Online chess cheaters are making the game unplayable

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:

  1. 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.”

  1. 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!

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

I don’t know anything about online competitive chess but I’d assume Yahoo would be a bottom of the barrel way to do it unless you just want some lawls.

Several years back when I was involved with competitive online video games like Counter-Strike you’d have to run a program that scans your computer for certain programs, take ingame screenshots, and record ingame demos/replays. If there was a cheating dispute they’d all be looked at, and it was usually easy to tell if someone was cheating unless they were sophisticated. Like if they only did it for specific situations and just played normal the rest of the time. There were also popular leagues that required a small yearly due, like five bucks or so.

I’m guessing it’d be harder to see if someone was cheating at chess than a video game, though.

It was fine for a long time. Now, not so much.

Yes, serious sites can run scans that determine if you are running chess engines on the same machine. But getting around that is easy: just run the chess engine on another machine. All you have to do is make your opponent’s moves and then copy what the computer does on the main computer.

That’s just depressing. Imagine someone with self-esteem so damn low, they have to go and get a computer to play a game of chess for them! (The movie “War Games” comes to mind.) But, seriously, what an incredible lack of human integrity! What a grotesque level of immaturity! What a – (goes to Google and searches “insulting quotes”) – pathetic waste of human potential: there’s a bunch of villages out there somewhere missing their idiots!

Interesting OP.

I’m not surprised that Yahoo has been invaded by miscreants. I would be surprised if there weren’t a number of decent alternatives.

  1. Q: Do cheaters use their real names?

  2. Would chatting with players first help matters?

  3. Aren’t there a large number of websites that offer games?

  4. Don’t chess magazines have something to say on the subject?

  5. I suppose a local chess club might help as well.

  6. If the problem is one where the computer needs to be monitored, this could be a business opportunity for internet cafes.

Seems to me that you’d never know for sure if somebody is cheating at a game like chess if you’re playing online. Why not just play the AI and skip Yahoo?

I see Red Hot Pawn is recommended as a top answer on Yahoo.

  1. Switch to Go, where computers don’t play at a high level. I’m kidding of course, but I thought I’d mention that.

I stopped playing chess when I came to the point where you would have to start memorising old games by master chess-players. It lost it’s charm then to me.

With the advent of computergames there are much nicer and better wargames available than chess.

I recommend that the OP never play online Scrabble. If you think chess cheating is bad…

how fast are the computer AI? would reducing turn times help deter them?

You shouldn’t have problems with chess.com. That is what I used when I was playing chess (right now I am taking a break, but I should be coming back to it eventually).

If you really want something good, you should get Chessmaster Grandmaster Edition. Excellent computer program which includes great lectures from IM Joshua Waitzkin (really cool guy), and it has a game-playing mode that comes with it too which is based on a raring scale (although your real-life USCF/FIDE rating will probably be lower). Hell it even comes with an analyzer which may not be as good as Fritz, but it is works quite fine and you can analyze any of your online or real-life games given you have the game score.

ETA: if you are really serious about chess, you should consider joining a chess club where you can participate in official USCF tournaments where you get rated (that is what I did a few months ago). I am rated somewhere in the 1400’s USCF. You can also play there for fun if you want.

Oh, if you are talking about cheating as in using an engine to calculate moves, then yeah, there is not much you can do. However I think you can report abuse on chess.com and they look out for and warn cheaters, so it is not that bad there.

The same reason why it’s more fun to play card games or multiplayer video games with real people.

The AI is predictable, which is good while you’re learning the game, but it gets repetitive and boring once your skill hits a certain level. Another person trying to outthink and outmaneuver you adds something the AI just doesn’t, and it makes your victory more satisfying because you’ve earned it.

Play on Chess.com. I’ve played there for a while and I’ve never noticed a problem there.

Another good thing about chess.com is that they have a pretty good message board for discussing chess (openings, games, etc.)

Blistering fast. They can analyze millions to tens of millions moves per second. Now there’s more to it that how many positions you can brute force per second, but that gives you an idea. Unfortunately, I can’t find any cites for a program that ranks per-move time with ELO rating.

[Moderating]
While a valid rant, I think this thread will get mire useful responses in the Game Room.
[/Moderating]

I used to play on isc.ro and I didn’t have any problems with it.

(Like Latro, I stopped playing Scrabble once I got up to the point where I’d have to memorize a bunch of stuff in order to improve.)

That sucks.

There are basically four approaches to quashing cheating:

  1. Pay for the game playing service. There are many fewer cheaters who are willing to pay money to not actually accomplish something, and a site that’s actually making money off of you has an incentive to kick the cheaters out and keep their player base happy.
  2. Supervise the players. This probably isn’t feasible for chess, since, as mentioned, you don’t even have to run the AI on the same computer you’re playing on.
  3. Social features so you only play “trusted” players, and can report suggested players
  4. Change the rules of the game to make it hard for computers to beat humans.

1 and 3 are probably the best options. Find another chess community (local club, other site online, etc.) that’s socially integrated more than the randoms on Yahoo. If you can afford it, one that has a membership fee is probably going to result in a better experience. How much is it worth to you to not deal with cheaters?