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19-year-old American grandmaster Hans Niemann is suing world champion, Magnus Carlsen, online platform Chess.com and others for slander and libel and is seeking at least $100m in damages as he was the centre of an alleged cheating scandal.
The lawsuit was filed at a US District Court in Missouri on Thursday and also included Carlsen’s online chess platform Play Magnus, Chess.com executive Danny Rensch and US grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura as the defendants.
Niemann claimed that the defendants are “colluding to blacklist” him from the professional chess world and that he has been shunned by tournament organisers since five-time world champion Carlsen publicly accused him of cheating.
Niemann was previously banned from Chess.com for cheating online, to which he had admitted that he had not played fairly in non-competitive games on the website in his youth but denied any such practices during over-the-board games.
Controversy erupted once again when Magnus Carlsen suffered a surprise defeat against Niemann and later announced his withdrawal from the Sinquefield Cup in St Louis, Missouri in September. This caused a furore of comments and allegations, including from Nakamura, that Niemann had cheated.
Days after the Sinquefield Cup, Carlsen resigned after playing just one move against Niemann in an online tournament and said later in September he expressed that Niemann had “cheated more – and more recently – than he has publicly admitted”.
The Chess.com legal team released a statement saying that Niemann’s allegations have no basis and that the company was saddened by the decision to take legal action. “Hans confessed publicly to cheating online in the wake of the Sinquefield Cup, and the resulting fallout is of his own making,” the statement read. “Chess.com looks forward to setting the record straight on behalf of its team and all honest chess players.”
Chess.com banned Hans Niemann after his first match against Carlsen and published a report talking about how he had likely cheated more than 100 times in online games. Niemann’s lawsuit said that Chess.com banned him “from its website and all of its future events to lend credence to Carlsen’s unsubstantiated and defamatory accusations of cheating”.
