The toxic rivalry tearing apart the chess world

As the two fiercest adversaries in the game renew hostilities, chess proves it is a sport that no other can match for psychological warfare

“[Magnus Carlsen’s] entire career is on the line. If he loses to me, I don’t think he can show his face in another tournament again.”
As openings to chess showdowns go, it was unstinting. But such is to be expected from Hans Niemann, the 21-year-old “bad boy” of the game, who will on Friday evening face the world’s number one player for the first time since acrimonious cheating allegations split the sport two years ago.
They will be sitting across from one another at the Speed Chess Championship in Paris, where $175,000 (£133,000) – and their already somewhat tarnished reputations – is at stake. After Norwegian grandmaster Carlsen accused Niemann of using anal beads to get ahead in a fiasco that was picked up by Elon Musk and pumped out to the masses on social media, their spat has become so high-profile as to have inspired a book and soon a film starring Emma Stone. 
The image of chess as a cerebral sport played by quiet types has been shattered by the controversy. But while the pair’s battle is perhaps the most venomous to alight the chess world, it is not the first. In fact, dastardly tricks and all-round craziness – including allegations of cheating via sex toys and attempts to poison opponents – have done much to expose its vicious side in recent years.
Carlsen and Nieman’s particularly bitter feud stems from the 2022 Sinquefield Cup, held in Missouri in the United States, when the Norwegian said his rival had received coaching by way of a vibrating sex toy in order to beat him.
The controversy might have stayed within the chess hall had it not quickly seized on by Musk. “Talent hits a target no one else can hit, genius hits a target no one can see (cause it’s in ur butt),” he posted on Twitter, now X, alongside the allegations, misquoting Schopenhauer. Musk later deleted the tweet and Carlsen, who walked out of the tournament, ultimately reached an out-of-court settlement with rival Niemann after lodging a $100 million federal defamation lawsuit.
But what’s happened between the pair over the past two years has, Carlsen concedes, forever changed the game. “I think there’s definitely more paranoia than before… Some things are not going back to the way they were.”
As such, the 33-year-old grandmaster – the first chess player ever to earn more than $10 million in winnings – was cautious of speaking out of turn ahead of the Paris match. “I’d prefer not to [play Niemann], but, you know, it’s the way that it is,” he said, before adding it was “a big deal” to beat his younger rival come Friday night.
Earlier this year, Niemann, who admitted to cheating twice in online games prior to 2020, said that “my life, by objective metrics, has been destroyed”. In Paris, he doubled down on what he sees as two years of injustice.
“When you deprive an athlete of their ability to win prize money, you certainly destroy their career,” Nieman said before the showdown with Carlsen. “It’s impossible to argue that my career has not been irreversibly damaged by the false accusations.”
The American prodigy, a grandmaster himself, was also unsparing in pointing the finger of blame at his rival, saying Carlsen had “brought himself into disgrace by ruining a 19-year-old kid’s life with false accusations”.
“He has tainted his legacy and his character by doing that. Day by day, as I achieve more and more, the reality of what happened to me will become clearer and clearer, and I’m sure that history will look back at things very differently,” Nieman, the world’s number 16 ranked player, said. He was confident of victory against Carlsen. “I already broke him once, and he can’t handle the intensity.”
Few sports can match chess for psychological warfare, says Malcolm Pein, the English Chess Federation’s director of international chess. “If you get inside somebody’s head in chess, you can actually tilt the balance in your favour,” he explains. “Chess players are exceedingly competitive, and you can’t be good at chess without being competitive.” 
Some players are willing – or at least, suspected of – taking that competition to extreme ends. Last month, Amina Abakarova allegedly wandered into a chess hall in southern Russia, smeared deadly mercury over the pieces of her childhood rival, and slunk off to claim victory. The suspected attempted poisoning – apparently carried out in retaliation for an insult from her opponent – led to Abakarova, 43, being suspended from competing, arrested, and facing three years in prison if convicted. 
The incident came less than a year after another major scandal rocked the sport, when the governing Chinese Xiangqi Association was forced in December 2023 to act upon accusations that then national champion Yan Chenglong had used sex toys to overcome opponents at a tournament held that month. With gossip spreading that he had been rhythmically clenching to transmit information to a computer, which in turn was sending back signals denoting what moves he should make, the association issued a statement declaring that it was “impossible to prove that Yan engaged in cheating via ‘anal beads’”. It did confirm, however, that Chenglong had defecated in his hotel bathtub following his tournament success, after which he was stripped of his title. 
(Niemann was also banned from the St Louis Chess Club this year after causing $5,000 worth of damage to a hotel room, which he describes as “unwarranted.”)
But nothing has quite dominated the sport of late quite like the feud between Carlsen and his challenger. Part of the reason his rivalry with Niemann has become so prolific is because the latter “is disliked by a considerable number of the world’s top players”, says Pein, “and he’s gone full Millwall” – a reference to the English football club’s chant “no one likes us, we don’t care”.
Lennart Ootes, who has photographed major chess tournaments for more than a decade, had a front row seat to the fracas two years ago. The room was thick with tension from the moment Carlsen walked in, he says, recalling it as “one of those days that I felt like, ‘Hey, something weird can happen today…’ I had a small feeling that something would go wrong”. When Carlsen’s around, “you feel the aura. You feel his presence, and that is reflected in his opponents. Just by being there, it was intimidating”. 
But the still-simmering feud between Carlsen and Nieman is only the latest in a long line of historic rivalries that have coloured the sport for decades. Many have been a microcosm of world politics, such as the 1972 face-off between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky – dubbed “the Cold War chess battle that captivated the world” – which ended in the American’s favour after nine weeks of competition. Tensions reached fever pitch later that same decade between Viktor Korchnoi, a USSR defector, and Anatoly Karpov, the darling of the Communist Party, who was accused of receiving secret signals during games and even hypnotic rays from his chair. Karpov’s team, meanwhile, alleged that there was a CIA operation in support of his opponent, highlighted by a snake appearing in his hotel room and helicopters flying overhead at night, stopping him from sleeping.
The arrival of Vladimir Zhukar, a parapsychologist, at the 1978 World Chess Championship in the Philippines sent the agitation soaring. He sat “in the front row at every game, just staring at Korchnoi the whole time” – a tactic, Pein says, “to mess with his head”. Korchnoi’s team sat beside the neurologist and stared back at him in response. The player himself also had a set of reflective glasses made – either “to ward off the evil rays of Dr Zhukar”, as Pein has it, or to catch the reflection of the room’s spotlights. A riff, it seemed, on advice from a chess book written in 1497 by Luis Ramirez de Lucena, suggesting that “you should place the chessboard so that the sun is in your opponent’s eyes”.
Then, there were the yogurts – with Korchnoi alleging that the delivery of various flavoured dairy products to his rival were codes for moves. (Referees ultimately ruled that Karpov could continue receiving yogurts, provided they always arrived at the same time, and that officials were informed of the colour prior to them being served.) Whether they were hidden signals or not, “once you’re inside someone’s head, that’s it, you’ve got the advantage”, according to Pein.
Sabrina Chevannes, a women’s international master, says suspicions run high at the game’s top level. “It’s intense, [especially] when you’re playing for your country, and everyone at home is watching you. You know that every single move you make, people are going to see and critique you.”
That scrutiny is all the more acute in a world where everything rides on rankings and prize money. “It becomes quite elitist and people judge your self-worth by your rating,” Chevannes says. “It’s a very mental game, and if you’re not mentally prepared, then your own thoughts can make you spiral out of control.”
Other mind tricks include players arriving late to signal they require even less time than allotted to win their match (a favourite tactic of Fischer’s). Pein notes that at the British Championships last week, one player complained about extensive security checks derailing his intentional tardiness. 
Refusing to shake hands is another tool players use to throw their opponents off-piste. Karpov turned Korchnoi’s approach away in 1978, while in 2006, Bulgarian Veselin Topalov refused to go palm to palm with Russian Vladimir Kramnik, after accusing him of cheating during his frequent bathroom visits. (Organisers ruled that they must use the same bathroom for the remainder of the competition.) Others prefer to make their feelings known with physical contact: Korchnoi and Tigran Petrosian, the Armenian-Soviet grandmaster, allegedly got so fed up with one another during one match that they began kicking each other under the table.
While feuds are many, Ootes says that friendships are few – none too surprising given Niemann’s belief that “there are no friendships on the chessboard. It is a continuous, perpetual game of chess-until-death”. Much of the animosity is driven by speculation that the other is cheating – especially now that computer programs can outpace any champion in a blink, and so many competitions are played online, where conditions are less controlled. “There’s always weird rumours or stories about that,” says Ootes, likening the act to “mechanical doping”.
“That is not good for friendliness… when people don’t really trust each other.” That distrust is often for good reason, adds Chevannes, who says there has been a rise in competitors “getting really desperate and cheating”.
“It’s causing paranoia as well,” she says, with unfounded gossip capable of throwing even the most honest participant off their game. “A lot of these players now, they can’t deal with losses. So they turn to the attack and accuse people of cheating instead.”
Still, in spite of the skirmishes, chess is “massively more popular than it used to be”, Pein says, with around six times as many players now as pre-lockdown – helped by the runaway success of Netflix drama The Queen’s Gambit. But “it’s completely changed now… it’s a young person’s game”. Good news where chess’s survival is concerned, but likely upping the chances of cheating via digital tools, and slurs spreading on social media both before and after games.
Thankfully, for the most part, people still willingly play by the rules – even if only just. “The hurly-burly of tournament competition is that your opponent might try and wind you up,” Pein says. “The best way of dealing with it is just to beat the guy.”
That’s certainly Niemann’s strategy. Looking ahead to Friday’s face-off with Carlsen, he said he felt “pure serenity” despite the raucous build-up. “I will enjoy every second.”