After all these years ...................

Begs the question.

Say an IM spends every second of his given time analyzing positions in his RHP game with every bit of chess he has in him, and then moves.


Say a strong player makes some fairly decent moves on his on and switches on his engine when he thinks the position is crucial, but he gives it enough time to make it look like he's thinking.

How do you tell the difference between the two?

Originally posted by nimzo5
It was Yelena Dembo not Pogonina.

Really? I thought it were pogthingy. Still, both lady master types so shouldn't need an engine to soundly thrash most of the humans on chess.com.

I thought the IMs and GMs were supposed to be better than engines anyway!

But, then again, sometime I make stuff up.

Originally posted by Paul Leggett
My point was that, for all we know, it was the engine that was the IM, not the player. Titles are only worth as much as the governing body is willing to invest in the integrity of them.

I'm not passing judgment, as I do not know enough to do so, so all I am saying is that a title is not an automatic free pass in a situation like this.

Weyerstrass was an ICCF IM before computers were really good enough to affect things.

FINALLY he got booted. how many people got forum bans for having the courage to point him out? probably dozens. how many resigned their subscriptions or left the site? probably dozens. how many threads deleted? at the very least dozens. how much damage to rhp's reputation for letting a well known engine user go unpunished for half a decade?!? almost beyond repair.

it'll take years of continued anti-cheating action to fix the damage. maybe act a little swifter next time, eh?

Originally posted by avalanchethecat
What I can't figure out is why an IM would use an engine?

same reason anybody else would, to cheat. no big mystery there. a title doesn't make anybody an inch more moral. world champions at almost any given sport cheat much more than amateurs.

Is anyone going to post evidence? I'm kind of interested...

If it took 5 years to ban him I doubt there's any obvious signs of cheating as in the case of Capa Preta...

No one seems to have mentioned that in official Correspondence rules, engine use is permitted. If this guy is a correspondence IM, then he probably used an engine to get the title in the first place. Therefore, there is no reason to believe that he'd have achieved a 2400+ rating unassisted on RHP, if that was the case he'd probably be an IM OTB too..

Engine use makes me glad to be a patzer. If people are abusing computers at my level, at least they aren't doing a very good job of it.

Originally posted by Marinkatomb
No one seems to have mentioned that in official Correspondence rules, engine use is permitted. If this guy is a correspondence IM, then he probably used an engine to get the title in the first place. Therefore, there is no reason to believe that he'd have achieved a 2400+ rating unassisted on RHP, if that was the case he'd probably be an IM OTB too..

Not neccessarily. Many top players on here could get a 2400+ rating if they used an engine. Does that mean they are all CC IMs too?

Originally posted by tomtom232
Not neccessarily. Many top players on here could get a 2400+ rating if they used an engine. Does that mean they are all CC IMs too?

Quite probably yes tbh, if you can achieve a 2300 rating unassisted then i'd imagine the engine could easily put 200 points on your rating without too much problem...

Originally posted by Marinkatomb
Quite probably yes tbh, if you can achieve a 2300 rating unassisted then i'd imagine the engine could easily put 200 points on your rating without too much problem...

Unassisted on a chess site without any IMs? I doubt you could say 2300-2350 is IM strength without any IMs to play against. Besides that I think 2500 would be quite hard to achieve regardless.

Originally posted by tomtom232
Unassisted on a chess site without any IMs? I doubt you could say 2300-2350 is IM strength without any IMs to play against. Besides that I think 2500 would be quite hard to achieve regardless.

The difficulty involved in reaching 2500 would depend on the rating system in use and the start rating. For example, it is quite easy to achieve a ridiculous rating on chess.com because of the strange implementation of the Glicko system they have. Some chess computer rating sites start the engines at 2400 for some reason. All one can say about a rating is that it is an indication of the likelihood of beating another player in the same rating pool.

Originally posted by tomtom232
Unassisted on a chess site without any IMs? I doubt you could say 2300-2350 is IM strength without any IMs to play against. Besides that I think 2500 would be quite hard to achieve regardless.

I'm not talking about IM strength, i'm talking about correspondence IM strength. There is a massive difference! The chairman of my chess club was British correspondence champion in the early 70's but he's never had an OTB grade much higher than 180 BCF, which would put him somewhere in the top 50 on here. He never used an engine to get that (obviously) but it serves as a good example as he's no IM otb..

Originally posted by Diophantus
The difficulty involved in reaching 2500 would depend on the rating system in use and the start rating. For example, it is quite easy to achieve a ridiculous rating on chess.com because of the strange implementation of the Glicko system they have. Some chess computer rating sites start the engines at 2400 for some reason. All one can say about a rating is that it is an indication of the likelihood of beating another player in the same rating pool.

I am aware of this and that's why I think it would be hard to achieve a 2500 rating here. I mean I'm not saying he wasn't using an engine but he went undefeated for a very long time and was not 2500.