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A Bird-Feed Seller Beat a Chess Master Online. Then It Got Ugly

28 points by elijahparker 6y ago

tacitusarc 6y ago
I watch Levy's youtube channel, and he is certainly not the kind of person to vindictively report someone because they beat him. Furthermore, he explains his reasoning clearly when he thinks someone is cheating using a bot: they make strange moves, the time between movies stays fairly constant, they take longer than expected to make very obvious moves. I would be very curious to see this indonesian player legitimately play against a chess master live, because from both chess.com and Levy it sounds like he was definitely cheating.
gumby 6y ago
Couldn’t someone simply livestream the game, filming him from the same room? You could see if he was consulting a computer or not.
- jobigoud 6y ago
  Could you? If stream sound is off you could have someone off-screen shouting the answers. If sound is on you could have a silent communication system through tapping or vibrating motors to transmit moves. Chess moves can be encoded in very few bits of info.
- tomcooks 6y ago
  Cheating in online chess is notoriously difficult to check, in a way not too different from how it's virtually impossible to stop piracy of content
Y_Y 6y ago
The article somewhat leaves the matter open, but I think that's unfair. The guy may well have played chess when he was younger, but that he would be a world-class player despite being virtually unknown is the extraordinary claim here, and hence has the burden of proof. As others have said the "explanations" are also comically weak. Playing against bots does not make you play like a bot, he's not the first player to practice chess against the computer.
- neaden 6y ago
  Yeah, this is not at all ambiguous if you know anything about chess and cheating, this person was straight up cheating and is trying to cover it up. There is no need for a rematch like some are suggesting, this is like if some random person claimed that they ran a 2 hour Marathon, you don't need to have proof to know it's BS.

28 points by elijahparker 6y ago

I watch Levy's youtube channel, and he is certainly not the kind of person to vindictively report someone because they beat him. Furthermore, he explains his reasoning clearly when he thinks someone is cheating using a bot: they make strange moves, the time between movies stays fairly constant, they take longer than expected to make very obvious moves. I would be very curious to see this indonesian player legitimately play against a chess master live, because from both chess.com and Levy it sounds like he was definitely cheating.

gumby 6y ago

Couldn’t someone simply livestream the game, filming him from the same room? You could see if he was consulting a computer or not.

jobigoud 6y ago
Could you? If stream sound is off you could have someone off-screen shouting the answers. If sound is on you could have a silent communication system through tapping or vibrating motors to transmit moves. Chess moves can be encoded in very few bits of info.
tomcooks 6y ago
Cheating in online chess is notoriously difficult to check, in a way not too different from how it's virtually impossible to stop piracy of content

Y_Y 6y ago

The article somewhat leaves the matter open, but I think that's unfair. The guy may well have played chess when he was younger, but that he would be a world-class player despite being virtually unknown is the extraordinary claim here, and hence has the burden of proof. As others have said the "explanations" are also comically weak. Playing against bots does not make you play like a bot, he's not the first player to practice chess against the computer.

neaden 6y ago
Yeah, this is not at all ambiguous if you know anything about chess and cheating, this person was straight up cheating and is trying to cover it up. There is no need for a rematch like some are suggesting, this is like if some random person claimed that they ran a 2 hour Marathon, you don't need to have proof to know it's BS.