How does someone cheat at chess?

This is where we go from questions about skill and ranking, and take them into the world of the surreal. There’s only one conceivable way someone can cheat in a live chess game, and that’s with the aide of a Chess AI examining the board and feeding optimal moves to a player via wireless device.

Most often this is imagined as a small receiver in a shoe sending vibrations to a player’s foot or ankle, but the internet being the internet, people began speculating that Niemann was ... using vibrating anal beads to tell him what move to make. This would have ended as dumb online speculation, until this happened.

I just lean into the weird humor of it and focus on the bigger picture: people love a wild story, but solid evidence and fair play still matter in chess talk.

The whole thing feels straight out of a parody, and I get why people are having fun with it. I’ve joked about how props in scandals like this always seem weirder than the scandal itself.

On a lighter note, I once picked up one of those high?end sex dolls as a gag gift for a friend’s bachelor party, and the reactions were priceless. Threads like yours have the same chaotic energy.