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Chess Mates (Netflix, Tuesday) has an unsettling early gambit: the face of Piers Morgan, looming via archive footage. “Have you ever used anal beads while playing chess?” Morgan asks down camera, as if prepping an ill-advised phone-in. “Your curiosity is concerning. Maybe you’re personally interested?” shoots back his interviewee, Hans Niemann (above). The minds of chess masters, as glimpsed in this fantastic documentary, are almost as compelling as any back-passage shenanigans on the table.
It’s worth looking up the whole clip, from when Niemann found himself at the centre of a cheating scandal. The 19-year-old had come from nowhere; in a match at the 2022 Sinquefield Cup, he did the impossible and beat the Goat. That’s Norwegian Magnus Carlsen: an undisputed titan who sees lines of play like Neo sees the Matrix, and has held the world No 1 spot, unbroken, since 2011. Suspecting foul play, Carlsen withdrew from the competition. Ever since, suspicion has swirled round his American rival. Which is where the beads enter. So to speak.
Cheating at chess requires live access to a machine that can predict every possible move, delivering a perfect game. Nothing less could defeat a mind such as Carlsen’s; with AI in their pocket, anyone could do it. Was Niemann hiding something? Chess internet was soon awash with frame-by-frame analysis and colourful theories. One of which, buried on a message board, suggested internal bum beads, transmitting moves by vibration. Makes coughing feel like a blunt instrument.
Niemann denies over-the-board cheating. We can never know for sure – the past is another country, as is a man’s anal canal. He shifts uncomfortably when the subject arises. I assume that’s why, anyway. “I’ll always be associated with anal beads,” he kvetches. He can’t quite bring himself to say it’s a bum rap.
Chess Mates is a telling document of other forces entering our culture. The modest yet elite Carlsen is almost aristocratic. “I sometimes feel I don’t deserve it,” he says of his unearthly talent. Niemann amassed his cult popularity playing chess games on the live-streaming platform Twitch. We witness his on-camera bragging. “I’m a god, sit down,” he roars at his bested foes. “Feels good to be in the club,” he swags. He’s talking about becoming a grandmaster, but sounds like 50 Cent.
“It felt like he was cosplaying at being a chess master,” says Carlsen of his callow rival. This line strikes at the Jake Paul v Mike Tyson-ness of what we’re seeing. To the young, influencers are entertaining avatars, who can turn their hand to any number of activities and sell them through force of personality. To non-digital natives, these same influencers appear to be complete bellends.
Niemann admits to cheating in his youth, online. Who didn’t make bad choices when they were 12, or 16? His personality is really the issue. Insolent and insecure, the childhood loner is now grandiose, hot-headed, possibly paranoid. Pure box office, in other words. He’s walked out of interviews, trashed a hotel room, claims to see the future. “I’m gonna be a stone cold killer the rest of my life.”
Watching, I really came to appreciate that the theatre of sports, however high or low-octane, is exactly that. Fans fixate on statistics, but it’s personality we’re drawn to. Chess Mates is Borg v McEnroe, Prost v Senna. Heated rivalries are an old story.
Carlsen will age, lose his abilities and watch me dominate, glowers a still bitter Niemann. He believes he was bullied, suffering at the hands of a “chess mafia” led by Carlsen, to maintain a commercial monopoly. “It’s all connected,” he insists, sounding the conspiracy theorist’s klaxon. (Niemann did go on to sue Carlsen, as well as a former mentor from the website chess.com. Unlike the distrust he seems to inspire, the case was settled.) The blood between these masters may be bad, but it makes for a great watch.
Narcissism, a shallow engagement with tradition – these are things we love to hate. There have always been disruptors, bad boys, Jake Pauls, who grow into the old guard. That’s how this story, too, will end one day. Who was more controversial than Mike Tyson? No one trash-talked like Muhammad Ali. And John McEnroe is now an august Wimbledon commentator, eating crustless cucumber sandwiches. They’re selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, man.
