Amended Niemann complaint old new
I ran it through comparison website, here’s changes highlighted https://beige-alys-26.tiiny.site
But let’s list big ones here.
Summary
For example, despite Carlsen’s obsession with his FIDE ranking and unbeaten streaks, Chess.com’s own statistics reveal that he has lost at least 40 online chess games on Chess.com in the past month alone.
For example, despite Carlsen’s obsession with his FIDE ranking and unbeaten streaks, Chess.com’s own statistics reveal that he has lost 20% of his online chess games on Chess.com in the past month alone.
v. Chess.com Streamer Hikaru Nakamura
v. Chess.com Streamer Hikaru Nakamura and His History of Abusing His Influence with Chess.com to Blacklist Competitors
- In 2016, Nakamura baselessly accused fellow Grandmaster Akshat Chandra of
cheating against him during an over the board game at the U.S. Chess Championship. Shortly thereafter, Rensch suddenly informed Chandra that he was banned from Chess.com for allegedly cheating online years earlier when he was only 15. When Chandra denied the accusations, Rensch threatened to make the ban permanent and to also ban Chandra from the ProChessLeague operated by Chess.com, unless Chandra confessed to cheating. As Chandra later commented in a lengthy portrayal of the controversy, “This appears to be a witch hunt which took Chess.com back 3 years to find something and ban me from the site” (https://akshatchandra.com/locked-from-chess-com). As Chandra explained, when he refused to capitulate and confess, Chess.com’s ban continued.- Nakamura also had an acrimonious relationship with Canadian Grandmaster Eric
Hansen, which led to a fist fight between them in or around 2018. As part of a personal vendetta, Nakamura abused his influence over Chess.com to revoke Hansen’s invitation to be a commentator in Chess.com tournaments known as “PogChamps.”
- Carlsen knew perfectly well that Niemann did not cheat against him. As the highest-ranked chess player in the world, Carlsen knows full well when he has played a game of chess poorly.
- In doing so, Chess.com breached the agreement that it had previously entered into with Niemann to play at the Chess.com Global Championship, Chess.com’s largest tournament, for which Niemann had qualified in a round of “play-in” games. Pursuant to this agreement, Niemann was to receive a guaranteed prize of between $5,000 and $200,000.
- Notably, Chess.com banned Niemann before Niemann made any statements regarding his past use of chess engines in games he played on Chess.com when he was 12 and 16 years old, demonstrating that, contrary to Chess.com’s revisionist history, Chess.com’s decision to ban Niemann had absolutely nothing to do with Niemann’s public statements.
- Moreover, on or about September 23, 2022, evidently unsatisfied with his scripted corporate statement, Rensch engaged in an expletive-filled rant in an interview with The Guardian, during which he made clear that he and Chess.com were accusing Niemann of cheating against Carlsen at the Sinquefield Cup. As The Guardian reported, Rensch stated: “Once in a while anomalies do happen. But if you have a lot of smoke, a lot of evidence, and a lot of reason to believe in the DNA of who someone is, and you walk into the room and they just say, ‘I just lifted that fridge with one arm’, you’re like, ‘Fu**ing bullsh*t, motherf***er.’” He followed, “I’m not going on the record on anything that I think about the over-the-board scandal with Hans or Magnus, but you can imply what you want based on what I’m saying.”
- Rensch and Chess.com’s additional false accusations had the intended effect of further fanning the flames of Carlsen’s initial defamatory accusations that Niemann cheated against him “over the board” at the Sinquefield Cup.
- For its part, Play Magnus posted the following defamatory meme on Twitter, which portrays Niemann as the villain from a movie and reiterates Carlsen’s accusation that Niemann had to cheat in order to beat Carlsen: (picture)
- Then, during a livestream on Play Magnus’s YouTube channel on September 19, 2022, Play Magnus commentator and chess International Master Lawrence Trent told Play Magnus commentator Tania Sachdev, in response to Carlsen’s cheating allegations against Niemann, that “I am not going to reveal what I’ve seen” but “I’ve seen things that were previously unavailable to me” and “Magnus’s side is much more credible from what I have seen.” In making this statement, Play Magnus, through Lawrence Trent, falsely represented to the public that he and Carlsen possess private and undisclosed facts indicating that Niemann cheated at the Sinquefield Cup when they do not.
F. Carlsen Continues His Defamatory Campaign Against Niemann Behind the Scenes, Making More Defamatory Statements
121. Despite the immediate damage that Defendants caused Niemann by their defamatory statements set forth above, Carlsen evidently believed that Niemann still had not been punished enough for defeating and disrespecting him at the Sinquefield Cup.
122. Accordingly, to ensure that he inflicted the maximum possible damage to Niemann and his career, Carlsen, in the days and weeks that followed the Sinquefield Cup, deployed a more covert defamatory campaign against Niemann, designed to bolster Carlsen’s more high-profile defamatory accusations within the chess community, specifically.
123. For example, in yet another malicious lie, in approximately September 2022, Carlsen verbally told other prominent chess players, including Norwegian grandmaster Aryan Tari, that Niemann cheated against him at the Sinquefield Cup, and that he received from Chess.com definitive proof of Niemann cheating “over the board.”
124. In addition to being knowingly false when made, the fact that Carlsen cited Chess.com as the source of this information is further evidence that Defendants’ simultaneous actions were part of a coordinated scheme, rather than mere parallel conduct.
125. In Carlsen’s malicious defamatory campaign against Niemann, Carlsen went as far as paying Aryan Tari €300 to scream “Ukse Hans,” Norwegian for “Cheater Hans,” from the stands at the closing ceremony of the European Club Cup on October 9, 2022, which was attended by many of the world’s most prominent chess players and heard by many of its fans.
126. Shortly thereafter, the entire Norwegian chess team, including Carlsen, were observed publicly chanting “Ukse Hans” in bars and the streets of the Austrian town where the European Club Cup was held. Any reasonable listener of these statements would interpret them as reiterating Carlsen’s false accusation that Niemann cheated when he defeated Carlsen at the Sinquefield Cup.
- Carlsen’s invocation of Dlugy to further defame Niemann adds to the significant evidence that Carlsen actively conspired and coordinated with Chess.com to harm Niemann’s reputation and blacklist Niemann from professional chess. As Chess.com later revealed, the source of the suspicion surrounding Dlugy was a series of confidential interactions that Dlugy had with Chess.com in 2017. The only way Carlsen could have known about these confidential interactions is if Chess.com privately disclosed them to Carlsen before they were published in media articles at the end of September 2022, as discussed below.
- Approximately one week after the tournament, Richard Kahn, a known affiliate of Play Magnus and former lawyer at Latham & Watkins, Chess.com’s attorneys in this action, reached out to Dlugy, fishing for information about Niemann’s past that could be used against Niemann, but found nothing.
In addition to Rensch’s prior admission, the Defamatory Report’s accusations that Niemann cheated in games while streaming are demonstrably false because Niemann’s face and computer screen were clearly visible in real time during those games, and plainly show that he was not cheating.
174. Further evidencing that the Defamatory Report was intentionally false and misleading is its absurd claim that Niemann cheated in games where he lost or played so poorly that no reasonable person with knowledge of chess could possibly conclude that he cheated.
175. The reality is that not even Chess.com believes Niemann cheated in all of the 100+ online games listed in the Defamatory Report. Rather, the Defamatory Report was designed with the malicious intent of demolishing Niemann’s career and reputation to protect Chess.com’s soonto-be-acquired asset, Play Magnus.
Chess.com knows full well that this accusation is false, as demonstrated by the fact that Chess.com claims it was not fully aware of the extent of Niemann’s supposed cheating until after it recently conducted a “deeper dive” into the data relating to his online chess games following Carlsen’s accusations. Niemann could not have “confessed” in 2020 to cheating in games that Chess.com only claims to have learned about in 2022.
Likewise, chess Grandmaster Teimour Radjabov has been repeatedly boycotted by players for allegedly cheating, and Rensch has claimed that Chess.com algorithms confirmed that he cheated. Yet, to this day, Radjabov is allowed to compete in prize-money events on Chess.com, including the Global Chess Championship from which Niemann was uninvited.
- Equally false is Chess.com’s recent statement to the New York Times, reported in an article dated December 4, 2022, claiming that it wanted to keep its findings private but had to “defend [them]selves” after Niemann went public about his use of a chess engine in a handful of recreational games when he was a child. As set forth above, Niemann’s public statements were a direct response to the false accusations leveled by Nakamura, Chess.com’s top streaming partner, claiming that Niemann was banned twice on Chess.com for cheating and that Niemann was a rampant online cheater.
- As chess Grandmaster Ben Finegold put in a statement to the New York Times, “It just seems like they want to back up what Magnus is saying for business reasons.” Chess.com published the Defamatory Report, Finegold and other critics say, “to protect its recent $82 million investment in Play Magnus, which is very closely tied to Carlsen’s personal reputation and success.” “There’s no evidence in the report that Hans cheated recently, so it’s very strange,” said Finegold. Putting to rest any notion that Finegold might be biased in favor of Niemann, Finegold made clear that “I really don’t like Hans at all, and I’ve not liked him for a long time.”
- Moreover, Nakamura, who has repeatedly admitted to having access to inside information from Chess.com, was obviously parroting the so-called “findings” in the Defamatory Report, which, according to Chess.com, had yet to be released to the public. To the contrary, however, Chess.com’s number one streaming partner was widely disseminating this “inside” information before Niemann had spoken on the subject at all. Similarly, before Niemann’s public statements, Chess.com also leaked this information to Carlsen, as is evident from Carlsen’s reference to Chess.com’s so-called “evidence” of Niemann’s cheating when Carlsen defamed Niemann to chess Grandmaster Aryan Tari.
- In the Defamatory Report, Chess.com does not even deny that its decision to ban Niemann from Chess.com was not based on their allegations of online cheating, stating, “We uninvited Hans from our upcoming major online event and revoked his access to our site based on our experience with him in the past, growing suspicions among top players and our team about his rapid rise of play, the strange circumstances and explanations of his win over Magnus, as well as Magnus’ unprecedented withdrawal.”
Better put “with or without proof”, isn’t it.