Hacker News Reader

Comment by ricardobayes | Hacker News Reader

This is really cool. Rampant cheating is the reason I completely abandoned playing chess, so nice to see something happening.

View on HN

Where did you experience rampant cheating? I don't remember any particular problems back when I played on ICC in my middle/high school days, and modern equivalents like chess.com and lichess seem to do a relatively good job at catching cheaters. I might have just gotten lucky though.

I never notice cheaters too, but I only play around 1500 FIDE rating. The cheaters are around 2300 FIDE or even higher.

I'm of similar strength, and I have occasionally been informed that some account got banned for cheating (you receive a notification because the system restores your lost rating points after that).

But it's definitely affected less than 1 in a 1000 games for me. Of course

I might have still gotten beaten by cheaters that went undetected of course, especially if they stopped cheating or lost interest in the whole thing leaving the site before they'd get caught.

Same reason why I stopped playing Scrabble apps.

I'm in a similar boat, I used to play ~ 50 games a day and I'm down to about 3 games a week now. No weekend play.

Once you get to ~1900 FIDE level of play and rework your repertoire for anti-engine strategy you realize just how much rampant cheating is happening.

This continues until at some point you have to ask yourself, do you want to waste your time volunteering to be a victim to satisfy someone else's severe mental illness.

They get their dopamine hit for psychologically abusing you with a tool they didn't create, often with some amount of delusion to justify it.

What do you get out of playing a game against a Super-GM rated computer? Nothing but time theft.

The current state of the game is without a guarantee that the game is between two humans, the game isn't actually chess. The providers for online chess don't make that guarantee.

So based on the incentives, the game you play on their services is more likely to be not-chess but they still call it chess. Deceitful bunch.

Perhaps you could clarify what you mean by cheating?

Probably isn't very good and chalks it up to cheating. Chess takes years to get good at. It's a slow slow grind.

Playing people who take 10 seconds every move— whether an obvious “only move” or the most complicated situations… and that pick the move that stockfish makes almost all of the time… are cheating.

Depends I like to slow play. It can frustrate someone to play quicker and make mistakes

The point is not that they take their time, the point is that they spend roughly the same fixed amount of time for difficult moves (coming up with seemingly brilliant ones now and then) as trivial ones (even in positions when there's physically only one legal move). This is one of the red flags implying somebody is cheating, and doesn't even understand the position on the board. Their pace is monotonous because the time they need for copying the move over to their engine and then the engine's response is more or less constant.

Yah, I know about slow play, too, and it's effective against me when I'm in the mode "Eh, I didn't really have time for this game, but one more!"

But -- if you're over 2000, surely you've encountered cheaters and understand the difference that I'm driving at.

It's rather blatant, and on Chess.com I almost always get an email a couple weeks later that they were removed for cheating and that I got rating points back, and when I look back on Lichess I often find them banned. I don't even bother reporting anymore.

If it's early enough in the game that I realize it, I can just get into a closed, very-slow-to-progress position and watch them clock flag. But that's still a waste of 10 minutes of my life.

People using an engine to tell them what moves to make against their opponent.

Failing to follow the rules set forth for chess.

Specifically, in this context receiving outside assistance directly or indirectly, that in any way impacts your decisions made during the currently on-going game.

This includes more than just lines and moves, such as the exact evaluation score of a given position.

> nice to see something happening

the latest ("real") commit is from 3 years ago

This isn't the repository which runs on Lichess. The actual one does have much newer commits. Though not sure much fundamentally changed. Ultimately, I guess it does what it's supposed to do (catch obvious cheaters to save human time). But this is only one part of a lot of anti-cheating measures, including a lot more automated ones (some, like kaladin, which actually is a recent development, were also linked in the other thread about Lichess) but also a huge amount of human work. Most of the people here or in the other thread don't really know anything about cheating, how to properly detect it, and the difficulty of it.

Though ofc you're certainly right that this isn't a recent development at all and at the same time it's certainly also not perfect yet. And I doubt it ever will be. I don't think cheating in online chess is something that can ever really be solved completely.

How do you cheat at chess? Serious question… there are fixed rules that govern the game, certainly a piece of software or in the human case 3rd party observer should be able to enforce them? In other words, given a list of moves, you can write a program that returns `valid` if the set of moves is allowed or `invalid` if it is not, no?

There are multiple permissible moves. Cheaters use a computer to identify the best one.

Open up high level bot in another tab. Play their moves and copy what the bot does in response.

I have no idea why people do it, it's not even like video game cheats where it gives people a advantage but you're still in control - you're literally just copying.

I’d have to guess, but fake internet points? The ability to say “I’m ranked 5th at blah blah chess website”. Maybe it’s not even to others but just to themselves.

The (not visible, but presumed and imagined) frustration of the player on the other end gives some people joy.

They don't even need to open another tab. There is at least one Google Chrome extension specifically for cheating in chess (which the creators pretty much openly admit - their YT channel features a blatant cheating tutorial video).

I've reported this extension for abuse - since it's obviously unethical, goes against the rules of the websistes it's supposed to be used on, plus the description in the Store is misleading, as it's deliberately vague and unlike their YT profile, it cautiously doesn't mention cheating at all. Obviously it hasn't been taken down though.

Oh, wait, this must be cheating in the sense of “I used a computer to assist my brain in determining my move”. I guess that is a new type of problem in online chess…

New since 1994 or so

I never got into online chess. I’ve always played against physical humans or a bot.

There are people who have snuck chess computers into over the board tournaments as well, or used signaling from someone who had one.

Simple: don’t play moves you discover independently, and instead use an advanced chess AI to tell you what to play. You play your opponent’s moves against an alternative AI program, and then play its moves back in your game against the human.

I don’t know why people do this. It’s not like it makes them better at chess.

The same reasons cheating is rampant in all online videogames, I imagine

Simple. You use an engine to decide what moves you make instead of your own knowledge and skill. It's depressingly common.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com