How Many Elite Chess Players Cheat? | Hacker News Reader

How Many Elite Chess Players Cheat?

wsj.com

16 pointsdrw6 comments

It would be interesting to compare the rates of cheating between pro players and amateur players and see which do so more. I know in some scenes (like speedrunning) it's often the pros that end up being exposed as cheaters more than random amateurs, and often because they wanted to achieve their (reasonable) goals more quickly/efficiently than their situation would allow.

> In the past, the platform would quietly close the account of any grandmaster caught using computer assistance.

> Now when a high-level player is caught, Chess.com plans to make the ban public.

What could go wrong? There are no risks of false positives in a proprietary and closed system making probabilistic and unfalsifiable judgments against players. It’s not like it could impact their career.

"Young Alireza Firouzja was auto-banned on chess.com because he was deemed too successful for an untitled player."

Case in point: the Viih_Sou incident [0]. Viih_Sou was an anonymous account famous for defeating Daniel Naroditsky and Wesley So with a meme opening: 1.a4/...a5, then sacking the rook on move 2. After Chess.com banned the account, GM Brandon Jacobson voluntarily outed himself as Viih_Sou, and insisted he didn't cheat.

Despite the opening looking Bongcloud-tier and objectively terrible (against a computer), it's surprisingly hard to refute as a human, especially during blitz, for two reasons:

1. Rooks are endgame pieces. Many blitz games don't last to an endgame. Trading your late-game piece for one of your opponent's most crucial opening/midgame pieces gives you an incredible jump on activity.

2. The gambit completely neutralizes the opponent's knowledge of opening theory. On the flip side, Viih_Sou has the advantage of studying dozens of lines for months.

Chess.com hasn't reversed the ban, but I think Brandon was telling the truth. I think using a bizarre opening that sacrifices material and involves questionable lines, followed up by the exacting genius of a GM playing top engine moves, stuck out as a statistical anomaly and tripped their Fair Play system.

0. https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1claxsm/its_me_viih_...

Not sure why anyone would want to play on a site that uses “yeah looks like cheating so you must’ve cheated” as a heuristic for a ban.

https://archive.is/3taq3

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