Hans Nieman is the real deal

Proofs don't exist outside of mathematics. He was using the word in a colloquial sense. Stop asking stupid questions.

Don't need to. I'm not trying to state as a fact he did.

Think we know that proof, in this context, means hard evidence, which he didn't provide.

Stop being an insulting jerk.

No.

Hans became an NM from 2 years from like 1000 uscf. He's actually super talented and insane

If you think asking for evidence for your claim is over the top then I think the problem is yours.

But, sure, block me, if that makes you happy.

Former world champion Vishy was befuddled on how anyone thought he cheated.  He said Hans made perfectly human moves. Other GMs have said the same thing.  Does your rating of 1760 mean anything when questioning world class players?  Here is more proof we were being lied to.

Plus chess.com's report generated some nasty headlines. Headlines like "Cheated in 100 games!" So in most people's mind he's a dirty cheater, even though that's not what the evidence suggests.

And again, we have to ask, if he's such a cheater, why is his account still open?

@hansontwitch

Why is FIDE letting him continue to play in tournaments OTB?

The answer is he's not a cheater, at least not in the last few years, not that anyone can tell. His account was locked after beating Carlsen. His account remained locked because chess.com was trying to save face. Now it's probably locked because he filed a lawsuit, so they're legitimate enemies... but chess.com was the aggressor. Hans was just minding his own business when chess.com kicked him out of the CGC and locked his account. Only afterwards did they try to justify it, and, shamefully, they were unable to.

Have none of you Hans supporters seen the interview Hans did after the Alireza match? Even if you're a genius player who plays absolute bot moves you would be able to give a logical reasoning behind your play, but he was unable to give a convincing analysis (lets be honest it was terrible, relative to someone who's supposed to be 2600+, even the commentator out-analysed him).  "Chess speaks for itself" is a poor excuse for " I don't know what I was doing and I can't explain it because the engine gave me the moves so imma act mysterious and bow out".

Hans might not be cheating every game he plays but games like this are a valid reason why people are and should continue to be sus about him. The only "real" fact here is the fact that he has admitted, and been proven to have cheated, period. Yall need to stop with the "underdog beats champion" fantasy, it's not real lmao 

He's a weird guy, he's always given weird interviews. That's not proof he cheated... sure it's reason to think he's weird, but that's it.

He cheated 2 years ago and chess.com let him keep playing after he promised to not cheat anymore... after the entire world (including chess.com) tried to find evidence of him breaking that promise, they couldn't find a single game he cheated in.

Once again.  Vishy and other world class players know a lot more about chess than you or I do.  What's your problem?

I made a reply but apparently I violated some sort of community guidelines, so here's my 2nd reply.

Weird does not equal bad; he might go off tangent and talk about how he absolutely loves animals and how he was inspired to play chess by a random mountain goat. That's weird, but ok cool I guess.

But what he was doing was giving a terrible post-game analysis. That's just him being BAD (unless you consider the fact that he being a GM is not able to justify his own moves, which is weird). As a GM (and playing with standard time control, long time to think there), he should have thought of each move (or at least the crucial moves) very deeply, and GMs (or high rated players actually) tend to remember most if not all of those variations. They don't go and recalculate everything from scratch (which was what Hans was trying and failing to do, because he didn't come up with the moves himself, or at least it seemed that way to me).

I think that fact alone raises MANY alarms, because how do you come up with not just one, but many good moves, then fail to justify any of them? It's statistically improbable (and rightly so).

First of all, he's GM strength... so he could have faked it better than "it's just an obvious move, you attack Alireza because he's bad at defending." He just chose not to.

Second of all he came back the next day, in the next interview, said that "people say I can't do analysis but that's ridiculous" and then gave good analysis.

Third, there's the question of cheating. If he were getting moves from a device (meaning he didn't calculate anything) then he would have been caught by all the scanning they did. So if he were cheating, the best he could have gotten was some small clues like calculate more here, or move the queen, etc... in other words he'd still have to calculate, so he'd still be able to give better interviews than that.

The interview(s) were actually not that suspicious, it's just that all together, in combination with everything else, Hans was suspicious.

And I want to really hammer this point...

If he's such a cheater, why isn't his chess.com account banned?
And why is FIDE letting him continue to play OTB?

---

I'm not saying we won't find evidence in the future. I'm saying the world's leading authorities don't currently find him so suspicious, so why should you?

I can't speak for them, I'm sure they had their reasons for forming the basis for their opinion. However, I am talking specifically about the Hans vs Alireza game here. I think the whole point of my argument is to say that if he's sus in one game, it raises a bunch of questions about how many more "sus" games he might have played, which have gone undetected.

Also, if you know what you're doing its actually fairly easy to cheat in chess (online chess, that is). While Hans may not be at super-GM strength, he is at the very least at IM/low GM strength (and thus we can assume he does in fact have quite a lot of theoretical knowledge). When cheaters (especially low rated players) first start out, they just throw in all the engine moves and get caught because they play all the best moves which just screams "HEY LOOK AT ME I'M USING ENGINE ASSISTANCE".

But strong players can use their theory (and relative knowledge of what kind of moves they can get away with that won't scream "SUS") to pick 2nd or 3rd best moves which, while not as strong as an absolute bot move, are still believable for their level of play. Obviously, this gets harder with OTB games because I suppose its difficult to get multiple lines fed to you, but this could also be possible if you had a strong player doing the "engine to human" analysis for you and feeding you the "human" moves directly.

Now, this would be incredibly difficult to prove (because I guess we need concrete and damning evidence before an innocent person can be pronounced guilty), and this is probably why FIDE hasn't actually sent the banhammer down on him, or why other strong GMs may have reservations about actually passing judgement (refer to the $100 million lawsuit; also don't forget that there are other GMs out there who are just as suspicious of his play as well).

Nevertheless, the Hans vs Alireza interview provides damning evidence against Hans. Possibly because he wasn't expecting the engine eval to be turned off (and hence he can't wing his way out of the situation because he doesn't know if the moves are good or bad), he screwed up majorly for the whole world to see, and this is why I think that he is a cheat. I'm not just basing my opinion on hearsay, I think this is a pretty logical conclusion to come by. 

I think my reply is relevant to some of the points that you have raised as well; also just because you are GM strength doesn't mean you can instantly do a perfect analysis on the spot. If he had been given some time to prepare, I'm sure he could have come up with the solutions; however this again proves my point that he was thinking on his feet, because he didn't come up with those moves himself (or he would have instantly been able to defend his ideas; its just like writing a thesis, how is it possible for you to not know what you're doing and being unable to defend your thesis if you've spent so much time researching something?)

So this video purports to show we were "LIED!!!" to by showing a single move that doesn't correspond with the engine.

Problem is, depending on how long you let the engine think, it in fact DOES show 22...Qxe5 as best (as tested with Stockfish)

Seems to me like the guy is more keen on stoking the controversy to get views than to be objective.

Again, the whole "it's hard to find physical evidence to justify" thing, which is why he's been banned only on chess.com. I'm not sure what you mean by chess.com hasn't banned him, I'm pretty sure he's banned now (the $100 million lawsuit against chess.com, and also I'm pretty sure chess.com released a long report about Hans' cheating case and how they justified that they had determined that he was in fact cheating, much more than he admitted and much more recently as well)

It's more of his approach to the analysis that I'm talking about rather than whether or not he found the right move.

If he had truly come up with his moves, he would have been able to justify exactly why he chose to play the way he did, concrete and logical reasoning. Whether or not the reason is wrong is another matter, but he would have had a convincing argument.

However, in the interview it was clear that he was unprepared, and did not know what he was doing. Whether or not he managed to find some decent continuation on the spot is irrelevant, because the point is he was already supposed to have thought these things out during the game (and the fact that he hasn't is quite telling indeed).