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My question about online chess is: why aren't people feeling that their opponents are cheating? I don't play chess. But in other online games, like FPS, the pl

My question about online chess is: why aren't people feeling that their opponents are cheating? I don't play chess. But in other online games, like FPS, the players always complain about cheaters. Then why isn't it a problem with chess.com? It's much easier to cheat with online chess than an FPS game, no?

creakingstairs 4y ago
In lower Elos, it’s pretty obvious if the other user is cheating, so the platforms seem to detect them pretty well.
hannob 4y ago
The question is: Do I care? Particularly if I'm not super-competitive. I play chess irregularly on a not very sophisticated level (ELO ~400). I get automatically assigned opponents. Sure, it's possible that some of them cheat. It's probably not super attractive, because I'm not sure what the fun is in "I beat random ELO 400 player on chess.com with a computer". So maybe one in a few dozend games I face a cheater. If you get into much more competitive chess then people probably cheat more. But I guess for the vast majority of players it doesn't matter.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  400 chess.com Elo (not ELO) is so low that bo cheater would never fall so lo in rating to play against you. 400 rating is still learning how the pieces move.
bsder 4y ago
1) A lot of "cheating complaints" in multiplayer games are simply people that suck. There was an article a while ago that examined several of these kinds of games and most people made the most absolutely basic blunders. 2) FPS games have a lot more degrees of freedom to cheat. There is network lag, hidden information, aimbots, etc. Chess, by contrast, has no hidden state and everything is contained on the server. The only way to cheat is simply to play better moves than your level. 3) Cheaters get bumped up in level quickly and wind up against people who can flag them for cheating. Almost all of the master level chess players can identify suspicious "computer" moves. Most systems have a way to flag a game or move for review. Finally, computers can deeply analyze the games and look for behaviors that don't match "humans". 4) The flip side of that is that amateurs blunder so much that they wouldn't be able to tell even if they got cheated against--by and large. Jerk behavior tends to be far more problematic than cheating. For example, if you get a winning position, it's not uncommon for an opponent to stop playing but make you wait the rest of the time to count the win. You will bump into this, and it will annoy you way more often than cheaters.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  >Jerk behavior tends to be far more problematic than cheating. For example, if you get a winning position, it's not uncommon for an opponent to stop playing but make you wait the rest of the time to count the win. You will bump into this, and it will annoy you way more often than cheaters. When people do this on Lichess, I spamclick the button that adds 15 seconds to the opponent clock and write "move or resign". Sometimes people resign, sometimes they keep playing, sometimes they just close the app then you can claim the victory almost immediately. This behaviour probably pisses me off so much because I grew up playing real tournaments, where politeness is highly valued. Getting up and walking away, or letting your time run out on purpose, is considered extremely rude to where it could get you disqualified.
  - chongli 4y ago
    They need a way of flagging this sort of behaviour as well. It should be relatively easy to spot if a person is repeatedly flagging while sitting there for a long time in completely losing positions.
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
      I think Lichess already does this. When players do this, there's a warning in the chat that repeatedly doing this will result in a temporary ban. I don't know how long the ban is and whether it becomes permanent, since I never do this unless my connection actually dropped.
- chongli 4y ago
  Cheaters get bumped up in level quickly and wind up against people who can flag them for cheating Yes, and the other side of this coin is sandbagging. Cheaters losing on purpose to keep their rating down. Generally this is also pretty easy to detect because it’s difficult to lose on purpose in a convincing way. Just resigning the game in a non-losing position or blundering mate-in-1 is too obvious and easy to catch. Someone playing the top Stockfish line 20 moves in a row and then blundering their queen just sticks out like a sore thumb.
watwut 4y ago
Lichess puts a lot of effort into catching cheaters.
- than3 4y ago
  No, they really don't. They use a ML Siamese head network that was donated to them back ~2012. Nothing has changed since then, and they don't prevent people from creating new accounts. There were issues reported to them in 2016 about the siamese network failing to detect properly in cases where the client-side parameters being passed could be spoofed and held static, and they banned the people who reported it and deleted the posts from their github and the site. From what I've seen, their team is petty, conceited, and vindictive people. They make a show of valuing the community, but its just that; a show. When it comes down to actually reporting something responsibly in goodwill; they have no professionalism, and no credibility. They don't want to hear about it; and its easier to silence with the hammer of admin power than anything else. Incidentally, there were also issues with the paperwork they filed for the charity in France too. You are required to have certain paperwork filed to provide when opening a bank account in France (so you don't comingle charity funds with personal funds). It didn't appear they filed that paperwork when I last went digging. Maybe OSINT will bring something up. I honestly can't stand false hero worship, they've done nothing to earn respect and a lot to lose any credibility they may have had.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    Those are strong accusations to make without evidence. Why should we believe your anonymous gossip over someone who spent years building and running lichess and giving it away for free? https://www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/pages/associations-detail-annonce/?q.id=id:201600250818 https://www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/pages/associations-deta... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31158426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31158426 You seem to have some sort of grudge against Lichess, to the point that the only easily discoverable info about Liches's Siamese network is your own vague complaints about it. Perhaps you are the one who hasn't earned any respect. Despite your claims that computers killed chess, chess is thriving more than ever, with more people making a living from chess than any time in history.
opportune 4y ago
Chess AIs are so good that consistently cheating will put you at a very very high rating relative to most players. It’s also very noticeable as AI-suggested moves have very low centipawn loss (in other words, AI-assisted moves are usually recognizably the “best” move/ the same as what a cheat detection AI run by the chess service would suggest). A pattern of regularly making probabilistically unlimely centipawn loss move sequences can be detected. Other heuristics used are mouse moving offscreen IIRC. A lot of top chess players only play bullet and blitz online where cheating is too hard, you’d have to completely automate it, at which point you are no longer playing a game but just watching an AI play pros until it gets banned. If you cheat in FPS you still feel like you’re playing the game, just on an easier setting. But with Chess it’s basically just delegating the game to something else. When playing online there is little incentivize to do this.
somenameforme 4y ago
A huge amount of work is dedicated to busting cheaters. Getting into the minutia of exactly how this is done is outside the scope of this post, but the most obvious one is correlation. Run a correlation check between a suspected cheater's moves and various engines - and see how they matchup. Another would be time expenditure. A guy spending the same time for an only-move and a superhuman tactical sequence is probably not legit. And there's dozens of other metrics you can use to determine 'cheatiness', with the end result being near 100% certainty on whether somebody is or isn't legit. I'm relatively high rated on chess.com and only run into a cheater every once in a blue moon. Invariably his account tends to be closed, and points refunded shortly thereafter. This wasn't always the case, 'back in the day' chess.com had a major problem with cheaters, but it's clear that at some point they made a serious effort to start flushing out the cheaters - and it's been a big success.
justaman 4y ago
I've played over 500 games on chesscom in the last year at between 700-1050 rating. Its hard to point out a cheater but sometimes you just get a hunch, then on review of the game, they blundered twice in the first dozen moves then the game shifts dramatically. Early game rated 600, mid 1500+. Whats more common is cheesy tactics. Kid will go on YT and watch a video about some cheeky opening and mimic that. Things like early queen pushes. Once you punish it, they crumble. So you get these players that have inflated ELO. If they can't do the one opening they know, they simply don't know the general tactics. Then there are the smurfs. They don't last long at low rating but these people are the worst. They exist in any online game.

creakingstairs 4y ago

In lower Elos, it’s pretty obvious if the other user is cheating, so the platforms seem to detect them pretty well.

hannob 4y ago

The question is: Do I care? Particularly if I'm not super-competitive. I play chess irregularly on a not very sophisticated level (ELO ~400). I get automatically assigned opponents. Sure, it's possible that some of them cheat. It's probably not super attractive, because I'm not sure what the fun is in "I beat random ELO 400 player on chess.com with a computer". So maybe one in a few dozend games I face a cheater. If you get into much more competitive chess then people probably cheat more. But I guess for the vast majority of players it doesn't matter.

hgsgm 4y ago
400 chess.com Elo (not ELO) is so low that bo cheater would never fall so lo in rating to play against you. 400 rating is still learning how the pieces move.

bsder 4y ago

1) A lot of "cheating complaints" in multiplayer games are simply people that suck. There was an article a while ago that examined several of these kinds of games and most people made the most absolutely basic blunders. 2) FPS games have a lot more degrees of freedom to cheat. There is network lag, hidden information, aimbots, etc. Chess, by contrast, has no hidden state and everything is contained on the server. The only way to cheat is simply to play better moves than your level. 3) Cheaters get bumped up in level quickly and wind up against people who can flag them for cheating. Almost all of the master level chess players can identify suspicious "computer" moves. Most systems have a way to flag a game or move for review. Finally, computers can deeply analyze the games and look for behaviors that don't match "humans". 4) The flip side of that is that amateurs blunder so much that they wouldn't be able to tell even if they got cheated against--by and large. Jerk behavior tends to be far more problematic than cheating. For example, if you get a winning position, it's not uncommon for an opponent to stop playing but make you wait the rest of the time to count the win. You will bump into this, and it will annoy you way more often than cheaters.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
>Jerk behavior tends to be far more problematic than cheating. For example, if you get a winning position, it's not uncommon for an opponent to stop playing but make you wait the rest of the time to count the win. You will bump into this, and it will annoy you way more often than cheaters. When people do this on Lichess, I spamclick the button that adds 15 seconds to the opponent clock and write "move or resign". Sometimes people resign, sometimes they keep playing, sometimes they just close the app then you can claim the victory almost immediately. This behaviour probably pisses me off so much because I grew up playing real tournaments, where politeness is highly valued. Getting up and walking away, or letting your time run out on purpose, is considered extremely rude to where it could get you disqualified.
- chongli 4y ago
  They need a way of flagging this sort of behaviour as well. It should be relatively easy to spot if a person is repeatedly flagging while sitting there for a long time in completely losing positions.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    I think Lichess already does this. When players do this, there's a warning in the chat that repeatedly doing this will result in a temporary ban. I don't know how long the ban is and whether it becomes permanent, since I never do this unless my connection actually dropped.
chongli 4y ago
Cheaters get bumped up in level quickly and wind up against people who can flag them for cheating Yes, and the other side of this coin is sandbagging. Cheaters losing on purpose to keep their rating down. Generally this is also pretty easy to detect because it’s difficult to lose on purpose in a convincing way. Just resigning the game in a non-losing position or blundering mate-in-1 is too obvious and easy to catch. Someone playing the top Stockfish line 20 moves in a row and then blundering their queen just sticks out like a sore thumb.

watwut 4y ago

Lichess puts a lot of effort into catching cheaters.

than3 4y ago
No, they really don't. They use a ML Siamese head network that was donated to them back ~2012. Nothing has changed since then, and they don't prevent people from creating new accounts. There were issues reported to them in 2016 about the siamese network failing to detect properly in cases where the client-side parameters being passed could be spoofed and held static, and they banned the people who reported it and deleted the posts from their github and the site. From what I've seen, their team is petty, conceited, and vindictive people. They make a show of valuing the community, but its just that; a show. When it comes down to actually reporting something responsibly in goodwill; they have no professionalism, and no credibility. They don't want to hear about it; and its easier to silence with the hammer of admin power than anything else. Incidentally, there were also issues with the paperwork they filed for the charity in France too. You are required to have certain paperwork filed to provide when opening a bank account in France (so you don't comingle charity funds with personal funds). It didn't appear they filed that paperwork when I last went digging. Maybe OSINT will bring something up. I honestly can't stand false hero worship, they've done nothing to earn respect and a lot to lose any credibility they may have had.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  Those are strong accusations to make without evidence. Why should we believe your anonymous gossip over someone who spent years building and running lichess and giving it away for free? https://www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/pages/associations-detail-annonce/?q.id=id:201600250818 https://www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/pages/associations-deta... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31158426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31158426 You seem to have some sort of grudge against Lichess, to the point that the only easily discoverable info about Liches's Siamese network is your own vague complaints about it. Perhaps you are the one who hasn't earned any respect. Despite your claims that computers killed chess, chess is thriving more than ever, with more people making a living from chess than any time in history.

opportune 4y ago

Chess AIs are so good that consistently cheating will put you at a very very high rating relative to most players. It’s also very noticeable as AI-suggested moves have very low centipawn loss (in other words, AI-assisted moves are usually recognizably the “best” move/ the same as what a cheat detection AI run by the chess service would suggest). A pattern of regularly making probabilistically unlimely centipawn loss move sequences can be detected. Other heuristics used are mouse moving offscreen IIRC. A lot of top chess players only play bullet and blitz online where cheating is too hard, you’d have to completely automate it, at which point you are no longer playing a game but just watching an AI play pros until it gets banned. If you cheat in FPS you still feel like you’re playing the game, just on an easier setting. But with Chess it’s basically just delegating the game to something else. When playing online there is little incentivize to do this.

somenameforme 4y ago

A huge amount of work is dedicated to busting cheaters. Getting into the minutia of exactly how this is done is outside the scope of this post, but the most obvious one is correlation. Run a correlation check between a suspected cheater's moves and various engines - and see how they matchup. Another would be time expenditure. A guy spending the same time for an only-move and a superhuman tactical sequence is probably not legit. And there's dozens of other metrics you can use to determine 'cheatiness', with the end result being near 100% certainty on whether somebody is or isn't legit. I'm relatively high rated on chess.com and only run into a cheater every once in a blue moon. Invariably his account tends to be closed, and points refunded shortly thereafter. This wasn't always the case, 'back in the day' chess.com had a major problem with cheaters, but it's clear that at some point they made a serious effort to start flushing out the cheaters - and it's been a big success.

justaman 4y ago

I've played over 500 games on chesscom in the last year at between 700-1050 rating. Its hard to point out a cheater but sometimes you just get a hunch, then on review of the game, they blundered twice in the first dozen moves then the game shifts dramatically. Early game rated 600, mid 1500+. Whats more common is cheesy tactics. Kid will go on YT and watch a video about some cheeky opening and mimic that. Things like early queen pushes. Once you punish it, they crumble. So you get these players that have inflated ELO. If they can't do the one opening they know, they simply don't know the general tactics. Then there are the smurfs. They don't last long at low rating but these people are the worst. They exist in any online game.