Tell me about it. I gave up on online Scrabble when I realized that either a lot of my friends cheated or they were one hell of a lot more well-read when looking at a Scrabble board than I ever would have thought in real life.
This type of thing bothers me a lot too. It would be one thing if people just used an engine all the time - they’d have some 2000+ rating, and consistently play games of that quality. Average players wouldn’t even run across them often at all. But instead you get poor players who just suddenly become GMs for a game or two.
I was wondering if any of these chess sites require you to use a webcam video connection so players are able to constantly watch each other?
Or would that not do much to deter cheating?
It would do nothing to deter cheating. Do you think people are cheating by having someone else in the room with them tell them what moves to make or something? Just run any half-decent chess program alongside your internet browser and mirror the moves your opponent makes while letting the computer (at a suitably high difficulty) decide your moves.
I’ve played at playchess.com for years and not had any trouble (games mostly with people rated 1500-1750). It’s cheap – one year subscription that comes out to a couple bucks a month, but you do have to purchase software to do it (I use the Fritz 8 program I bought 8 years ago… it would cost about ten bucks to buy it used today).
I’ve played more than 5400 fast games and 700 games at slow times ranging from 25 minutes per side to 90 minutes+5 seconds a move.
Here’s my evidence that there is no appreciable cheating:
My opponents’ average ratings come out to be about the same as my rating, which would predict that my wins equal losses.
My overall statistics just about match that.
Someone using a good engine would play at an extraordinarily good level (probably at a 3000 rating on that site). So if a significant number of my supposedly under 1750 opponents were in reality playing at the 3000 level, I’d never over time have won anything close to the number of games predicted by comparing our ratings.
If you see me on there, give me a shout – I have the same handle as on the Dope.
This is an interesting thread.
I don’t play on-line chess. But it doesn’t surprise me that people cheat. It’s disappointing, but sadly, I am not surprised. That’s why, when I play chess, I do it either against a computer program (that when on the hardest setting, i can’t beat, but I don’t expect to), or play a real human.
What is the point of cheating? Yes, you win, but so what? Do you get better? No, because it isn’t you making the moves, it’s a computer. So, your on-line ranking might rise, but what good is that? Don’t you need to join a chess club and go through a rigourous program to become officially ranked? Being ranked on-line behind a made up username isn’t exactly what I’d call impressive. Especially since if these people ever identified themselves, someone could call them out to play in person, and they’d most likely get crushed.
I like playing players better than me so I can get better. Beating someone that is below my skill level isn’t really enjoyable to me, so I cannot imagine how much fun it would be to cheat to win against a total stranger.
I just find this behavior very strange. I mean, what is the point of playing on-line chess if you need a bot to make your moves for you? How does someone get enjoyment out of that?
And if two people are using bots, that’s even worse. Neither person is playing for real, and is just entering moves made by another computer program. How is this fun?
And I’ll toss my agreement in on Scrabble. What a joke. People who have the vocabulary of your basic farm animal somehow pull words out of the air that Shakespeare would have to look up. Please. This is a game where cheating is so obvious it makes it hard to look at your friend the same way again.
I stopped playing Scrabble on-line very soon after I started. Sounds like I wouldn’t play chess long on-line either, although for me, i might just view it as me against a computer. Which is something I can do on my computer by myself, so playing a “real” opponent on line would be a waste of time and redundant.
I always thought chess players were like golfers in that they would police their own game and meep it free of cheating. Guess I was wrong!
Exactly! That’s where I think things have changed in the last few years. It used to be people would just blast away with the engines, and soon they would be playing other engines. Now they are using the engines to win “just enough.”
I am starting to get a feel of when someone is cheating, however–I think. There are multiple recoveries in a row that feel just a little too good to be true. When a player is not playing the opening very well but somehow manages to win every time, including on openings that low-ish-rated players don’t know very well. Then I disengage. I think I have become a pretty good chess player from playing all these 'roid-pumped players, so to speak!
Thanks for the heads up on this thread!
Do you mean people with “real” chess ratings outside the site? Or do you mean that the site gives you a rating?
If it’s the former, then how are those ratings verified? People could put in anything, right? Unless they are using their real names connected with real ratings. In that case, I can understand some accountability and perhaps less cheating. In any case a “real” USCF rating of 1500-1750 is really quite high, which in your case could help diminish the effect of limited cheating, since there would be less of a gap between yourself and the computer program.
If the site gives you a rating based on your wins and losses (as I assume any site would do), then I don’t think that’s meaningful to the argument. It would just mean that lesser players are able to float at the 1500-1750 level with a little “assistance.”
Now, on Yahoo, I used to play many years ago when I was a much worse player up to 1600-1650. Now I find it hard to stay about 1400. Anyone with a rating below 1300 used to be easy to beat. You would just wait for them to make a fatal mistake, like leave a piece hanging, and you would win. Now I regularly get into fierce games with people with ratings of 1100, and it’s gotten fairly uncommon for someone to blunder unless they are below 1000.
There are two main possibilities in this: Pressure at the top of the ratings from cheating drives good players down to lower ratings. And people with lower ratings are actually cheating. I think it’s both. I find it hard to imagine that any site could avoid cheating unless they policed it quite heavily. Or if there were some other accountability factor, as I suggested above.
So yes, please explain what you mean by this further and how this site might be different.
I agree that anyone using an engine all the time would float to the top. I think the problem that has arisen is selective cheating.
I think typical motivations are as follows:
• In the early days, people had fun just trouncing others with the engines. Not as many people had them, and it would let you experience what it was like to be a GM. However, after enough people were doing this, you’d only be playing other computers. Even back in 1999, when I was in chess club at grad school, it was understood that people with high ratings online could easily be a computer. So I would typically (on Yahoo) not play anyone rated 1650 or higher. That was my cutoff. Anything lower than that was probably real. Ironically, in those days, I would often get accused of cheating by my opponent if I pulled off a nice win, whereas today I am never so accused. The reason is, undoubtedly, that cheating is so rampant at all levels now that it’s pointing to even make the accusation.
I’m sure some people fire up the engines and play this way still, since I still see ratings of 2000 or higher in the intermediate Yahoo chess rooms, and I think, “Suuure.” I think there will always be a subset of people who enjoy this, even though I agree that it would be pretty boring.
•But what about selective cheating at lower ratings? I think one motivation is, now that cheating is soooo common, to at least maintain a respectable rating. People may feel they “deserve” to be at least 1300 or 1400 and cheat just to maintain that level. Especially if you feel that your opponent has cheated in a few games and a little payback is in order.
•There is still the “joy of screwing with people” factor. Jerks who used to get their jollies blasting away with an engine still have that motivation. But in order to screw with real people and not other engine-wielders, they’ve had to get creative. Obviously, they can’t win every game, otherwise they’d float up too high and not be screwing with real humans.
•There are surely some players who are decent who only use the engine to prevent a loss instead of guaranteeing a win. Thus, they would not seem to have super-human skill if they were genuinely winning from the start. Then, when they feel they are losing, they fire up the engine. There may be some genuine curiosity and intellectual stimulation in seeing how the engine can get out of a nasty situation. If I see this happening several games in a row, I am pretty sure that the person is cheating. Again, this type of player would have to allow themselves to lose somewhat. I’ve played people where I win the first few games handily, but then they become GMs once they start losing. This may be their algorithm: lose at the beginning of a set of games and then “titrate” up with the engine back to the target rating.
•I really think the prevalence of cheating has pissed off a lot of people and turned them into occasional (i.e., minimum rating-maintaining) cheaters that would not otherwise cheat and driven out those who are sick of being beaten in this way. Thus, it’s a vicious cycle.
No, you can also just play across the board in officially sanctioned meets and tournaments. You have to “file” to get the rating, however.
Obviously. The last time I played people across the board, it was at a Mensa meeting, and one guy was actually a chess club moderator at a private grade school. Now, these guys were actually terrible at chess, but I also surprised myself at how good I’d become. It was a reality check for just how bad the online situation has become.
I like what I call “brain-teaser” chess in which the person gives me enough of a challenge but I still win most of the team. (Now I also like to learn from someone better, but if sheer learning were the only goal, I’d probably just study chess books and play engines.) I think some people cheat in this “brain-teaser” mode too, using engines to be just “good enough,” maybe maintain a rating at a certain level they feel they deserve, especially when so many other people are cheating.
If people were playing under their real names, this would no doubt happen to some extent. But highly ranked people have been caught cheating in real tournaments, too. They have been caught using earpieces (confederates feed them the moves), consulting engines via cell phones on bathroom breaks, and one guy was even suspected of concealing a device in his shoe(s):
http://www.chessvibes.com/borislav-ivanov-alleged-cheater-ends-chess-career
He refused to take off his shoes and forfeiting a game. The thought was he had a signaling device or something “down thar.”
Presumably, chess engine developers are working on this: an option to play well enough to achieve a desired result while mixing in enough questionable play to blunt suspicion.
I used to regularly play Yahoo chess until the mid 2000s when they changed their interface and eliminated the boot opponent from table option. I always played timed games to avoid opponents that would just move once or twice then leave the table. I routinely booted opponents with rating below 1200 because they’d be either really bad or a strong player using a new account that would hurt my ratings badly if I lost to them.
I always used the same gambit opening which would result in some entertainingly quick checkmates versus unwary opponents. I even beat 1700-1800 opponents in less than 20 moves with this opening. My highest rating was over 1700, but it averaged somewhere around 1600. I usually opened my own table so I could boot any suspect opponents. Sometimes I would suspect that a bot was being used although I would just assume there’s some stronger opponents out there since I’m not a grandmaster. It’s been several years since the last time I played Yahoo chess.
The site rates players based on who they lose to or beat.
Yes, if players restrict their cheating so that they maintain some mid level rating, the statistics I offered won’t reveal them. I find it hard to believe there would be a large group of cheaters who only want to be average.
If there were such people, I’d think they would cheat to avoid game losing blunders – that’s the most frustrating aspect of not being good at chess, after all. So I imagine they’d vet their moves with an engine on another computer and reject anything evaluated as worse than -.5 or -1.0 to their position. But almost all the games I play are decided by who makes the last blunder, often after exchanging a few such blunders between sides.
I do go over most of my slow games with computer analysis, and I don’t find patterns that would indicate cheating (poor play followed by remarkably better play, computer-style play, etc.)
The other big factor is that many people of playchess.com have been playing on there for years. Hard to see cheating at chess as a fun enough hobby to keep at it for that long.
Probably most important is that you do have to pay a little to play. So you get a more serious player pool.
The site itself has a number of methods of policing cheating, so if you just boot up an engine and put your current game into it you’ll get banned. But nothing can be done to catch someone who puts the game into an engine on, say, his laptop while playing the game on his desktop.
What I notice is that at my level (1600s, which is the average for the site) people don’t worry much about cheating. Some players of greater skill, say 2000+, won’t play slow games because they believe opponents of their rank are often cheaters. So they just play blitz, in which conventional wisdom has it that the time limit leaves no room for cheating.
What Aeschines describes on yahoo does sound very different from what I’ve run into. That said, I believe his reports about yahoo and admit I can’t prove there are not cheaters who use engines to maintain an average rating.
A final note – if there are cheaters who use engines so sparingly I beat them 50% of the time, I’d have to say I’m not too worried about them. I’d pay a lot of money for a chess engine that could give me a game at my level and play like a human 95% of the time. In may ways that would be the holy grail of chess engines.
You can boot players from your table on Yahoo now. I don’t remember any period in which that wasn’t possible.
You reminded me of another thing that has changed: there used to be plenty of “provisional” people in the Intermediate lounges. Now there are virtually none. Not sure why that’s happened.
King’s gambit? That’s one of my faves.
This seems like rubbish to me… Cheating in online chess is no where near the level this board suggests. What you lot are describing is a combination of bad beats which happens in chess unless your exceptionally good, and the fact that more people play online chess then in the 1990’s- hence it is far more competetive and your rating has decreased relative the larger number of good people playing. Very occasionally I see someone log out and back in… before making a much better than expected move. On chess.co where I play I have sometimes won games due to fair play policy intervention where this seems to have happened. I have never really suspected a person of cheating apart from trying to get out of a tight spot or crucical point (most of the time chess.com seems to flag them). Life is too short to spend ages of time winning with a chess engine at the lower levels. People like to win by themseves, occasionally they may cheat for pride at a bad moment or two. Won’t affect your long term rating. too many honest players out there. My thoughts on it anyway.
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