Cheating in chess

Discuss anything you like about chess related matters in this forum.
Kevin Thurlow
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Re: Cheating in chess

Post by Kevin Thurlow » Sun Apr 11, 2021 1:09 pm

"I think it's just some guy with a slightly addled personality, made worse by being locked down for a year, and he's taken to drink."

He should join an internet forum.

Geoff Chandler
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Re: Cheating in chess

Post by Geoff Chandler » Sun Apr 11, 2021 1:13 pm

Hi John Mck.

"This discussion has now begun to plumb the depths of the theory of nothing." (I agree.)

Maybe the point some are trying to be make is because Lichess are not following
their own house rules then their whole cheat detection system is faulty.
(other than that John I fail to see the significance or reason for this witch hunt v a person or persons unknown.)

Of course the two are different. Sandbagging,(or what ever is happening ) is nowhere near as serious
as cheating with a computer and I think we can all agree they are certainly not doing that.

Mathew reckons as many as 40-50 people are on the cheat detection team.
If they need that many then sandbagging' (in this case still not proven) will be low priority.

They seems to be enjoying themselves, they are playing fair (not using a computer) leave them alone
and look about for a computer cheat these should be target of the wrath.

Re the latest game. Yes Mathew it has all the markings of a mouse slip (Qa6)
(though I think we should all make an effort to get Ray Keene's term 'mousetakes' into the chess lexicon.)

White displayed a distinct lack of imagination in giving up. Here.



Instead of 20.Rd4 how about 20 Rh4 then 20..Nc3+ will mate in a few moves.

'....or the dog started barking.'

Don't mention the dog Mathew, next claim will be the dog is telling them what to play.

(I'm having go over it all and replace 'he/him' with then 'they or them' lets revert back to a he.)

Jonathan Bryant
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Re: Cheating in chess

Post by Jonathan Bryant » Sun Apr 11, 2021 3:19 pm

Kevin Thurlow wrote:
Sun Apr 11, 2021 1:04 pm
"I don't know why he spent over two minutes on move 3 in a five minute game, perhaps he had to answer the door, the internet went down or the dog started barking."

I can confirm all of the above have made me spend weird time on a move, so you can't take that in isolation.
....

Oh for sure. I've had my battery die after the first move and had to run around the house looking for a charger. I've had the usually doorbells and phones going. In one recent classical game, I paused after move one to remove my phone from the room. Not that I was going to default myself - I just didn't want the distraction. It didn't do me much good - I blundered a piece early on anyway - but that's another story.

If you look at my games against 1 d4 you'll often see me pause for a bit after 2 Bf4 or 2 Nf3 e6 and then 3 Bf4 - that's me popping over to their profile page to block them then heading back to the game.

So, clearly, you don't take a long pause - even 2+ minutes on move 2 after an usually long pause on move 1 - as anything in and of itself. It is unusual though. As was what came next before the pieces started flying off the board - but I've described that elsewhere.

Wadih Khoury
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Re: Cheating in chess

Post by Wadih Khoury » Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:26 pm

The Lichess founder had an AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit.
I haven't read the entire thread, but it appears that Lichess gave access to USCF to their anti-cheating method (under NDA) and as a result USCF may well "accredit" Lichess and use it for rating purposes.
USCF statment here : https://new.uschess.org/news/us-chess-e ... ethodology
The letter of endorsement from the US Chess Executive Board for lichess.org’s fair play methodology should give confidence to US Chess members that online-rated events will have a high degree of integrity of play on the lichess.org platform. The endorsement also paves the way for officially-rate games to take place on lichess.org.

The letter also emphasizes that the endorsement does not abrogate the rights of a US Chess member to due process if accused of cheating in a formal complaint to the US Chess Ethics Committee. Evidence of supposed cheating detected by the fair play method may or may not be adequate to support a charge that a player has violated the US Chess Code of Ethics.
I don't know if the ECF can do the same (or has done the same).

Full thread here for those curious about Lichess: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments ... _anything/
Good to hear they are still fully funded by donations, no paywalls, adds or data sold. And heir spend is public, including salaries.

Matthew Turner
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Re: Cheating in chess

Post by Matthew Turner » Tue Apr 13, 2021 10:17 am

Wadih Khoury wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:26 pm
The Lichess founder had an AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit.
I haven't read the entire thread, but it appears that Lichess gave access to USCF to their anti-cheating method (under NDA) and as a result USCF may well "accredit" Lichess and use it for rating purposes.
USCF statment here : https://new.uschess.org/news/us-chess-e ... ethodology
The letter of endorsement from the US Chess Executive Board for lichess.org’s fair play methodology should give confidence to US Chess members that online-rated events will have a high degree of integrity of play on the lichess.org platform. The endorsement also paves the way for officially-rate games to take place on lichess.org.

The letter also emphasizes that the endorsement does not abrogate the rights of a US Chess member to due process if accused of cheating in a formal complaint to the US Chess Ethics Committee. Evidence of supposed cheating detected by the fair play method may or may not be adequate to support a charge that a player has violated the US Chess Code of Ethics.
I don't know if the ECF can do the same (or has done the same).

Full thread here for those curious about Lichess: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments ... _anything/
Good to hear they are still fully funded by donations, no paywalls, adds or data sold. And heir spend is public, including salaries.
The USCF did the same thing with Chess.com
https://new.uschess.org/administration/ ... t-us-chess

A Federation has to decide whether or not to sign a NDA with the platforms. A Federation has to to take on the risk of 'unlimited financial liability' with potentially very limited benefits when they are prevented from revealing/using any information they find out.
I would say that the USCF have taken quite an altruistic approach and I'd applaud them for that, however I certainly wouldn't criticise Federations who took a different approach.

Roger Lancaster
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Re: Cheating in chess

Post by Roger Lancaster » Tue Apr 13, 2021 11:32 am

Geoff Chandler wrote:
Sun Apr 11, 2021 1:13 pm

Mathew reckons as many as 40-50 people are on the cheat detection team.
If they need that many then sandbagging' (in this case still not proven) will be low priority.
I may be wrong but my reading of Matthew's comment ["If there are 40-50 people ..."] seemed speculative rather than a statement of belief. But it does touch on the wider question of how many people are defending Lichess or Chess.com for the simple reason that they're on the payroll.

Matthew Turner
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Re: Cheating in chess

Post by Matthew Turner » Tue Apr 13, 2021 11:38 am

Roger Lancaster wrote:
Tue Apr 13, 2021 11:32 am
Geoff Chandler wrote:
Sun Apr 11, 2021 1:13 pm

Mathew reckons as many as 40-50 people are on the cheat detection team.
If they need that many then sandbagging' (in this case still not proven) will be low priority.
I may be wrong but my reading of Matthew's comment ["If there are 40-50 people ..."] seemed speculative rather than a statement of belief. But it does touch on the wider question of how many people are defending Lichess or Chess.com for the simple reason that they're on the payroll.
I was trying to quote from a recent interview with a Lichess employee. That was my recollection of what was said.
I should point out that some of those working on cheat detection will be employees whilst other will be volunteers. I would suspect the majority are volunteers.

Matthew Turner
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Re: Cheating in chess

Post by Matthew Turner » Tue Apr 13, 2021 11:40 am

You can listen for yourself here
https://www.perpetualchesspod.com/new-blog

Ian Thompson
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Re: Cheating in chess

Post by Ian Thompson » Tue Apr 13, 2021 11:43 am

Roger Lancaster wrote:
Tue Apr 13, 2021 11:32 am
Geoff Chandler wrote:
Sun Apr 11, 2021 1:13 pm

Mathew reckons as many as 40-50 people are on the cheat detection team.
I may be wrong but my reading of Matthew's comment ["If there are 40-50 people ..."] seemed speculative rather than a statement of belief.
The person from lichess being interviewed (that was linked to a few days ago) said this, so perhaps Matthew should have said "As there are ...", rather than "If there are ...".

You didn't have to listen to the whole, more than 1 hour, interview to hear his comments about anti-cheating measures. There was some information giving the times that he spoke about different topics.

Roger Lancaster
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Re: Cheating in chess

Post by Roger Lancaster » Tue Apr 13, 2021 12:52 pm

Thanks to Matthew and Ian for drawing attention to that interview, where "40-50 people" was indeed mentioned and, later, "the majority of whom are volunteers". Apparently a couple of those people are IMs along with several FMs and NMs.

The interviewee also confirmed what I imagine most of us believed, ie. a two-stage anti-cheating system with a computer algorithm weeding out the 'obvious cheats' and other cases [notably those involving titled players] feeding through to the human team.

Now, looking at the numbers, it seems that several years ago 100 million games were played annually on Lichess - and presumably the figure is significantly higher now. Even working on the lower figure, if the algorithm flags up 1% of games as suspect, that's 1,000,000-a-year or around 30,000-a-day. [I suspect both 100 million and 1% are conservative estimates but I don't want to overstate the case].

There's no way that a team of 40-50 humans [even if working fulltime, which most of the volunteers almost certainly aren't] can handle anything approaching that number. In the unlikely event that everyone managed to look at 20 games each and every day, that represents far fewer than 5% being looked at by humans. In short, it seems very clear the vast majority of cases flagged by Lichess [and I've no reason to suppose it's different at Chess.com] are treated as 'obvious cheats' and never seen by humans. Of course, it's possible to substitute different numbers but I hope I've chosen mine so as to be fair to Lichess.

Matthew Turner
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Re: Cheating in chess

Post by Matthew Turner » Tue Apr 13, 2021 2:53 pm

Roger Lancaster wrote:
Tue Apr 13, 2021 12:52 pm
Thanks to Matthew and Ian for drawing attention to that interview, where "40-50 people" was indeed mentioned and, later, "the majority of whom are volunteers". Apparently a couple of those people are IMs along with several FMs and NMs.

The interviewee also confirmed what I imagine most of us believed, ie. a two-stage anti-cheating system with a computer algorithm weeding out the 'obvious cheats' and other cases [notably those involving titled players] feeding through to the human team.

Now, looking at the numbers, it seems that several years ago 100 million games were played annually on Lichess - and presumably the figure is significantly higher now. Even working on the lower figure, if the algorithm flags up 1% of games as suspect, that's 1,000,000-a-year or around 30,000-a-day. [I suspect both 100 million and 1% are conservative estimates but I don't want to overstate the case].

There's no way that a team of 40-50 humans [even if working fulltime, which most of the volunteers almost certainly aren't] can handle anything approaching that number. In the unlikely event that everyone managed to look at 20 games each and every day, that represents far fewer than 5% being looked at by humans. In short, it seems very clear the vast majority of cases flagged by Lichess [and I've no reason to suppose it's different at Chess.com] are treated as 'obvious cheats' and never seen by humans. Of course, it's possible to substitute different numbers but I hope I've chosen mine so as to be fair to Lichess.
This is complete and utter nonsense in all respects

NickFaulks
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Re: Cheating in chess

Post by NickFaulks » Tue Apr 13, 2021 2:56 pm

Matthew Turner wrote:
Tue Apr 13, 2021 2:53 pm
This is complete and utter nonsense in all respects
Care to elaborate? It made sense to me.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a QR code stamped on a human face — forever.

Matthew Turner
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Re: Cheating in chess

Post by Matthew Turner » Tue Apr 13, 2021 3:03 pm

For automated algorithm to work they require a very high threshold of evidence, thus they are not going to be making decisions based on single games. Alternatively just use your common sense, do you really believe Lichess are banning 30,000 people a day?

Matthew Turner
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Re: Cheating in chess

Post by Matthew Turner » Tue Apr 13, 2021 3:06 pm

Continuing Nick's striving for his evidence based approach, here are some figures from Chess.com that a simple google search threw up
https://www.chess.com/article/view/onli ... g#closures

NickFaulks
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Re: Cheating in chess

Post by NickFaulks » Tue Apr 13, 2021 3:06 pm

Matthew Turner wrote:
Tue Apr 13, 2021 3:03 pm
Alternatively just use your common sense, do you really believe Lichess are banning 30,000 people a day?
I have absolutely no idea how many people Lichess ban. How would I have?
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a QR code stamped on a human face — forever.

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