GM Maxim Dlugy statement on the Hans Niemann cheating affair
A grandmaster and a chess professional for more than 40 years, I have found myself dragged into the cheating controversy rocking the chess world, following the release of confidential emails by chess.com – a company with a huge financial stake in supporting the version of events pushed by chess world champion Magnus Carlsen. The first bolt from the sky came when Magnus said that I was a mentor to Hans Niemann, a former student of mine with whom I’ve kept in occasional touch over the years, insinuating that I helped him cheat.
Then came calls from reporters seeking comment on two-year-old emails between chess.com and me that the website had agreed in written form to keep confidential and released without my consent. In a roundabout way, the exchanges could be purported to prop up claims made by Magnus.... with whom chess.com just happens to be negotiating a huge financial deal.
So even though I had absolutely nothing to do with the now infamous match between Magnus and Hans, I am now compelled to defend myself against completely absurd and slanderous accusations made against me.
My Chess Career:
I’ve been involved in chess for the vast majority of my life. I won my first chess tournament when I was 15. I won the World Junior Chess Championship in 1985, was the highest-rated blitz player in the World Blitz Chess Association in the period between
1988-1992, and tied for first in the World Rapid Championships in 1989, I also was elected as one of the 7 members of the Grandmaster’s Association’s Board of Directors in 1989 and as President of the US Chess Federation in 1990.
More recently, I was Chairman of the Association of Chess Professionals, helped Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov run their bid for FIDE Presidency and started an online chess matching service www.chessreach.com to match Titled Professionals and chess students.
In recent years, I have tried to maintain my blitz form. My official FIDE blitz rating dropped from 2731 about 10 years ago to slightly above 2600. Still, six years ago at the end of the Sinquefield Cup, I managed to split an informal match of about 50 bullet games with Magnus Carlsen, prompting him to muster a compliment “You are very strong” when the match was over.
As a coach, I helped Garry Kasparov in his matches against Anatoly Karpov and years later Anatoly Karpov in his Rapid tournaments in France and Russia.
I was involved with chess.com as one of their Banter Blitz showmen and as a commentator for a number of their events and have produced over 30 instructional videos for the website, which it displays to this day.
In 2013 I orchestrated the capture of infamous chess cheater Borislav Ivanov. You can read more about it here: en.chessbase.com/post/ivanov-ends-his-che-career-051013
I also wrote the book “Grandmaster Insides,” detailing my chess career, and have recently completed work on the Queen’s Gambit Accepted book for Russel Enterprises.
In 2015, I founded Chess Max Academy on New York City’s Upper East Side. Today we operate 3 locations (Greenwich CT, New York’s Upper East, and Upper West sides) and
my students have won more than 20 National scholastic titles in the last several years.
I have played tens of thousands of games on lichess.org, chessbase.com, playchess.com, chess24.com, and chess.com. Aside from the incidents on which I will expand below with chess.com, I have never been accused of foul play by any other website or in any over-the-board competition.
Relationship with Hans
I met Hans during the World Youth Championships in South Africa 8 years ago when he was 11. I started working with him around October 2014. In the short three-four months, he went up from 2150 to 2350. I was not so much amazed by his progress, as I had students who demonstrated similar growth, but by his ability to digest the information I would give him and then improve on it.
Most of my sessions would take place between rounds of major tournaments on the West Coast and it was clear that Hans could take in information as quickly as a top GM could, immediately being able to implement it in the game he played. When Hans moved to Connecticut with his family, I imagined how much more work we could do together, but unfortunately, this was not to be.
Various family circumstances prevented us from working together, and though I would always be happy to give him pointers as we would meet in some rapid or blitz events in the NY area, this was no longer an ongoing relationship.
When Hans became stronger, he started giving lessons in the neighborhood of Chess Max Academy which was located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He would sometimes stop over for a few minutes to grab a snack, play a blitz game, and then he would be off.
I didn’t feel he was too serious about his chess career and so I didn’t offer to help him out. The change came when he applied to Harvard University and didn’t get in. At that point, he made a firm decision to work extremely hard to become the best chess player he could be.
As I never demanded anything of him and always supported anything he was doing, Hans reached out and I was happy to ensure him that if he ever needed any advice or help or ideas on how to improve in chess, I would be happy to offer them.
As I mentioned, in my Facebook post after Hans beat Magnus, one of such suggestions happened over a year ago, as Hans was preparing for the U.S. Junior Championship 2021. I invited Hans to Chess Max Academy at 110 West 79th Street, in Manhattan, and we spent 4 hours going over some complicated endgames, to improve his endgame understanding. I truly thought this was his weakest part of the game at the time and pressed him to do more work on it.
My Facebook post, thus, reflected my jubilation at the fact that it seemed he listened to me, though post factum, as his play in the U.S. Junior Championship where he misplayed two endgames which cost him a full point, barely enabled him to win that event.
More recently, Hans reached out a bit more for advice on the right coach for him. It took some time, but that issue has also been resolved. (To maintain the integrity of Han’s chess preparations I am not at liberty to disclose the name of his coach.) I didn’t have anything to do with Hans’ success in his game against Magnus, contrary to what Magnus has insinuated, as I don’t prepare Hans for his games. That is his own job and potentially the job of his current coach. Since 2014, I have also not given Hans advice on actual game preparation for any other tournaments, whether online or OTB, as in my opinion, only a full-time coach would have enough knowledge to be able to do this in a professional manner.
Magnus Carlsen Accusations:
I do consider myself something of a mentor to Hans, though this is clearly a very tentative title, one that is established at both participants’ will. On the Monday before Magnus referred to me as Han’s mentor, I had what I believed to be a friendly chat with a mutual acquaintance of mine and Magnus. Clearly, this chat formed the basis of Magnus’s claim.
It looks like Magnus has been told by advisors to avoid direct accusations and work with insinuations. He insinuated that Hans cheated in their game, without saying as much, and when it came time to say something of note, he insinuated that Hans has a mentor, myself, who is doing a great job helping him to play well, which to Magnus now is equivalent to cheating. He then came out openly and claimed Hans has cheated and he will not be playing in tournaments with him anymore. Magnus’ plan is to try to prove “Guilt by association”. If Hans has a mentor who is a cheat, by definition Hans must be a cheat and therefore he did cheat in their game, as he looked relaxed or rather “not tense” when playing him. The public was then directed to check out my alleged cheating incidents in 2017 and 2020 on chess.com, which would firmly establish that since I admitted to violating Fair Play policies of chess.com, I clearly helped or advised Hans that the only way for him to make progress in chess is by cheating.
Since Hans has by then already admitted that he has cheated when he was 12 and 16, it would get social media firmly behind the World Champion’s plan of further implicating Hans by connecting one “cheat “ with another.
There are a number of problems with this concept:
Although to cheat with an actual device you do need an accomplice who has access to the device with a chess engine running on it, you also need a connection to the device which given the precautions taken at many of the modern tournaments, especially the Sinquefield Cup, is not even remotely a possibility.
None of the specialists tasked to find anything wrong with the actual Carlsen-Niemann game in question, came up with anything substantive pointing to any outside influence in generating moves. In fact, Hans has on at least two occasions during that game relinquished much of his advantage gained in the early opening phase, but Magnus failed to capitalize on it. Kenneth Regan, the accepted foremost authority on the subject presented a detailed report where he found no evidence of Hans using an engine neither in that particular game nor in any other Over the Board game. This hardly gives merit to the idea of a “device” passing moves to Hans during the game.
There is no plausible method known to me or anyone I know, including thousands of social media posts, where I could be acting as an accomplice to Hans’ insinuated cheating in his game with Magnus. There is no device, there is no actual cheating and I was in New York City when the game was played.
My relationship with Hans is explained above. There is no work done on tournament or game preparation between the two of us going on now or in the last 8 years, except for the 4-hour session before the U.S. Junior Championship 2021, focused entirely on endings. Managing three physical Academies in Manhattan and Connecticut as well as 7 School programs and an Online School doesn’t give me enough time to work with players such as Hans and so this possibility is a non-starter.
Chess.com History
The emails submitted by chess.com showed that I indeed violated their Fair Play Guidelines twice in 2017 in two tournaments where one of my students in a class was shouting out moves together with other students while consulting with the engine.
I realized that the accusations in 2017 had some truth to them a few months later only after I caught the student in question cheating. As soon as this happened I immediately reached out to Danny Rensch and admitted to the breach of fair play guidelines that I didn’t know I had committed until that moment. I admitted this was a violation, though the recent videos of Magnus Carlsen receiving advice from one of the top British players David Howell (www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNMcnrmb97g) to beat a major competitor in a money tournament on lichess.org seems to be a larger violation, as he willingly played the move which won the game on the spot. It can be seen clearly in the video that tMagnus didn’t take this too seriously, admitting that he was cheating on the spot.
In my case, I truly had no reason to believe that I had actually cheated and was adamant I did not cheat until I realized what was happening months later, as the thought that kids rated over 1000 points lower than me could be helping me play better never occurred to me. I think I was negligent in not imagining that such a thing could occur, but having apologized for it and having offered to return the prize money for the event, an offer Danny Rensch did not comment on, I think I did as much as anyone would under the circumstances.
On May 10 th of 2018, Danny Rensch offered me to start playing in Titled Tuesday tournaments by October, if I start streaming. This was my reply:
Hi Danny,
I am fine using my current bestinblitz account and so if you could switch it to my name it
would be fine.
Problem is my groups are not allowing me to compete in Titled Tuesdays because of
the time conflict, and clearly I am not going to repeat what happened with the students
offering advice, so until my new Academy gets off the ground allowing me my personal
time, I won’t be able to compete or stream during those events. Hopefully by Jan 1,
2019 I will be available to play or otherwise participate in the PCL, so that solution
seems most likely. If anything changes in my schedule And I can start playing and
streaming the Titled Tuesday earlier, we can revisit.
In 2019, I resumed playing on chess.com and was kicked out of a tournament for no apparent reason. Here’s the email exchange between me and Danny Rensch pertaining to that event:
Hi Maxim,
First, my apologies for the delay. I wanted to be sure what happened before responding.Your removal
from the tournament was based on old information for our Fair Play team, and the action was taken
based on the understanding that a restriction for you to compete in prize events was still in order.I have
now confirmed to my team that your restriction is lifted and that you are free to compete in prize events
once more.My apologies for the inconvenience.
Danny
—
Danny Rensch
Chief Chess Officer
Chess.com LLC
There was another Title Tuesday event around the same time, where I started with 4/4 before the chess.com server crashed. After wasting 2 hours including the waiting time to hear announcements, it was announced that the afternoon tournament’s prizes will be combined with morning prizes and the results of this morning event are annulled. All this made my participation in Titled Tuesdays a rare phenomenon as I simply had too much going on in my life at the time. Yet in the Spring of 2020, I decided to play again.
It should come as no surprise that even if my 40 plus years of a distinguished chess career weren’t there, the thought of using engine assistance given the above history would be furthest from my mind.
In the Spring 2020 tournament which I played in after my account was fully reinstated 3 years after the 2017 events, I was kicked out by chess.com during the 9th round of the tournament where I had a score of 6,5/8, while NOT USING ANY OUTSIDE ASSISTANCE!
I was shocked by this, as I was playing the tournament from my apartment and could not understand what occurred. I was informed that I was kicked out for Fair Play Guidelines violations and that given the past history, I would have 72 hours to confess to anything regarding Fair Play Guideline violations or my account would be closed permanently.
This created quite a dilemma. On the one hand, from my previous discussions with Danny Rensch on the subject, it became quite obvious that he believes in chess.com methodology more than in anything else, although having recently studied the materials on the chess.com website, I found out that it turns out that 5 or 6 appeals per month are actually satisfied and those accounts are reinstated. I simply didn’t have the time to deal with this situation, and since I took chess.com at their word that the email exchange would continue to be confidential and private as stated in all of their correspondence, I made the mistake of agreeing to admitting that I used some help in some of the games in the event. The flip side would be potentially worse.
When you are kicked from chess.com, rumors start circulating immediately that you cheated and therefore were kicked out. Remembering the messages I got back in 2017, I decided that it’s best to admit to wrongdoing, and if they ever made this public, I would always be able to prove that I didn’t cheat by simply analyzing the games in question. Sadly, it has come down to this. Since chess.com can now not be trusted with keeping their promises, I will have to do what I do best: Analyze chess games. My analysis of the games in question will be at the bottom of this statement. I would also like to mention that since I “confessed” to violating Fair Play Guidelines, my account was reinstated by chess.com and until recently, I regularly played using this account, which I agreed with chess.com would remain anonymous. This account is known by a handful of my friends as well as my students. It is a titled GM Diamond account.
My battle with the Russian Legal system:
When my name was first brought up in this scandal, a number of articles made a point of mentioning that I was “imprisoned for embezzlement in Russia” as further “proof”
that my character is that of a cheater.
This is in reference to my waiting for trial in a Russian holding cell 17 years ago, a deeply painful and damaging time in my and my family’s life. At the time some business rivals with close ties to Putin’s government used my friendship with Garry Kasparov (who besides his role in the chess world was one of Putin’s most vocal critics) to have me arrested and force a sham trial.
Even with the full force of the Russian judicial system working with the prosecution to keep me detained, they eventually had to acquit me when none of the false evidence could stand up to scrutiny. After I was acquitted, Garry sent his own head of security to make sure I made it back to Moscow safely. That evening I had dinner with Garry and his mother before flying back to New York the following day.
[Snipped Game analysis follows at link to Chessdom]
www.chessdom.com/maxim-dlugy-publishes-a-statement-on-the-hans-niemann-cheating-affair/
A grandmaster and a chess professional for more than 40 years, I have found myself dragged into the cheating controversy rocking the chess world, following the release of confidential emails by chess.com – a company with a huge financial stake in supporting the version of events pushed by chess world champion Magnus Carlsen. The first bolt from the sky came when Magnus said that I was a mentor to Hans Niemann, a former student of mine with whom I’ve kept in occasional touch over the years, insinuating that I helped him cheat.
Then came calls from reporters seeking comment on two-year-old emails between chess.com and me that the website had agreed in written form to keep confidential and released without my consent. In a roundabout way, the exchanges could be purported to prop up claims made by Magnus.... with whom chess.com just happens to be negotiating a huge financial deal.
So even though I had absolutely nothing to do with the now infamous match between Magnus and Hans, I am now compelled to defend myself against completely absurd and slanderous accusations made against me.
My Chess Career:
I’ve been involved in chess for the vast majority of my life. I won my first chess tournament when I was 15. I won the World Junior Chess Championship in 1985, was the highest-rated blitz player in the World Blitz Chess Association in the period between
1988-1992, and tied for first in the World Rapid Championships in 1989, I also was elected as one of the 7 members of the Grandmaster’s Association’s Board of Directors in 1989 and as President of the US Chess Federation in 1990.
More recently, I was Chairman of the Association of Chess Professionals, helped Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov run their bid for FIDE Presidency and started an online chess matching service www.chessreach.com to match Titled Professionals and chess students.
In recent years, I have tried to maintain my blitz form. My official FIDE blitz rating dropped from 2731 about 10 years ago to slightly above 2600. Still, six years ago at the end of the Sinquefield Cup, I managed to split an informal match of about 50 bullet games with Magnus Carlsen, prompting him to muster a compliment “You are very strong” when the match was over.
As a coach, I helped Garry Kasparov in his matches against Anatoly Karpov and years later Anatoly Karpov in his Rapid tournaments in France and Russia.
I was involved with chess.com as one of their Banter Blitz showmen and as a commentator for a number of their events and have produced over 30 instructional videos for the website, which it displays to this day.
In 2013 I orchestrated the capture of infamous chess cheater Borislav Ivanov. You can read more about it here: en.chessbase.com/post/ivanov-ends-his-che-career-051013
I also wrote the book “Grandmaster Insides,” detailing my chess career, and have recently completed work on the Queen’s Gambit Accepted book for Russel Enterprises.
In 2015, I founded Chess Max Academy on New York City’s Upper East Side. Today we operate 3 locations (Greenwich CT, New York’s Upper East, and Upper West sides) and
my students have won more than 20 National scholastic titles in the last several years.
I have played tens of thousands of games on lichess.org, chessbase.com, playchess.com, chess24.com, and chess.com. Aside from the incidents on which I will expand below with chess.com, I have never been accused of foul play by any other website or in any over-the-board competition.
Relationship with Hans
I met Hans during the World Youth Championships in South Africa 8 years ago when he was 11. I started working with him around October 2014. In the short three-four months, he went up from 2150 to 2350. I was not so much amazed by his progress, as I had students who demonstrated similar growth, but by his ability to digest the information I would give him and then improve on it.
Most of my sessions would take place between rounds of major tournaments on the West Coast and it was clear that Hans could take in information as quickly as a top GM could, immediately being able to implement it in the game he played. When Hans moved to Connecticut with his family, I imagined how much more work we could do together, but unfortunately, this was not to be.
Various family circumstances prevented us from working together, and though I would always be happy to give him pointers as we would meet in some rapid or blitz events in the NY area, this was no longer an ongoing relationship.
When Hans became stronger, he started giving lessons in the neighborhood of Chess Max Academy which was located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He would sometimes stop over for a few minutes to grab a snack, play a blitz game, and then he would be off.
I didn’t feel he was too serious about his chess career and so I didn’t offer to help him out. The change came when he applied to Harvard University and didn’t get in. At that point, he made a firm decision to work extremely hard to become the best chess player he could be.
As I never demanded anything of him and always supported anything he was doing, Hans reached out and I was happy to ensure him that if he ever needed any advice or help or ideas on how to improve in chess, I would be happy to offer them.
As I mentioned, in my Facebook post after Hans beat Magnus, one of such suggestions happened over a year ago, as Hans was preparing for the U.S. Junior Championship 2021. I invited Hans to Chess Max Academy at 110 West 79th Street, in Manhattan, and we spent 4 hours going over some complicated endgames, to improve his endgame understanding. I truly thought this was his weakest part of the game at the time and pressed him to do more work on it.
My Facebook post, thus, reflected my jubilation at the fact that it seemed he listened to me, though post factum, as his play in the U.S. Junior Championship where he misplayed two endgames which cost him a full point, barely enabled him to win that event.
More recently, Hans reached out a bit more for advice on the right coach for him. It took some time, but that issue has also been resolved. (To maintain the integrity of Han’s chess preparations I am not at liberty to disclose the name of his coach.) I didn’t have anything to do with Hans’ success in his game against Magnus, contrary to what Magnus has insinuated, as I don’t prepare Hans for his games. That is his own job and potentially the job of his current coach. Since 2014, I have also not given Hans advice on actual game preparation for any other tournaments, whether online or OTB, as in my opinion, only a full-time coach would have enough knowledge to be able to do this in a professional manner.
Magnus Carlsen Accusations:
I do consider myself something of a mentor to Hans, though this is clearly a very tentative title, one that is established at both participants’ will. On the Monday before Magnus referred to me as Han’s mentor, I had what I believed to be a friendly chat with a mutual acquaintance of mine and Magnus. Clearly, this chat formed the basis of Magnus’s claim.
It looks like Magnus has been told by advisors to avoid direct accusations and work with insinuations. He insinuated that Hans cheated in their game, without saying as much, and when it came time to say something of note, he insinuated that Hans has a mentor, myself, who is doing a great job helping him to play well, which to Magnus now is equivalent to cheating. He then came out openly and claimed Hans has cheated and he will not be playing in tournaments with him anymore. Magnus’ plan is to try to prove “Guilt by association”. If Hans has a mentor who is a cheat, by definition Hans must be a cheat and therefore he did cheat in their game, as he looked relaxed or rather “not tense” when playing him. The public was then directed to check out my alleged cheating incidents in 2017 and 2020 on chess.com, which would firmly establish that since I admitted to violating Fair Play policies of chess.com, I clearly helped or advised Hans that the only way for him to make progress in chess is by cheating.
Since Hans has by then already admitted that he has cheated when he was 12 and 16, it would get social media firmly behind the World Champion’s plan of further implicating Hans by connecting one “cheat “ with another.
There are a number of problems with this concept:
Although to cheat with an actual device you do need an accomplice who has access to the device with a chess engine running on it, you also need a connection to the device which given the precautions taken at many of the modern tournaments, especially the Sinquefield Cup, is not even remotely a possibility.
None of the specialists tasked to find anything wrong with the actual Carlsen-Niemann game in question, came up with anything substantive pointing to any outside influence in generating moves. In fact, Hans has on at least two occasions during that game relinquished much of his advantage gained in the early opening phase, but Magnus failed to capitalize on it. Kenneth Regan, the accepted foremost authority on the subject presented a detailed report where he found no evidence of Hans using an engine neither in that particular game nor in any other Over the Board game. This hardly gives merit to the idea of a “device” passing moves to Hans during the game.
There is no plausible method known to me or anyone I know, including thousands of social media posts, where I could be acting as an accomplice to Hans’ insinuated cheating in his game with Magnus. There is no device, there is no actual cheating and I was in New York City when the game was played.
My relationship with Hans is explained above. There is no work done on tournament or game preparation between the two of us going on now or in the last 8 years, except for the 4-hour session before the U.S. Junior Championship 2021, focused entirely on endings. Managing three physical Academies in Manhattan and Connecticut as well as 7 School programs and an Online School doesn’t give me enough time to work with players such as Hans and so this possibility is a non-starter.
Chess.com History
The emails submitted by chess.com showed that I indeed violated their Fair Play Guidelines twice in 2017 in two tournaments where one of my students in a class was shouting out moves together with other students while consulting with the engine.
I realized that the accusations in 2017 had some truth to them a few months later only after I caught the student in question cheating. As soon as this happened I immediately reached out to Danny Rensch and admitted to the breach of fair play guidelines that I didn’t know I had committed until that moment. I admitted this was a violation, though the recent videos of Magnus Carlsen receiving advice from one of the top British players David Howell (www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNMcnrmb97g) to beat a major competitor in a money tournament on lichess.org seems to be a larger violation, as he willingly played the move which won the game on the spot. It can be seen clearly in the video that tMagnus didn’t take this too seriously, admitting that he was cheating on the spot.
In my case, I truly had no reason to believe that I had actually cheated and was adamant I did not cheat until I realized what was happening months later, as the thought that kids rated over 1000 points lower than me could be helping me play better never occurred to me. I think I was negligent in not imagining that such a thing could occur, but having apologized for it and having offered to return the prize money for the event, an offer Danny Rensch did not comment on, I think I did as much as anyone would under the circumstances.
On May 10 th of 2018, Danny Rensch offered me to start playing in Titled Tuesday tournaments by October, if I start streaming. This was my reply:
Hi Danny,
I am fine using my current bestinblitz account and so if you could switch it to my name it
would be fine.
Problem is my groups are not allowing me to compete in Titled Tuesdays because of
the time conflict, and clearly I am not going to repeat what happened with the students
offering advice, so until my new Academy gets off the ground allowing me my personal
time, I won’t be able to compete or stream during those events. Hopefully by Jan 1,
2019 I will be available to play or otherwise participate in the PCL, so that solution
seems most likely. If anything changes in my schedule And I can start playing and
streaming the Titled Tuesday earlier, we can revisit.
In 2019, I resumed playing on chess.com and was kicked out of a tournament for no apparent reason. Here’s the email exchange between me and Danny Rensch pertaining to that event:
Hi Maxim,
First, my apologies for the delay. I wanted to be sure what happened before responding.Your removal
from the tournament was based on old information for our Fair Play team, and the action was taken
based on the understanding that a restriction for you to compete in prize events was still in order.I have
now confirmed to my team that your restriction is lifted and that you are free to compete in prize events
once more.My apologies for the inconvenience.
Danny
—
Danny Rensch
Chief Chess Officer
Chess.com LLC
There was another Title Tuesday event around the same time, where I started with 4/4 before the chess.com server crashed. After wasting 2 hours including the waiting time to hear announcements, it was announced that the afternoon tournament’s prizes will be combined with morning prizes and the results of this morning event are annulled. All this made my participation in Titled Tuesdays a rare phenomenon as I simply had too much going on in my life at the time. Yet in the Spring of 2020, I decided to play again.
It should come as no surprise that even if my 40 plus years of a distinguished chess career weren’t there, the thought of using engine assistance given the above history would be furthest from my mind.
In the Spring 2020 tournament which I played in after my account was fully reinstated 3 years after the 2017 events, I was kicked out by chess.com during the 9th round of the tournament where I had a score of 6,5/8, while NOT USING ANY OUTSIDE ASSISTANCE!
I was shocked by this, as I was playing the tournament from my apartment and could not understand what occurred. I was informed that I was kicked out for Fair Play Guidelines violations and that given the past history, I would have 72 hours to confess to anything regarding Fair Play Guideline violations or my account would be closed permanently.
This created quite a dilemma. On the one hand, from my previous discussions with Danny Rensch on the subject, it became quite obvious that he believes in chess.com methodology more than in anything else, although having recently studied the materials on the chess.com website, I found out that it turns out that 5 or 6 appeals per month are actually satisfied and those accounts are reinstated. I simply didn’t have the time to deal with this situation, and since I took chess.com at their word that the email exchange would continue to be confidential and private as stated in all of their correspondence, I made the mistake of agreeing to admitting that I used some help in some of the games in the event. The flip side would be potentially worse.
When you are kicked from chess.com, rumors start circulating immediately that you cheated and therefore were kicked out. Remembering the messages I got back in 2017, I decided that it’s best to admit to wrongdoing, and if they ever made this public, I would always be able to prove that I didn’t cheat by simply analyzing the games in question. Sadly, it has come down to this. Since chess.com can now not be trusted with keeping their promises, I will have to do what I do best: Analyze chess games. My analysis of the games in question will be at the bottom of this statement. I would also like to mention that since I “confessed” to violating Fair Play Guidelines, my account was reinstated by chess.com and until recently, I regularly played using this account, which I agreed with chess.com would remain anonymous. This account is known by a handful of my friends as well as my students. It is a titled GM Diamond account.
My battle with the Russian Legal system:
When my name was first brought up in this scandal, a number of articles made a point of mentioning that I was “imprisoned for embezzlement in Russia” as further “proof”
that my character is that of a cheater.
This is in reference to my waiting for trial in a Russian holding cell 17 years ago, a deeply painful and damaging time in my and my family’s life. At the time some business rivals with close ties to Putin’s government used my friendship with Garry Kasparov (who besides his role in the chess world was one of Putin’s most vocal critics) to have me arrested and force a sham trial.
Even with the full force of the Russian judicial system working with the prosecution to keep me detained, they eventually had to acquit me when none of the false evidence could stand up to scrutiny. After I was acquitted, Garry sent his own head of security to make sure I made it back to Moscow safely. That evening I had dinner with Garry and his mother before flying back to New York the following day.
[Snipped Game analysis follows at link to Chessdom]
www.chessdom.com/maxim-dlugy-publishes-a-statement-on-the-hans-niemann-cheating-affair/
