2020 European Online Chess Championships

[MartinCarpenter]

"3.10 Players are not allowed to open a second window or connect through another device to chess.com while playing their tournament. The server automatically will disqualify them from the tournament.

You perhaps have to ask how this is policed. If it's by IP Address, it's going to give false positives anywhere there's a shared wifi or wired connection. That might apply in a hotel, student residence or block of flats.

It's a condition which makes hosting a team match on chess.com quite probably out of the question. How do you tell what's happening elsewhere in the match?

IP Address is all the information they're going to have, I think. Well, login with the same username from 2 different places of course but extra accounts are trivial to get.

Its so easy for a remotely determined cheater to dodge - and for innocents to get caught by - as to be an actively stupid measure. Use the data signal on your mobile. Maybe the VPN built into the private mode of most modern browsers would do it too etc.

[Roger de Coverly]

Its so easy for a remotely determined cheater to dodge - and for innocents to get caught by - as to be an actively stupid measure.

What's also actively stupid is having live engine analysis on the server whilst games are in progress.

[JustinHorton]

Just a flier here, but wouldn't we expected sophisticated cheating to be much more unlikely among <1400 players than players of club strength? By "sophisticated chaeating" I mean disguising it rather than reading the top line off a program every move.

[MartinCarpenter]

I meant vaguely technically competent

I genuinely can't imagine how a 1400 would cheat using a >3000 rated engine with any degree of subtlety in terms of the moves.

[JustinHorton]

Well yes, that's my point (which wasn't directly made in response to anybody else's point). How good are the championship games of the long-term players who have been disqualified?

[David Sedgwick]

I'd like to respond to a few of the points made in this thread.

1. The play on Monday was the first stage of a two day event. From that a minimum of 250 players were to qualify for the second stage yesterday. After adjusting the scores (see below), all players scoring 5 points or more were invited to play yesterday; that was 267 players.

2. Games played by those disqualified for cheating were re-scored as wins for their opponents. As a result 11 players scored 7/7, as opposed to 4, including 2 disqualified players, on the original list. No-one suffered, except marginally in that there were a few more qualifiers for Day 2 than there would have been had the re-scoring not been done.

3. All the disqualifications recommended by Chess.com were indeed subject to review by the arbiters prior to implementation.

4. One of the advantages of the two stage process is that in some marginal cases you can allow the players to proceed to Day 2 and await further evidence. I know that this happened with a few players.

5. The Chess.com results of Day 2 have now appeared at https://www.chess.com/tournament/live/e ... &players=1. If I have counted correctly, a further 5 players have been disqualified, including those in the top 2 places.

6. The official results have not yet appeared on ChessResults, possibly because the decisions about how to handle the results of the games played by the disqualified players are less straightforward. Ian Thompson's comments* upthread are not correct in respect of Day 1, but they could have some validity in relation to Day 2.

7. One thing which I can say without fear of being refuted subsequently is that the arbiters are working extremely hard.

Edit: *I was referring to the following comments by Ian:

Assuming these players were cheating, they've seriously affected the chances of quite a few other players qualifying for the next stage. The score to guarantee qualification to the next stage was 6/7, with 5.5 and a good tie-break also being good enough. Tough to do that if you've already lost a point to a cheat.

[Kevin Thurlow]

"All the players agree that they have no right to appeal the aforementioned actions either through arbitration, consultation or in a court of law within any jurisdiction"

Answering John Swain, I sent the bit I quoted to a legal expert, whose informal advice was that he would not be surprised if a UK court considered the above condition unreasonable, and they might well overturn it.

My own view is that they might view the above condition as like a car park which says "we are not liable for any damage to your car howsoever caused", which is totally invalid as if they are negligent, they are liable.

[John Swain]

"All the players agree that they have no right to appeal the aforementioned actions either through arbitration, consultation or in a court of law within any jurisdiction"

Answering John Swain, I sent the bit I quoted to a legal expert, whose informal advice was that he would not be surprised if a UK court considered the above condition unreasonable, and they might well overturn it.

My own view is that they might view the above condition as like a car park which says "we are not liable for any damage to your car howsoever caused", which is totally invalid as if they are negligent, they are liable.

Thanks, Kevin, for seeking out informed legal opinion.

I'm not surprised to discover that the organisers' attempt to deny players a right of appeal is open to question. If any of the ECU organisers suspect or accept that chess.com's anti-cheating measures are not watertight, this clause may be viewed as an attempt to deter those wrongly accused of cheating from seeking justice.

[JustinHorton]

They had no business whatsoever including it.

[NickFaulks]

3. All the disqualifications recommended by Chess.com were indeed subject to review by the arbiters prior to implementation.

It would certainly be impressive if they rejected any.

[Alex McFarlane]

It would certainly be impressive if they rejected any.

I heard today that one such 'disqualification' was over-ruled by the arbiters in Saturday's French Blitz. The player was aged 7 and had been playing above expectation. It was investigated and because of certain circumstances explained to the arbiters it was accepted that the player had improved by the amount demonstrated.

[Roger de Coverly]

It was investigated and because of certain circumstances explained to the arbiters it was accepted that the player had improved by the amount demonstrated.

Does that mean they are using the flawed logic that a player is cheating by virtue of playing better than his or her rating?

[Alex McFarlane]

Does that mean they are using the flawed logic that a player is cheating by virtue of playing better than his or her rating?

From what I was told it was the surprisingly high quality of the moves that flagged the player. So playing better than rating came into it but was not the exclusive factor.

[John Swain]

It would certainly be impressive if they rejected any.

I heard today that one such 'disqualification' was over-ruled by the arbiters in Saturday's French Blitz. The player was aged 7 and had been playing above expectation. It was investigated and because of certain circumstances explained to the arbiters it was accepted that the player had improved by the amount demonstrated.

This specific case raises a more general and important point about how juniors playing in online chess events should be treated by organisers. Labelling a child, especially one as young as seven, as a cheat without watertight evidence is surely contrary to safeguarding regulations and those of the UNCRC (United Nations Commission on the Rights of the Child). Clearly, in the case of this young child, the organisers sought additional evidence and then decided to reverse their preliminary findings and not disqualify the player.

[MartinCarpenter]

Does that mean they are using the flawed logic that a player is cheating by virtue of playing better than his or her rating?

From what I was told it was the surprisingly high quality of the moves that flagged the player. So playing better than rating came into it but was not the exclusive factor.

It would be fascinating to know what the reported quality of the moves was. A <1400 child can clearly easily improve several hundred grading points in the blink of an eye. So can an adult learner come to that.

In fact there’s likely quite a few UK club players right now with profoundly unrealistic online grades due to playing in closed groups of newly created accounts.

I’d have thought that getting a computer to play <2000 in remotely realistic manner was very hard, but maybe they’ve got that ‘better’....