When using statistics to assess whether Hans Niemann cheated in over-the-board chess, there are two main approaches. One is to look at the moves and ask if they’re too accurate or too close to the engine’s top moves. We already looked at that two weeks ago. The other way is to look at Hans’ rating progress. He’s risen through the ranks remarkably quickly. Perhaps too quickly.
To make a comparison to athletics, in the 100 meter dash, 10 seconds is a fantastic time; 5 seconds is an impossible time. So the question is whether Hans’ rapid ascent is more like the 10 second time or the 5 second time: is it impossible or merely amazing?
When you compare Hans’ rating progression to the other top ten juniors in the world, it looks broadly similar with a few key differences:
Hans started out from a lower point in the 10-12 age range. When many of the other players were already master strength (2200+), Hans was still around 2000.
He had a couple large setbacks around 11 and 12 years old where he lost over a hundred rating points. These types of setbacks were rare for the other players. When you combine this factor with starting from a lower point overall, it makes him the lowest rated player by far at age 11.
His growth was delayed compared to the other players. In particular, he made the jump from ~2500 to ~2700 after the age of 17, whereas the other players made their biggest gains earlier.
How likely you think it is that Hans cheated depends largely on what you make of this delayed growth pattern. While it is certainly unusual compared to the other top juniors in the world, it doesn’t strike me as obviously impossible that Hans could have made the same jumps a few years later.
As always with data, the conclusions you arrive at depend heavily on how you look at it. If you start the analysis at one of Hans’s lowest points, his improvement looks very large indeed. But if you start at other points, it looks much more comparable to the other top players. I published the analysis I did for this post as an interactive dashboard so you can draw your own conclusions.
One thing that strikes me about a lot of the sleuthing around Hans’ history is that it often points out statistical oddities, but stops short of connecting them with a plausible story of how and when he cheated.
For example, how strong of a player is Hans supposed to be right now? His new account on Chess.com (created in 2020 after his old accounts were closed) has higher ratings than the old ones, and no cheating allegations. Everyone who’s interacted with him in person seems to think he’s incredibly talented. Unless Hans is running an elaborate long con where he’s cheating even in casual in-person blitz games, it seems that at present he is indeed a very strong grandmaster. If this is the case, it means the unusual part of his rating history – the relatively late growth into a top player – has in fact happened whether he cheated or not. That wouldn’t make it any less interesting, but it would undercut it as evidence of cheating.
What we’re left with in Hans Niemann is a player who’s charted a very unusual trajectory through the chess world. Some aspects of that may be down to cheating, while others are not, and we’re not much closer to disentangling which is which.
One thing to clarify first is that while Niemann's FIDE rating was frozen at 2465 for much of 2020 from the lack of in-person chess and nipped up just a bit at year's end, he was improving all that time. Thus the length of his spurt thru the July 2022 FIDE rating list should be reckoned as 2.25 years, not 1.5 years as several have done.
It would be good to reference Frederic Friedel's comparison https://en.chessbase.com/post/tracking-a-player-s-progress And as GM Mihail Marin pointed out on Sasha Starr's chess show, if you go back further you can find Levon Aronian making a comparable spurt at an even later age. His rating chart at https://ratings.fide.com/profile/13300474 goes back to April 2003 (2606), but the individual calculations go back to his being in teh low 2500s running up to July 2001.
I just want to say that I see the title of this post and I appreciate it.