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Comment by cmwelsh | Hacker News Reader

I did a Ctrl+F and no one so far has posted about cheating! How can we trust a Twitch experience of chess when actual video game streamers have been caught cheating on Call of Duty et all? This seems rife for abuse. I love chess but I wouldn’t play electronically against random folks since the past 15 years.

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I've been playing fairly regularly on lichess and I can assure you that I have not yet met players that were using computers to cheat. Firstly, lichess may have some simple checks for move strength relative to the player's rating. Secondly, I mostly play 5+0 blitz and it's really hard to cheat as the time goes low with no increments

Real-time fuzzed data isn’t hard to come by when people are hacking memory cheats and DirectX for mainstream games. I hate to be the one to say it, but will we see a 2400 MMR player post his “hack” on HN one day?

People on lichess forums complain about cheating fairly regularly and lichess is locking accounts for cheating often and quickly.

In my thousands of games on lichess I've run into a couple of cheaters, but they are very easy to spot. You also get the rating points refunded once they are caught and removed.

A standard engine is probably somewhere around 3000 strength (better than any human), and the average person who cheats is probably 1000-1800 strength. Within 1-2 games you can easily tell if a 1500 player is magically playing above super-gm strength all the sudden. The player also isn't going to be good enough to not play the computer moves that give them away, because they won't understand them!

Yah, I've played a few games against people that A) played a tricky but objectively weak (memorized) opening hoping I'd fall into traps, B) blundered their whole way around the middle game, hanging pieces like mad, and C) slowed way down and played with 99.9% accuracy through the only, very non-obvious 20 move sequence that could salvage a draw for them. It's pretty obvious. (Often they are slow with the engine, so I flag them during C).

I think lichess has pretty sophisticated techniques to detect cheating. They take it pretty seriously. I’ve played thousands of (non anonymous) games on lichess and I might have played against someone who was cheating once. If you play without logging in, you’ll probably find more cheaters but it’s rare even then.

I'm sure that people do cheat. I am also sure that almost everyone doesn't cheat. I play 3+2 games, they're very short, and if even 5% of them are against cheaters (and I doubt it's this high) it's not a big deal.

Who cares? If you are watching a game, it doesn't matter if one side is a bot.

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