Twice, when he was 12 and 16, in online nonconsequential games. It's not great, but "once a cheat always a cheat" is still wrong.

Chess.com made a public statement after his comments, effectively saying he wasn’t honest and had cheated far more extensively than he had admitted. They banned him and said that they shared the evidence with him in private, and it would be up to him to respond to it.

So either chess.com is wrong, despite having a pretty good ability to detect cheating, or Hans is lying. I’m inclined to believe the latter.

Chess.com is also 25% or so owned by Magnus’s company.

Also, if chess.com had all this evidence why did they wait until after Magnus’s cryptic tweet to act on it? Do they only run their algorithms on games after Magnus makes cryptic comments on players playing the games?

The far more obvious reason is that they took these actions because they don’t want to potentially lose Magnus and his company’s involvement in the tournament.

This didn’t make sense to me. His reasons for cheating were because he wanted to play higher rated players. However I’ve seen many rated players get up there on like 2 hours. He said he does nothing for two years but play. One side very patient, other very impatient..

Banned twice to be clear means he cheated far more than twice, it more means there were two major periods in his life where he was cheating and chess.com banning him recently implies there was very likely a third period more recently.

That being said I do think it’s unlikely he cheated in Sinquefield. I should stress that OTB cheating and online cheating are indeed psychologically different. One can be a momentary lapse in judgement which can be a slippery slope, the other requires extensive pre-meditation and is more likely to be detected.

Cheated twice, not was banned twice.

to put that in context, he’s currently 19

He admitted to cheating once in a money prize tournament on chess.com

> To me he forfeited being given the benefit of doubt after that.

Why does he need the benefit of doubt though? There's no evidence or indication that he cheated.

This is my essential problem with Magnus’s actions. What is he going to walk out of every tournament where somebody who cheated at 16 plays in? Is that how we as a community address the problem of cheating? Passive-aggressive gestures against people caught for cheating in the past that pull uninvolved people into your drama?

And only do that after losing... Which is the part that makes him look bad. On other hand I don't think there is a way to look good in this situation. Other than just to shut up and play.

Even better, there isn’t even a claim that he cheated.

All we have is Magnus quitting the tournament after losing and cryptically retweeting Moutinho saying “I cannot say more”.

For all we know Magnus quit because he has a bad case of diarrhea and finds it embarrassing to talk about that.