Magnus Carlsen resigns from chess match against Hans Niemann
The two were playing an online match Monday in the Julius Baer Generation Cup, using the Chess24 platform via Microsoft Teams, when Carlsen’s webcam suddenly switched off while he was on the clock for his second move.
“What happened? That’s it?” exclaimed Peter Leko, a grandmaster who was providing analysis on the feed.
“We’re going to try to get an update on this,” said fellow analyst and international master Tania Sachdev. “Magnus Carlsen just resigned. Got up and left. Switched off his camera, and that’s all we know right now.”
“Wow — speechless, yeah?” Leko said.
Carlsen, 31, was leading the tournament in the early going at the time. The Julius Baer Generation Cup is the seventh event on the nine-tournament Champions Chess Tour, which runs from February until November. Carlsen is in first place in the series, while Niemann ranks 16th.
Carlsen and Niemann were competing this month in the Sinquefield Cup, a St. Louis-based, in-person event on the Grand Chess Tour, when Niemann defeated the five-time world champion. Adding to the massive level of upset was that Carlsen was on a 53-match unbeaten streak in over-the-board tournaments and held a significant rating advantage over Niemann.
The next day, Carlsen withdrew from the Sinquefield Cup, saying in a tweet that he always enjoyed competing there and hoped to be back in the future.
What sent the chess world into a tizzy, however, was that Carlsen appended to his tweet a video clip of famed soccer manager José Mourinho saying in 2021: “I prefer really not to speak. If I speak, I am in big trouble.”
The tweet gave the impression that Carlsen was hinting at some nefarious behavior on the part of Niemann, who has enjoyed a meteoric rise in the sport. Speculation that Niemann was cheating only increased after Hikaru Nakamura, a 34-year-old American grandmaster who has a massive following for his Twitch streams, offered his take shortly after Carlsen’s withdrawal.
“This is probably something I should not say, but I will say this anyway, which is: There was a period of over six months where Hans did not play any prize-money tournaments on Chess.com,” Nakamura said. “That is the one thing that I’m going to say, and that is the only thing that I’m going to say on this topic.”
Nakamura added on his Twitch stream: “I think that Magnus believes that Hans probably is cheating. … He’s withdrawing to make the point without publicly making the point.”
Niemann, who was subjected to a thorough scan for devices that could help him cheat when he arrived for another match at the St. Louis tournament, subsequently admitted to having cheated several years before on Chess.com.
In a Sept. 5 interview with grandmaster Alejandro Ramirez that was shared online by the…
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