regarding the online stuff.

I heard Lucille Ball could hear radio transmissions that nobody else could hear because the cavity fillings in her teeth acted like antennas. Probably a rumor, but it does make you wonder if there are other ways to communicate other than cell phones. 

Haha, now that I know some things about wireless communication that's a pretty funny idea to me... previously I thought, you know, maybe in some weird rare case, but no, that's not how radios (or ears) work

Sure there are other ways to communicate besides cell phone. Radio waves, microwaves, light waves... they're all the same thing just different frequencies. Maybe you've heard of li-fi? It's like wifi except with light. Higher data rate, but highly directional (you need line of sight).

Anyway, the point is detecting wireless communication is not rocket science... all you have to do is scan the frequencies you want to listen in on. You can buy a scanner for relatively cheap. You can even buy super fancy stuff like network analyzers (not cheap, but Rex is a billionaire or whatever).

So let's say I have an arduino or raspberry pi, and I'm sending morse code... that's something you could detect.

Once again, for those in the back, Niemann is currently banned from chess.com. Niemann himself made it public, and Danny Rensch confirmed it. 

What is the evidence that he cheated in the game against Carlson, I have not seen any yet other than speculation. I'd like to know.

Yeah but could you detect a code that nobody else knows? For example, you have fillings in your teeth (or a metal hip or whatever)  that allow you to receive some sort of communication, but that communication isn't "do this". But instead, the radio (or whatever communication) is, say, a popular song. But the receiver knows which songs mean what. I'll bet no matter where you go in St. Lous, the air is full of all kinds of different communication buzzing back and forth. 

Hans still lying about cheating, what ever. He should have never been allowed into this tournament, but the Sinquefields love their Americans, and Hans was (as of late) the highest rated after Shankland and Naka who both declined. Too bad we didn't get Xiong or someone else clean and not a toxic blowhard liar. People like Hans burn everything they touch, including the Grand Chess Tour unfortunately

This scandal literally brought popularity to chess, like if anything the Grand chess tour benefited from this

Yeah, that makes sense, you could transmit on some radio station's frequency, and use songs as code. That's a fun idea

I think the tip off there would be the power of the signal... ok if you were really meticulous you could even work to copy that... heck you could have someone at an actual radio station collaborating with you lol.

But that gets into the realm of it's easier to be a real 2700 than it is to be a real life Mission Impossible. Sure, they're not having him play naked in an anechoic chamber, so it's always possible, but I mean come on, he's young, COVID happened, a lot of young players did nothing but chess, is it that hard to believe he's 2700? I think it's easier than this other stuff, that's for sure.

 What is really suspicious and makes me doubt about chess.com's side of the story, is they had invited him to a tournament a few days before he beat Magnus, and then they drop him as if he had always been a confirmed cheater (since the time he cheated many years ago and was pardoned by chess.com). 

 If they already had proof he was cheating and it's all a "timing coincidence" (him beating Magnus at the same time chess.com bans him for unrelated cheating), why would they invite him to a tournament? 

Very very fishy. At the time chess.com is merging with the play magnus app for tens of millions. Hmmm... 

By the way, in So's interview today, he said Rex reassured him that he'd made the chess club more secure than the White House... a pretty big boast from a very rich and very big chess fan if all they're doing is some simple stuff.

I assume they can check anyone with a few clicks.

It's in the news that Hans is suspicious, so some staff member clicks a few buttons on Hans and discovers some cheating 1 month ago (I'm just guessing) and so they ban him.

Yes it's very bad timing. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess they should have waited until this tournament was over. In any case I think we can imagine scenarios (like this) where chess.com is fully justified in banning him, and justified in only discovering he cheated after he beat Carlsen.

I think there has been a lack of maturity in handling the situation by Magnus and many other parties. Hopefully, people will reflect on the situation and make better decisions in the future. That's the least we can hope for.

Umm yeah, no.  Welcome to the 2020s.

Anyone on a whim can buy $15 earbuds on Amazon that are so tiny you can put them basically on your eardrums (but don't).  The metal coils for the receiver would be too small to get picked up by metal detectors unless you wand their ear canal directly...which just doesn't happen.

Those entry level "spy" earbuds would not work, because you have to wear extra stuff (which is why I feel okay even mentioning them here), but it shows how easy this is to approach with a modicum of effort and the will to do it.  There are a dozen companies in the US that will build you a custom receiver exactly to your specifications for about $2,000-$3000 dollars.

The era of smartphones in the soles of sneakers is done.

There are many arguments one can make in this discussion, but "that's just not possible" is not one of them. 

Find the evidence, I think it is completely non-existent at this point.

I forgot if I mentioned it in this topic, but Finegold said it didn't make sense to withdraw immediately after a game like that, even if you thought it was cheating. So Finegold hinted that maybe something happened earlier (such as being cheated in their recent rapid games).

That makes some sense to me and isn't something people are talking about... only "some" sense because... I don't know why Carlsen would have enough conviction to quit but still be unwilling to say something.

chess.com,  show the  evidences !

It was a bad Idea to ban Hans from chess.com again, it will only fuel the drama further. What absolutely needs to be done is to enhance anti-cheating measures and to figure out what has actually happened in these matches. Tiny devices protected by tiny Faraday cages? How do inmates smuggle mobile phones into jails? Things like that.

Here's a story that may help illustrate what is going on at this site. Recently, a friend of mine from the local club who is rated around 1600 USCF got fed up seeing 400 rated players win tournaments. Now, this is a guy who is ex military and does everything by the book. He never uses an engine or opening book during a game, and plays to the best of his ability every game. And in all the years he has played on this site, he has placed in about 3 arena tournaments.

So, he creates an alt account and places in 10 arena tournaments in two weeks, and he wasn't playing that often. He threw games to keep the rating of the alt account down while trying not to raise any red flags. He reported that it was almost trivial for him to do this. Only once did he get an alert that his rating had dropped too low for him to enter an arena tournament after recently winning one. He won a few games, got his rating up to the bare minimum, and won that one, too.

After weeks of causing mayhem in tournaments and painfully throwing games to triple digit players, the account was banned. Not because of fair play, however. It was banned because someone found the account name to be offensive.

The TLDR of this is, it was trivially easy for him to scam tournament after tournament on this site. Not only that, he wound up placing first every single week in his league except for one (his work schedule was particularly brutal that week). The leagues give players one more bit of incentive to play dirty.

I find it crazy that this site homes in on a player who can legitimately defeat the world champion while not only ignoring massive amounts of cheating but also creates the incentive for players to do just that. The site isn't getting another dime from me, ever, until these problems are fixed. And they are fixable.

That's not what's fueling the drama. What's fueling the drama is that players have given up on tournaments on this site because they are nearly always full of sandbaggers and cheats. The correct answer to this problem is to close any and all tournaments to non-premium accounts. This is in keeping with how the USCF operated for years; you could walk into any club with no rating and no membership in the USCF and play, but if you wanted to enter a tournament, you had to pony up a membership fee (and usually another fee for the state federation, which, to me, is a whole other ripoff).