Cheating in chess

[MJMcCready]

I was once accused of cheating for pointing out that my opponent lost on time. He claimed that I fiddled the clock. I think he was just a sore loser.

[Neil Graham]

The 4NCL has now published a Fair Play report for season 2 :- http://www.4ncl.co.uk/data/4NCL_online_ ... ort_s2.pdf

[Chris Rice]

The 4NCL has now published a Fair Play report for season 2 :- http://www.4ncl.co.uk/data/4NCL_online_ ... ort_s2.pdf

Very interesting...an ECF Arbiter under the microscope. Not a good look for the ECF.

[NickFaulks]

By the way, I thought the Regan article - Predicting Chess and Horses - that Chris R linked to some pages ago would have piqued your interest - at least as far as how it applied to predicting the winners at the gee-gees.

I presume you didn't read it yourself.

[Kevin Thurlow]

I have now watched all of Naroditsky's piece on the cheating accusation and it is interesting. He does comment that the platforms are not likely to ban a strong GM without being certain they're right. (It would be good if they applied that to everyone.) He does make the good point that anyone could play a game without mistakes, he beat Magnus Carlsen in an online game and someone implied that was suspicious, but Magnus did blunder early on, and later as well.

[MJMcCready]

But the real question is, is it possible to cheat in chess and not cheat yourself in the process?

In the 90s the rise of cheating in football was blamed on the influx on foreigners. Can't we apply this to our chess also and and blame cheating on them or the influence of them?

[David Sedgwick]

Very interesting...an ECF Arbiter under the microscope. Not a good look for the ECF.

If I have counted correctly, there are currently 174 ECF Arbiters. Nothing has been proved against any of them, but one of them is under suspicion.

I do not accept that that reflects badly on the ECF.

[John McKenna]

John - accusations and false are disruptive and memory lasts for decades. I was called a cheat at your club for not ticking my score sheet . 2 of your players lost because of the noise and all after losing a rook in a game of chess.

Great points and reasons why I and others refuse to play graded chess on Lichess.

Nick, you've lost me in the mists of time.

I do not recall the scene you describe, above.

The last home match we played against you was Nov. 2011and that is not it. Our clubs have only met twice since - both at your venue.

[John McKenna]

By the way, I thought the Regan article - Predicting Chess and Horses - that Chris R linked to some pages ago would have piqued your interest - at least as far as how it applied to predicting the winners at the gee-gees.

I presume you didn't read it yourself.

Well Nick, white lettering on a bright green background with purple adverts is not easy on the eyes.

https://www.inverse.com/article/31250-j ... s-big-data

Also, I am not a gambler so it did not appeal.

I wonder why Ken Regan chose to give the article an intro about nags and use a picking winners flavour to it. Trying to make it more readable and appeal to the punter in all of us, perhaps.

(I did once place a bet - on a premonition - Andre Agassi to win Wimbledon but he didn't deliver and that was that.)

[MJMcCready]

I do believe you can bet on chess these days although I don't think you can place an each way bet in the world championship finals.

[JustinHorton]

He does comment that the platforms are not likely to ban a strong GM without being certain they're right.

Just speaking in general terms, arguments of this nature creep me out: they're making an assumption, and a heavily weighted one at that, in the absence of knowing.

[Chris Rice]

So a kid was done for cheating on Lichess and his father was trying to find out exactly what it was for. Lichess was not willing to engage.

[Jacob Ward]

Here are the frequencies of their playing the best through the tenth-best move in such many-choice positions: Rank / Pct. 1 / 17.76%, 2 / 13.22%, 3 /9.95%, 4 / 7.66%, 5 / 6.25%, 6 / 5.18%, 7 / 4.41%, 8 / 4.55%, 9 /3.50%, 10 / 3.03%, 11+ / 24.49%..."

I take that to mean among the players FIDE-rated between 1000-1200 who played a move in the 6,082 positions the best move was found by 17.76% of them and so on... down 24.49% of them who played the 11th or lower, "best" move.

Compare that to what Prof. Regan says about the best FIDE-rated players -

"For the elite class—2600 to 2800—in the same kind of many-choice positions, the new model does even better.

Much more data on elite players is available, so I have 49,793 such positions faced by them:

Whereas elite players found the best move in 30.85% of these difficult positions, my new model finds their move in 34.64% of them..."

(PLEASE NOTE: Prof. Regan, above, is comparing his computer model of human best move selection there with that of the best GMs. Neiither of which were capable of finding the best engine - Stockfish/Komodo - moves in those difficult ramified positions more than 30.85% (GMs) and 34.64% (Regan's model) of the time. Which means Regan's computer model of best human-like move selection was better than that of the best humans. And he goes on in the article to try to explain how and why that helps make his cheating-detection algorithms better.)

I take that to mean when the top GMs faced equivalent, but much more dificult, positions (than the tyros FIDE-rated 1000-1200 faced in their games) then the GMs found the best move in 30.85% of them (much better than the 17.76% best moves found by weak players in easier positions).

Jacob, I hope you can follow the above answer enough to realise how impossible it is for humans to play strong moves in difficult positions by "happenstance".

And if weak players play such moves multiple times even in a single game against a much stronger opponent then they are almost certainly not playing moves they're finding themselves alone at the board.

Hi John

Thank you for your considered reply. I quote only part of it above just to avoid a very long quote - I am not singling out part of your post and ignoring the rest.

I take your point that there is not a hard-line distinction, such that one game can never provide sufficient data but multiple games can. I am sure there are examples of games that would provide sufficient information.

However, it seems to be that there are two significant limitations on the conclusions to be drawn from looking at multiple moves in a single game.

First, to what extent are the moves actually independent, and therefore providing additional evidence? If you have a very long game I imagine moves towards the start and end would be entirely independent of one another, but in a shorter game if a player, for example, happens to find the computer's preferred plan or tactical line, wouldn't that mean that you would expect a higher degree of correlation for perhaps quite a number of moves? That is leaving aside the question of preparation - if you play into a player's preparation you might find a significant number of matches with the engine's preferred moves, but you could not regard them as independent data points.

Second, how many of the type of multi-option moves that Prof. Regan's analysis relies on are there in the game? I haven't managed to find any information in his online papers as to how many he usually finds, and I have no idea whether you would normally find a handful or a large number. You suggested in another comment that 3 moves would be enough for real suspicion, but on the statistics above the strong player would manage that in (30.85%)^3 = approx. 3% of games. Is that really a solid basis for concluding someone is cheating? And does an average game contain three of these particularly difficult multiple-option positions? It's not clear from the extract above how often these positions come up.

[Neil Graham]

Very interesting...an ECF Arbiter under the microscope. Not a good look for the ECF.

If I have counted correctly, there are currently 174 ECF Arbiters. Nothing has been proved against any of them, but one of them is under suspicion.

I do not accept that that reflects badly on the ECF.

I don't suppose that all of them competed in the 4NCL On-Line - and having looked at the list only a handful played. Three, including myself, were in my squad.

[Ian Thompson]

And does an average game contain three of these particularly difficult multiple-option positions? It's not clear from the extract above how often these positions come up.

Other than opening moves, which don't count because they're theory, and some endings, where many moves may be equally good, it would be rare to have even one in a game, I would have thought.