Hans Niemann, One Year After the Chess Cheating Scandal

On the second day of this year’s Grenke Chess Open, Europe’s largest tournament, the 20-year-old grandmaster Hans Niemann woke before dawn with a stabbing pain in both ears. The trouble had started on the flight to Germany, when Niemann, who is the 46th-best player in chess and its most reviled villain, got extreme vertigo and vomited. “Screaming in agony,” he later told me, he went to two hospitals but found the staff at both places rude and unwilling to treat him before a 9 a.m. match. Niemann went to the tournament chess hall and, ears throbbing, beat two weaker opponents before getting ahold of some antibiotics. By the end of the competition, Niemann had been diagnosed with a double middle-ear infection, lost zero games, won first place, and received a check for €20,000.

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