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Comment by CrankyBear | Hacker News Reader

I love chess. At my absolute best, I had a over-the-board USCF rating of 2156. I never made it to master no matter how hard I tried. So, ticked off, I gave up serious play. Years go by and while I'm no where near as good these days, I started enjoying playing again. And, then I start running into people online who were clearly using engines instead of their own skills and wits. Now, I only pay with friends and over-the-board. If this can help wipe out the cheats, I may finally go back to playing online again.

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What time controls do you play? Cheating is much more prevalent in rapid than blitz, with correspondence probably being the worst of all. It's unlucky for people who don't like speed chess.

The only solution to this problem I'm aware of is developing/becoming a part of a community of people you trust. Of course, that's hard and comes with plenty of limitations.

Lastly, please don't get your expectations up. This is a hugely unsolved problem on lichess and the history of its and chesscom's efforts do not inspire confidence. I noticed this repo has no updates in the past three years, during which lichess has maintained its reputation of having tons of cheaters. Chesscom has a team and probably more tools (proprietary, larger company, etc.) but the best case scenario still involves cheaters getting several games in, wasting your time along the way.

I have been playing daily for about two years now on Lichess and over-the-board whenever the opportunity presents itself. I find people who burn the clock when their game takes a turn for the worse far more frustrating than those who cheat their way to victory. At least with the cheaters, the game is over pretty quickly, so I can move onto a game which is actually enjoyable.

I got into Lichess myself about a year ago, after not really having played much chess in the past 20 or 20 years. Oddly enough, it was people on HN who persuaded me to give online chess a chance. I'd never bothered previously, as I couldn't see how you would ever know the other player wasn't getting their moves from a chess app. HNers persuaded me to give it a go because Lichess had algorithms in place which detected cheating.

Having now played nearly 2000 games on Lichess, I'm pretty happy with their ability to weed out cheaters. I've very rarely had cause to suspect my opponent wasn't playing fair. Maybe once or twice someone with a lower ranking than me seemed to be a bit too good --but then we all have our flashes of inspiration, as well as our off days.

However, on a couple of occasions, I've logged onto the site to see a notification that I've had some ranking points restored, as a previous opponent had cheated. But, unfortunately, Lichess doesn't tell you which opponent or which game, so I'm still none the wiser.

PS: Agree with you about the people who run the clock down, when they're losing. Really annoying. When this happens, I usually switch to another browser tab and read intarwebs instead, switching back to the Lichess tab every 5 mins or so, to see if they've made a move yet.

> At least with the cheaters, the game is over pretty quickly

Yeah, unless you want to play a longer game than a 5 minute blitz.

I don’t understand this sentiment.

The rating of a player will reflect their strength, regardless of whether they are an unaided human, a full computer, or a human with some heuristic to consult an engine. Whatever the player is doing, their rating will reflect their average strength, and the website matches us to players of similar rating. Whether or not a player is pure human, pure engine, or centaur, we get matched to a player that we have a roughly even chance of beating.

Pure cheaters will quickly skyrocket to the top of the ratings and I will never see them. Hybrid cheaters, who do not have a perfect rating, have a probability of losing because their heuristic to switch to an engine is imperfect, and their rating reflects this imperfection.

Whatever the player is doing, their numeric rating reflects their average strength, and if you have a similar rating you have roughly even chances of beating them.

I disagree. The centaur might have a rating of 2150, but they will sporadically play a 3300 rated engine move. This completely breaks the rating system's probabilities.

This is like boxing in the lightweight division, but your opponent can, at will, use Mike Tyson in his prime to hit you in the face.

> Pure cheaters will quickly skyrocket to the top of the ratings

Unless they cheat in unrated games, or discard their account and create another before the rating ascends too high (not necessarily for that purpose, but to avoid detection).

You should be happy with that! That's like candidate master level. Real impressive

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