As time has passed, bad behavior on the Internet has evolved at a fairly quick pace. It used to be that trolls would act like shit-flinging apes online, enraging people by tossing obvious verbal feces. People soon learned to call out such behavior with the word “troll.” Concepts are empowering. But trolls got better and subtler. The “concern troll” was born, as well as people who knew how to taunt and goad just enough.
And so it has been with any kind of annoyance, be it email spam, blog comment spam, what have you. Where countermeasures have been implemented, people have learned to be dicks in other ways.
This has happened in online chess as well, and it’s come close to making me quit completely.
I started playing chess online on Yahoo in 1998 when I first was in grad school. Cheating existed from the beginning. People would use chess engines and beat the shit out of you. The thing was, they tended to float pretty high on that power. I made it my policy never to play anyone rated 1650 or higher. Until the mid-2000s or so, I could play up to about 1600 as my rating. This is pretty good. I have never once used a chess engine to cheat; I don’t even have one on my computer. I will confess once or twice I have used chess books to figure out an opening. Mea culpa on that.
I have read what I could concerning online cheating. The following picture is what I have come up with based on my readings and experiences. I would invite fellow chess players to weigh in.
My rating has fallen since 2004 or 2005 to about 1400 max–a full 200 points lower. I never used to drop into the 1200s–if I did, it was the result of a really bad streak and a mark of shame. Back in the day, I could expect blunders and easy wins from anyone in the 1200s, and anyone in the 1300s was usually an easy win. 1400+ was where the challenge began.
Now, however, things are totally different. People playing in the 1200s are fierce. Hell, I play people in the 1100s who are playing tight, tight games with no mistakes. Keep in mind that you start out with 1200 points on Yahoo just for signing up (although you are marked “provisional” for 20 games). It is extremely frustrating to see someone playing an advanced opening like the Caro-Kann with a low rating.
Needless to say, I have not become a worse chess player. The reason is cheating. There’s a lot more cheating going on (quantitative), and a lot more subtle cheating going on (qualitative). The effect has been to push everyone’s rating down, creating the situation in which even people with extremely low ratings are playing very well.
A few months ago, I played people over the board for the first time in years. This was at a Mensa meeting (!), and these guys seemed fairly confident of their ability. Now, objectively speaking, I don’t think they were very good chess players, but in any event I destroyed them. I didn’t lose a single game and wiped the board with they ass. So I am genuinely curious how good I’ve become over the years. For all I know, I’ve been playing a lot of bots and very good players and am now a decent player myself. I just don’t know.
In any case, you may be wondering how cheating has become more subtle. First, I think the motive for more subtle cheating is pretty obvious: people who were playing with chess engines raised their ratings and then found themselves playing other people with chess engines. That’s no fun. You’ve got to crush a real person who’s actually trying to feel their pain and enjoy it. So they started doing things like this:
- Losing for a few games and then, once their rating sinks below what they feel to be an appropriate threshold, fire up the chess engine and start winning. Still not very subtle, especially if they start playing perfect book games all of a sudden. I think a number of players who would otherwise be honest have started doing this. They just don’t want their rating to go too low, you see? Plus, for all they know, I’m using an engine against them, and they want to get me back.
This method can be done more subtly if they don’t play perfect book games once they decide to start “winning.”
- Using a chess engine after they start losing. I can almost scream with frustration as I write about this type of opponent. I am kicking ass, up a pawn or two or even a piece, and then the motherfucker starting throwing down like a grandmaster. Fuck that shit!
Sometimes I will actually win one of these games. Maybe they started trying to win a bit too late. But, my gawd, it’s like playing Gary Kasparov at that point!
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Losing a game or two but using the chess engine in a subtle fashion to win overall. This is hard to detect or prove, but sometimes you get the feeling that it is going on. Plus, I met a guy on Yahoo–the first person I was ever able to talk with about the cheating situation while on the site–who says that a lot of people will do this.
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Just kicking your ass right from the beginning, old-school cheating style. Sometimes I will start playing with someone with a low rating and they will just beat my ass like a grandmaster with a grudge. And I think, “What the fuck! Look at your rating, man!” This could be someone like #1 above who finds their rating too low at one point and just starts on a new opponent with the engine fired up.
The environment this cheating has created is toxic to the max. I don’t trust anyone, and I can tell that no one trusts me. If I pull off a big win against a decently rated opponent, usually they will leave. The probably figured I had started up the chess engine and was now going to kick their ass now. Oddly, accusations of cheating are pretty rare now, whereas they were common back in the late 1990s! I think people just know that it’s rampant and they just leave.
This situation creates paradoxical situations. I find that it’s often easier to beat people who are slightly higher rated than lower. It’s as if there is a sweet spot around 1430 or so where players are more likely to be real. I have a chance at beating anyone shy of master level if they are not cheating, but I have no chance of beating a chess engine ever.
Further, I think there are just a lot of plain ol’ bots in Yahoo chess that are programmed do Nos. 1-4 above. I see a lot of weird behavior that would not be fun for any human troll, such as continuously entering and exiting my chess table without sitting down and playing. But I don’t really know.
Now, supposedly internetchessclub.com (ICC) is a better venue that does a better job of catching cheaters. They can do things like seeing if a user is playing pure book moves, if they are spending the same amount of time on moves regardless of their difficulty, and so on. It’s clear that Yahoo does nothing to catch cheaters, and something would be better than nothing.
That may be the case, but ICC charges money, and you have to download a funky interface for Mac, etc. I may end up doing it to get something better, and I’d like your feedback on that.
At the same time, I have also read online that ICC doesn’t really do that great a job of catching cheaters. It would seem extremely hard to catch cheaters using automated methods if they were using chess engines in a subtle and selective manner. For example, using the engine’s advice every second or third move would probably be enough to beat most players, and I think it would be very difficult to discover that.
Such is my rant. I cordially invite your input, advice, and complaints.