Hikaru Nakamura, a chess superstar and streamer on Stake-backed platform Kick, has slammed some of his peers for seemingly accusing him of cheating. The Chess grandmaster achieved a new blitz rating record on Chess.com, a milestone that did not go unnoticed by his peers.
A blitz rating is based on a player’s performance in games that are more than three minutes but under ten minutes. Hikaru – who goes by the moniker GMHikaru – hit a new high of 3,336 last week, surpassing Magnus Carlsen’s score of 3,322 to take the top spot on the site.
scored a suspicious amount of points on consecutive Blitz games
In response to that achievement, Vladimir Kramnik and Ian Nepomniachtchi, two grandmasters, made some cryptic insinuations on social media. First, Kramnik posted on his Chess.com page referencing “some small new piece of statistics.” Seemingly referencing Hikaru, he claimed a player had scored a suspicious amount of points on consecutive blitz games – something he said “everyone would find interesting.”
Meanwhile, Nepomniachtchi added fuel to the fire by tweeting Kramnik’s message to his followers.
Hikaru held no punches in response. Retweeting Nepomniachtchi’s post, Hikaru asked “is he really accusing me of cheating????” The grandmaster deemed the accusation “garbage:”
Not to be deterred, however, Kramnik has doubled down on his first post with a lengthy article explaining his accusations. In a Chess.com post titled “On resent hysteria,” Kramnik said that many professional players believe Hikaru is cheating. When Kramnik investigated Hikaru’s stats, he supposedly found “NUMEROUS low probabilities performances both of him and some of his opponents,” some of which had “EXTREMELY low mathematical probability, way below one percent.”
Hikaru has so far not responded to that post.