A chess Grandmaster has been accused of using signals sent by wireless anal beads to cheat his way to success. This is the basis of a developing story that is almost definitely a lie made up to explain away a massive tournament upset, but it’s one that’s captured the public’s imagination to the point that, like anything to do with famous people putting things in their asses, will not go away until definitively disproved.
Well, this opportunity has now been provided to the Grandmaster in question, a 19-year-old American named Hans Niemann, thanks to a cam site’s offer to host a match played by him entirely in the nude.
As Vice’s Jules Roscoe writes, cam site Stripchat “says it sent a letter to Niemann congratulating him on his victory, and extending sympathies” for his having been accused of cheating with vibrating anal beads. The site also offered Niemann $1 million to star in a nude, live-streamed game that would clear this whole thing up.
As a bit of background for how we got here, the cheating allegations cropped up after Niemann beat World Champion Magnus Carlsen at the Sinquefield Cup early last week, leading Carlsen to withdraw from the tournament with a tweet that cast aspersions on his competitor. Niemann has admitted to cheating on Chess.com when he was 12 and this, combined with him being a younger, less established player, helped lead to a flurry of theories that he, as Vice details, studied a leak of “Carlsen’s prep work for the tournament.” Another theory offered by Reddit user u/nicbentulan, covered at length by Kotaku’s Ethan Gach, is that Niemann stole a vibrating, wireless anal bead system powered by an advanced AI from Carlsen and used it to win.
This is, very obviously, a joke, but one whose ingenuity has caused it to spread beyond the chess world so far into the internet at large that cam sites now want to get in on the action.
So, the Stripchat offer. Aside from the obvious self-promo opportunity that the cam site spotted in a story of butt-related scandals, the site’s decision to make the live-stream offer was helped along by the fact that Niemann defended himself from cheating allegations earlier this month by telling an interviewer, “If they [his accusers] want me to strip fully naked, I will do it.”
“Prove the haters wrong once and for all,” Stripchat writes in its public letter to Niemann. “Strip naked and play a game of chess live ... in return for up to $1 million.”
Niemann hasn’t publicly responded to the offer yet. Whether that’s because he doesn’t want to get naked on the internet or because he knows that the accusation won’t necessarily be cleared up without Stripchat using extremely invasive camera angles, we don’t know.
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