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Comment by grzaks | Hacker News Reader

My biggest frustration with chess online is the huge number of cheaters on platforms like chess.com and lichess. It really takes the whole fun away.

I never really understood WHY people are cheating in online chess games. There is no fame, no money in it. This is puzzling for me.

My frustration is that chess.com and lichess are extremely week at finding and banning cheaters. Sometimes is sooo obvious, when for example somebody blunders a piece in first few moves and from this moment starts playing just perfect moves.

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> I never really understood WHY people are cheating in online chess games.

It seems that for some quite high proportion of the population someone else losing is necessary and sufficient for them to feel like they have won. Basically for those people winning just means "the other person lost".

This goes way beyond chess and explains a lot about society.

chess.com puts some effort in detecting cheaters. When I was active user I was receiving messages stating that such and such game was lost to cheater and my rating is updated to reflect that.

Cheater detection sounds like very interesting problem

Cheating detection can only be achieved statistically (it's kind of like proving a random number generator isn't random).

It makes it easy to achieve great accuracy in the long run, but hard to be accurate in the short run, because you don't want false alarms. So 99.9% of cheaters may get banned after a few games, but since they keep on coming up (it's not hard to simply register another account, after all), the frustration they're causing is always going to be there.

Some kind of shadow banning would be suitable. Let them play bots, or just other cheaters.

Good idea, apparently this is - or at least was - already being done on lichess, albeit not without some controversies (of the sort that's fairly typical whenever shadow banning enters the picture).

I cheated hard on this adventure time card wars game. Basically they stored "gems" offline on the client, so instead of buying a few gems, I'd just set the value like gems=9999999.

The thing was that matchmaking would match you up based on how many gems you spent. It inadvertently just set us all up with cheaters. The free game was pretty meh, but cheater's hell was a lot of fun. Everyone had every card, so the only way to win was being good at the game. I'm rather sad they killed the game eventually, it was a pretty well designed game.

I think bot hell for chess would be interesting too, the game becomes who can make better bots.

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