I for one think Hans is great for chess! He's improving ratings. And he's not cheating, he's just a guy who loves playing alot.
The Niemann Effect
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Try lichess.org instead for online games. They seem to be more honest there in online play.
Just look at that wall of text! This troll really put some work into his trolling.
Sep 21, 2023
0
#6
i dunno, am at 1300 and if you need to cheat just to get there, then i really dont care..... i can never assume it is a single human i am playing against. maybe they have a friend who is watching and blurts out something to stop them blundering. maybe the friend blurts out something to amke them blunder... maybe they need to go to the toilet. So iy am playing someone who's natural level is 500 but has cheated to get their level to 1300 then my opponent is 1300, whether the opponent is "composite' or not even the world champ has seconds who may or may not be of equal quality to their opponents. They may have chess theoris they push on the candidate that are useful or not. The candidate may be influenced or not......... Anyway at a higher level , or where money is concerned cheating really needs to be stompt out, and if i can get some points back (like what happened once) thats great....but day to day... i just paly (AND TRY NOT TO BLUNDER)
I'm not sure how well this has been discussed, or if it is at all possible to discuss here, but I'm going to give it a try anyway.
I used to play Yahoo chess (aka wild west chess) back in the early 2000s, and I mostly play on Chess With Friends right now, but I've recently had the urge to branch out and play more people online so that's why I opened an account here. I do have a YouTube channel, and I do follow multiple Chess streamers, and I have followed the Hans Niemann scandal and have followed the topic of cheating online for a long time, which in all honestly, is one of the main reasons that has kept me from playing online chess (other than with friends and friends of friends).
Now, this fear that I had of online play was actually twofold. Most people get a kick out of the first, but it is what it is. My first fear is that someday my chess skill will just magically kick in one day and all my games will be played with 100 percent accuracy and I'll be labeled as a cheater because this notion "just getting good" is not possible, even though many motivators and philosophers have countless hours of material stating otherwise. And that line about Bobby Fischer just one day getting out of everybody's league has stuck in my brain. I feel like there's a levee, and that levee just eventually breaks due to the hours of pressure that beating on your craft brings. Anyway, that's my first fear. My second fear (about playing random strangers) is that every loss I take will be because my opponent has used an unfair advantage against me. And if he/she isn't caught, then they just got away with it and they got away with a piece of my green and still developing chess ego.
These were my two fears, but what led me to reach out to the chess.com community is that I now have a third fear that has reared its ugly head as of late, and that is what I refer to as the "Niemann Effect." I feel that bringing back Hans Niemann is actually encouraging other people to cheat their way to "better competition" instead of playing games fairly and working your way up the ladder. i feel like cheating isn't as demonized as it should be, and people Like Danny make videos (reading the emails from cheaters) and joke about how it's a very light subject and they'll just gift people memberships for being a sympathetic cheater. I feel that Hans Niemann has given online chess a virus, and that virus is slowly killing online chess. But, if online chess dies, does that mean that more people will seek to play OTB, like the game was intended to be played - like Fischer played it. Maybe online chess needs to die, so that we can reconnect again and look our opponents in the eye and watch their souls crumble as we close in on them. I don't know, so I turn it over to you.
Side note, what prompted this topic was that my very first game on here was played with somebody who was using an unfair advantage against me. How do you like that? :/