Computer Cheats

@Gambiteer
As far as I know there are no grandmasters or IM's here. The ones who claimed to be such proved to be using engines. And most of page one are ALL users. On page one of the tables, there is NOBODY under 2300 there. Statistically impossible.

@sonhouse said
@Gambiteer
As far as I know there are no grandmasters or IM's here. The ones who claimed to be such proved to be using engines. And most of page one are ALL users. On page one of the tables, there is NOBODY under 2300 there. Statistically impossible.

I know that there is one GM here, and find it perfectly reasonable to think that there are a lot of masters playing online -- why shouldn't they? They are by definition the most skillful players around, and it takes passion and a love for the game to play at that level -- why shouldn't they enjoy playing online as much or even more than the rest of us? The masters that I know can't get enough chess, they're always ready for "just one more game". And when they play online, aren't they allowed to play with all the skill and ability they have?

As for the first page of the tables, why should it be statistically impossible for less than 0.37% of our active players to be rated over 2300, which really isn't even a very high rating, assuming some approximate equivalence to USCF ratings? That percentage is a shade less than 4 players in a thousand, and if we gathered 1000 players for a tournament here in my part of the US, there could easily be 10 times that many such players, in addition to the lesser masters.

@Gambiteer
May be true but if you did a computer check on the dudes on page one you will find almost all of them are using engines.
Who is the GM here? I know there was a dude claiming to be IM but computer checks showed he consistently used engines and was banned.
I would like to see the GM games given a computer check. My guess is he too is just another engine user.
For instance, look at #1, over 5000 games, 32 lost. How may GM, including any world champ you choose, have a record like that?

@sonhouse said
@Gambiteer
As far as I know there are no grandmasters or IM's here. The ones who claimed to be such proved to be using engines. And most of page one are ALL users. On page one of the tables, there is NOBODY under 2300 there. Statistically impossible.

I have lost to several of the players on page one, and not ALL of them are engine users. One or two I can tell you even what engine they were using, but some of them beat me in a very legitimate manner.

One of them was a p1200 player whom I played in a RHP Welcome Game, and pretty early on I could tell that I was simply playing a better player. Very natural moves, and a loss in due course on my ledger, but that happens.

I could easily see a USCF 2000 player having a rating of 2200-2300 on the site, as the ratings here tend to run a bit higher than USCF OTB, based on people I know in the real world who also play here with me.

I know almost nothing about any of their identities, so I can't make any title claims one way or the other, but I can confidently assert that they are not all cut from the same cloth.

There are a lot more that use engines than you would think.

It's easy to spot as one minute you are playing someone rated 1100. Next game 2000.

I think its very sad that someone feels the need to do this just to improve their rating. It's not like anyone knows who they are.

Kids cheat to get higher ratings in the games they play. So you have to feel sorry for an adult with the mental age of a 12yo. But hey, you carry on cheating your way though life.

I don't understand why someone would waste their time and life cheating at chess.
It reminds me of those internet muscleheads that get caught lifting fake weights 😆

When I replay my own RHP games, post mortem, with Stockfish analysis, I often see that I have played moves Stockfish recommends; this is because I train against Stockfish, am learning how Stockfish analyzes positions, and so tend to play a Stockfishy sort of style.

Kasparov wrote that no one these days gets to be a GM without training against a strong engine. Moreover, strong engines, including Stockfish (but excluding AlphaZero), operate on a human-based set of positional evaluation criteria. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that there should be a convergence of strong human play and machine play.

I am not convinced that all the players on page one are engine cheaters. They may be people who have trained against engines so long that their play mimics engine play.

@moonbus said
When I replay my own RHP games, post mortem, with Stockfish analysis, I often see that I have played moves Stockfish recommends; this is because I train against Stockfish, am learning how Stockfish analyzes positions, and so tend to play a Stockfishy sort of style.

Kasparov wrote that no one these days gets to be a GM without training against a strong engine. Moreover, str ...[text shortened]... ers. They may be people who have trained against engines so long that their play mimics engine play.

Good point.
There's a lot of sense in what you say.
I think there are people on here who cheat but not neccessarily the top ranked players.
Sometimes you come up against a player rated quite low who, all of a sudden , when in a losing position starts playing like a master.
They're the sad players who just can't bear losing under any circumstances.
They probably consult the board one player at their club,or set the position up on a machine and follow the recommended moves
You'll struggle to prove anything though

@venda said
Good point.
There's a lot of sense in what you say.
I think there are people on here who cheat but not neccessarily the top ranked players.
Sometimes you come up against a player rated quite low who, all of a sudden , when in a losing position starts playing like a master.
They're the sad players who just can't bear losing under any circumstances.
They probably consult th ...[text shortened]... position up on a machine and follow the recommended moves
You'll struggle to prove anything though

The opposite happens, too, of course: even quite strong players occasionally make mistakes. I just finished two tournament games against a page-one 2300+ player. In one game, he crushed me in 23 moves, much as I expected he would. However, in the second game (playing a defence I've known backwards and forwards for upwards of 35 years), he slipped and I was able to steer the game into a three-move-repetition draw. That very strongly indicates that I was not playing against an engine.

@moonbus
To add to it, we can use books and other materials on the site. Practically every book written since the early 2000's has engine-aided analysis, often quite deep. If you are following an actual book line, there is a high probability it is engine-enhanced. Completely legit, but I wonder where the future is going to take us with this type of chess format.

On the flip side, I often try to play in the various King's Gambit tournaments that BiggDoggProblem runs in the Gambit Fantasy Club. I have a very good King's Gambit book library, but inevitably it seems we are out of the books by move 8 or so!

@venda said
Good point.
There's a lot of sense in what you say.
I think there are people on here who cheat but not neccessarily the top ranked players.
Sometimes you come up against a player rated quite low who, all of a sudden , when in a losing position starts playing like a master.
They're the sad players who just can't bear losing under any circumstances.
They probably consult th ...[text shortened]... position up on a machine and follow the recommended moves
You'll struggle to prove anything though

I have to say that, for myself, I tend to play harder if I am losing but still think I am in the game. I've talked about it with my friends at the club, and we sort of decided that the top players know how to focus like that all the time, not just when they are losing. I have a reputation OTB for swindling lost games, even a piece down, and my friends give me grief for not playing that hard all the time. I get lazy, drop something, then start to concentrate. Here is an interesting recent OTB example (I was black):


I dropped a piece at move 6, got angry with myself for a split second, then told myself "Karpov would still win this game if he were playing my opponent, so the moves are there- I just have to find them." I just focused on development, exploited some dark squares, and in the end... still took 12 moves to finish a mate in 4 starting at move 22.

It was Game/60 minutes, and we were both a little short of time, but I still should have recognized that I could gain control of the c1 square. The Queen's ability to create threats by changing the color complex it operates on is a fine point I sometimes forget.

GM Lars Bo Hansen lives in my area, and he has often mentioned that he finds it interesting and humorous that American players start the game assuming the point, and tend to see a draw as a failure by giving away a half point.

He says he starts the game with nothing, and he views a draw as an earned half point. If his opponent errs, he gets the other half, too!

@gambiteer said
I know that there is one GM here, and find it perfectly reasonable to think that there are a lot of masters playing online -- why shouldn't they? They are by definition the most skillful players around, and it takes passion and a love for the game to play at that level -- why shouldn't they enjoy playing online as much or even more than the rest of us? The masters that I kn ...[text shortened]... of the US, there could easily be 10 times that many such players, in addition to the lesser masters.

Well said.

@paul-leggett said
I have to say that, for myself, I tend to play harder if I am losing but still think I am in the game. I've talked about it with my friends at the club, and we sort of decided that the top players know how to focus like that all the time, not just when they are losing. I have a reputation OTB for swindling lost games, even a piece down, and my friends give me grief for ...[text shortened]... g, and he views a draw as an earned half point. If his opponent errs, he gets the other half, too!

You're on, Paul ! Give me odds of a knight any time !

@moonbus
One year at the US Amateur Team Championship South, I dropped a rook, but then swindled my opponent into a mate. As I was recording the score on the results chart, two teenagers walked up to me and exclaimed "Dude, you are the best swindler we know! How do you do it?"

I was still annoyed and nonplussed for almost throwing away a game in a Team Tournament of all places, and all I could say was "Well, for starters you have to get into a losing position. I wouldn't recommend it."

@Academus
Hi - what happened to number 1 player CENERENTOLA ???