The best of Aesop’s fables is the one in which the Wind and the Sun compete to remove the coat from a passing man. The Wind goes first, assaulting the man with full force, but the harder it blows, the tighter the man grips his coat. When the Sun takes a turn, it radiates such glorious heat that the man takes off the coat of his own accord.
Similar wisdom might inform an interview with a sporting figure. Forget the Paxmanesque inquisition: prepare some open-ended questions, establish a rapport and listen carefully to the responses. You would probably not strap your subject to a polygraph machine, point a camera at them and pepper them with questions like ‘Have you ever played chess while you were drunk?’ And yet this freakish genre thrives in the upside-down world of online content creation. In the past year, Chess.com has published interviews with various top players and streamers, presumably inspired by a series of interviews with celebs on Vanity Fair’s YouTube channel.
Regardless of the po-faced polygraph operator and ominous background music, nobody actually takes this stuff seriously. Or do they? Last year, I received a bizarre press release from a company representing World Chess, a commercial partner of Fide. World Chess were offering a free lie-detector test to the world’s top 100 players ‘in a move designed to promote transparency and fairness in the sport’. This test, focusing on areas relating to fair play and ethical conduct, was to be administered by the detective agency Pinkerton. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear! The only person I’m aware of who volunteered for this was the former world champion Vladimir Kramnik, whose zealous and indiscriminate campaign against chess cheating has by now implicated so many players, on such flimsy evidence, that his views on the subject have lost all credibility.
Hans Niemann has complained of a lack of invitations to top-tier events ever since Carlsen’s unsubstantiated accusations back in 2022. At the recent Aeroflot Open, held in Moscow, he was one of very few western competitors. Afterwards, he lined up an 18-game blitz match with Daniil Dubov, one of the world’s best blitz players from Russia. This grudge match had the unusual condition that the loser would be forced to answer a single question on a polygraph test. It was a gripping contest, and the decisive final game from Dubov’s 9.5-8.5 match win is shown below.
According to Niemann, Dubov demanded the test take place in Dubai at Niemann’s expense, which he rejected. ‘I have no intention of giving someone like Dubov, who behaved like a child, the honour of asking me a question on the lie detector, which is pure pseudoscience, when I have honestly nothing to prove.’ He later agreed to go ahead with it.
Daniil Dubov-Hans Niemann
Blitz Match, Game 18, March 2025, Moscow
If Dubov hoovers up the kingside, Niemann would easily achieve a draw e.g. 64 Ke6 gxh4 65 gxh4 Nc6 66 Nf5 Ne5 and the knight will soon be sacrificed on h4. Instead, with both players down to their final seconds, he found an unexpected breakthrough. 64 g4! hxg4? There was a path to a draw here with 64…gxh4! 65 gxh5 h3 66 Nf3 Nd7 67 Ke6 Nf8+ 68 Kxf6 Nh7+ 69 Kg7 Ng5! and the knight is immune from capture. 65 h5 Nd7 66 Ke6 Ne5 After 66…Nf8 67 Kxf6 g3 68 Kf7 g2 69 Ne2 Nh7 70 Kg7 the knight is trapped by its own pawn on g5, so White wins. 67 Kxf6 Nf3 68 Ne2 g3 Black resigns as after 69 h6 the pawn cannot be stopped.
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