These points are all well taken. I think it is indeed highly plausible that top players can sense cheating in their own games from clues that are unavailable to others, including cheating detection experts, who are not directly involved in the games in question.Keith Arkell wrote: ↑Wed Nov 02, 2022 1:03 pmI would be very happy to partake in such an experiment, but there is a caveat: we are better at detecting when cheating has taken place by our own opponent rather than in another game about which we only have access to the moves, but no other information.
You see there is the rhythm and tempo of the moves, the body language (in the case of otb cheating), but most of all the feeling of power of the opponents moves. I said elsewhere that it is only engines which have the ability to play none - human type moves after which you discover, a few moves later, how well the hidden tactics always seem to work for the opponent.
And remember that these aren't just empty words. I have only once in my life ever withdrawn from an event in protest because I was sure I had been cheated. And I have played about 7000 'official' games. Half an hour after I withdrew, Chessdotcom closed my opponent's account for cheating. Coincidence? I think not!
Two caveats I would however add to that are:
(1) We see the same phenomenon at all levels of the game. Weak club-strength players, for example, sometimes report that their stronger opponents must surely be cheating because their play seems inhumanly strong, whereas stronger players can see that the players complaining about cheating are simply being outplayed with superior technique which they don't understand. I used to see this frequently in the Cheating Forum of chess.com concerning online games. Now, top players could certainly be said to have good cause to label such eerily superior play as cheating because they play at the top levels possible for humans, but there could be different "dimensions" to good quality play of which individual top players only master some.
(2) The players of individual games are subject to strong emotions during the games (losing is painful!), and these emotions may interfere in the judgment.
