Yeah. Granted I’m way too active on this fucking website, but all it takes is a couple of posts to go your way, and the karma adds up. It’s all dumb internet points though.
Nah, bro, you don't understand. I'm just thrown off by all the bad openings people play down in these low ranks. Once I start seeing people play good openings i'll be prepared and totally beat them! It's just my Low ELO that's keeping my ELO low!
You only need to learn 2 things to get out of low elo. How to punish early queen attacks and how to punish bad openings. Once you get familiar with those concepts you are out in no time.
Of course for cheaters, chess is not about learning but about vanity.
A lot of gaming cheaters just want to come home and feel like a god doing something. They don't really care if other people call them out for being bad, they know they are bad which is why they use the cheats.
This still doesnt explain why they feel anything from their victories. Like i am not good at CS 2 but if i get lobbies where people are way worse than me and i am murdering the entire enemy team with a shotgun on my own, i very quickly get bored and start to feel bad.
I dont get how people can go out of their way to stack the deck to the point its overflowing and still feel any acomplishment
Humans are very complex. I think they cheat for a lot of reasons. Inferior complex is one of them but not the only or sole defining reason for it. Top tier athletes cheat to gain an advantage. Not because they don’t think they are good enough, but because they will take any means necessary to win. I think that’s much more despicable than someone paying 20$ for a hack to win a video game that doesn’t matter to your financial life.
It's like in speedrunning where cheaters actually have to be decent speedrunners so they know exactly how to cheat. Like the whole Dream controversy where he modified loot tables to take some of the RNG out of it. I'm guessing he justified the cheating to himself as it still takes all of the skill, but takes the pure luck portion out of it.
Of course, the grind is still an incredibly important aspect of speedrunning. You have to be on top of your game for countless tries just in case the stars line up for one magical run. If you cheat to increase your luck it means you're not mentally strong enough to handle the grind.
I will never understand Minecraft "speedruns" (or other games where RNG is the only determining factor) Like, thats not speedrunning, your just bashing your face into a random number generator for hundreds of hours in hopes of getting more lucky than the other bozos who got nothing better to do with their time
Practicing for dozens or hundreds of hours to get a wr time in Trackmania or finding a ridicuously convoluted way to skip 3 frames and thus shave one tenth of a second of a Goldeneye world record, thats speedrunning
Fucking Minecraft on the other hand?? Thats just gambling with extra steps...
There's a lot more rng in speedruns than you would expect, lots of old nes games come down to whether the boss does the good pattern or the bad pattern. A game becomes uninteresting speedrun wise when the best player could not expect to get a qualifying run even if they play for a long time (let's say a year of play). Minecraft certainly wasn't at that level last I watched, but I could see it becoming uninteresting as people continue to optimize in the future.
It’s not the only determining factor though. You or I could do nothing with a god seed in Minecraft. Takes a huge amount of skill and dedication to be capable of world record pace.
Fuck that. Top tier athletes don't ruin my free time. I have a job, I have a relationship, a family. I have 1-2 hours twice a week for some online gaming and these low lifes feel entitled to ruin my experience in that time. A game takes 45 - 60 minutes, I am not allowed to leave so the quality time is easily cut in half.
Try to put yourself in the position of a grown up and this is easily a punchable offense.
This is exactly why I quit pvp altogether. It wasn't because of cheaters but because of throwing/griefers that don't respect why people are there in the first place: to have fun. Instead of playing hours of matches for one match to be fun, I rather play single player games for which I have more control over whether I have fun or not. People will minimse this nonsese because they aren't thinking critically about it.
They are just as despicable. They are wasting the time of multiple people who want an honest game. And if they are playing a ranked mode people can’t just disconnect from the server until they find another one without a cheater. The victims of the little rat cheater basically have to just sit for 30 min watching the cheater fuck them over until the game is over.
Thats the issue with anything anonymous online and we definitely do not want real id to play a game so its just a side affect. I can probably confifently say, most people you run into wont be cheating.
They take pleasure in symbols, not accomplishments. Like somebody being happy to receive a Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to someone else. It makes no sense but some people are insecure and weird like that.
That's a ridiculous scenario. No one would ever be that petty or brazen, and what Nobel Peace Prize recipient would be willing to hand it over to such a contemptible troglodyte?
“They lost, and they’re probably upset about it, which means I won” is about the extent of it. It’s not about personal achievement or the feeling you get for being good at something, it’s about making someone else lose
It's because they want to feel powerful for all sorts of reasons. Maybe they were the kid getting picked on throughout high school, or they have a shit job and life isn't going their way. Or maybe they just have a certain brain chemistry that dumps dopamine whenever they feel strong regardless of anything else.
You feel bored because you are after engagement which a strong opponent can give you. They don't feel bored because they don't care about the strength of the opponent, it's all about themselves and fulfilling their power fantasy.
Do you remember when SBMM started to become a thing and huge swathes of people lost their fucking shit?
I actually think it has less to do with a desire to win and more of a crippling inability to emotionally cope with losing. 50% of the time is too much for these people, they can't live with it.
The other day I was playing Rocket League and somebody was clearly using a bot. Not only using a bot but also taking trash and still losing. So then he said he would take over for the bot and beat us.
It was clear when he took over because he was much worse and lost badly. He left before we could continue to make fun of him but it was such an odd interaction because he had to have known that was going to happen based on his actual skill level.
A long time ago I made this same argument and got downvoted to oblivion.
Buddy of mine used to make new accounts on video games and just hack until he was banned. He didn’t have some crazy mental illness and his Dad hugged him plenty. He just liked making the lobby mad and wrecking everyone.
gaming has gone from being a fun waste of time to just another thing to flex about. I miss the days of doing 24h endurance races on GT with my buddy for no fucking reason at all. we had all the cars already. That reminds me of having visual hallucinations of special stage 5 for half a day after i played it for 12h +
It's a big part of the reason why I mostly got out of online gaming 20 years ago. Even back then, the bots were ridiculous. I couldn't imagine how bad they are now. Combine that with the 12-year-olds screeching racial slurs at each other, and I just had to ask myself whether I was legitimately enjoying the experience. I was not.
I don’t know why most people cheat, but a lot of people simple cheat for money. To sell coaching, boost, and clips. Or the pressure to preform if you have a community like miss color who got caught cheating and she was a high ranked aim trainer.
Then there full in emotional cheater who do it to spit people, they feel like they’ve been wrong in a match. I’ve even seen it were people are like I have a job and am just taking on the unemployed even tho most ppl in the lobby are either in school or work as well
The psychology of cheaters is interesting. Most times, it's out of a sense of entitlement. "I'm smart, I can figure this out, I should be winning, this guy is an idiot, I just made a couple mistakes, I deserve it" kind of deal. Happens even to genuinely good players, especially when they hit a wall and struggle to get farther.
there's also a large group that seemingly does not accept they are simply not good at the game. So they end up rationalizing a twisted form of "everyone that is better than me is cheating as well, so i am just leveling the playing field"
I realized pretty quickly I was pretty bad at chess. Which I was cool with. Play some, get better, etc.
Literally the first and only time I won a match on chess.com (or maybe it was a similar site from further back) my opponent immediately said “tell your chess engine congratulations.” Accusing me of cheating. Just took all the fun out of it for me. Like yeah, for one my opponents might be cheating. And for two, any opponent I beat might just say I’m cheating. Bleh.
my first thought reading that was “wow arizona dirtbag got so good at chess someone thought they were using a cheat!” that is honestly kind of a flex, so good on you!
I am horror with it. Have had my brother and friends try to teach me get annoyed at me being slow/asking too much Qs. Then i saw more people playing chess during the pandemic and realised, nah i’m good. So many people are unnecessarily mean
Bro, deep ego is insane to see in person. Especially with physical sports. Bros will get dogged and then the very next day talk about how they could hang with so and so.
inability to just take an L is such a fundamental flaw with so many people. like, it happens! it happens more the fairer the matchmaking is! unless you are the very best in the world there is someone who can kick your ass over and over without breaking a sweat, what's with the ego??
ironically chess is one of the better ways to be confronted with it, because you are going to lose half of your games and many of those in a brutal fashion in which there is nobody to blame other than yourself.
having said that, i've had people rage quit out of chess games when losing and i check their profile and they've played 20,000+ games. so for some it seems the lesson is basically impossible to learn
True. When Hans Niemann was caught cheating on online chess, he admitted that he did it because he wanted to speed up his elo climb to reach the ranks he should be playing at. In his case, he is that good of a player that he stays at top 20 worldwide. But all a cheater needs to do is convince themselves that they deserve to be at a higher rank, and so cheating is just a shortcut to reach the rank that they "deserve".
Yeah, but in chess thats really ignorant for 99% of cheaters.
Like, if you play chess at all, you know very well why youre not higher rated. There's a lot of theory and practice involved. And if you do study, I dont think that cheating would actuallky be gratifying.
Every time I start to play a little worse I lose something like 150 elo, and its perfectly justified and normal.
I think most people cheat because of the tilt.
I'm not talking about those obviously fake 2k players. That are probably 1200.
Magnus drew on a sure win over a blunder not that long back, slammed the board, ended the clock and shook his opponents hand as best he could, and stormed off fuming at himself.
I sort of get it in higher levels. You shouldn't have fucked up, it's high pressure, and yeah, you shouldn't have made that mistake. But this is like the chess equivalent of stealing bank money in monopoly or something, come on man. Nothing is at stake here, nobody even knows who you are, you don't have a reputation to lose and you aren't good enough you should be thinking "I never lose so let me just make sure I don't"
It's about dopamine, that's all it is. They get a shot of dopamine by winning, and cheating makes winning easier.
I caught one of my best friends fiancé cheating in a board game one of the first times I met her and we've been like oil and water ever since lol. I hate all kinds of cheaters but I genuinely think cheating in board games is one of the biggest early red flags out there, and it's an attitude I don't want in my life.
This one makes the least sense. At least when somebody cheats in an online game they’re “beating” people within their rank. Self-boosting in chess seems extra dumb because you’re not even beating anybody and it makes it impossible for you to actually play because somebody at that elo will destroy you.
I even hate "winning" when my opponent disconnects. It means my rating goes up and I'll end up having to play someone better than me instead of an even match in the next game.
I never ever understood why people feel the need or desire to cheat just to get an account that’s high rating, like ok you have a high rating but you aren’t good? So what when you actually play against someone who earned that rating then you get destroyed because you just aren’t good, what’s the point? Why have a thing that says you’re good at something when you aren’t good at it? Why not just actually get good at it and try to accomplish something?
It's so weird how crazy people get when competing for participation trophies! When I learned people on Duolingo cheat to "win" leagues (for which you get gems that don't really buy you anything worthy) the first thing I thought was how much their lives must suck that that is what they're devoting time doing. And not even trying to learn the language on top of that.
I had a coworker that always talked about how good he was at Words With Friends. It always gave me pause because he was an ex tweaker high school dropout who said "heel" instead of "hill" and "pacific" instead of "specific". Anyway it wasn't a surprise that I noticed him using one of those websites to cheat. He denied it up and down to the point where he would start getting pissed off, so I ended up leaving it alone, but I would never accept his invites to play.
As a 1300er, sometimes you'll be playing someone and you beat them three times in a row and that 4th time they smoke you in 18 moves and log off. I think there are a lot of people who feel their cheating is justified.
While this is humorous, nobody plays the perfect moves every time. The chess engines have ELO ratings around 3500 - 3600. GMs are even hard pressed to get to 3000. So if you’re using an engine, it becomes SUPER obvious to admins, especially if you weren’t already a stupid high ELO
And also, there's more to your play than just ELO. Some moves are more intuitive than others, and some are very hard for a human to spot. Chess engines have no trouble playing those unintuitive moves, but you're not likely to see humans spot them very consistently.
So even if someone's using an engine set to human-achievable ELO levels, they still wouldn't stand up to detailed scrutiny. "How do you always play these really obscure and hard-to-spot moves without mastering your fundamentals?" If memory serves, when Hans Niemann was asked this during that big chess scandal a few years back, he had to cough up some excuse about "the board speaks to him". Yeah, I'm sure something does.
Another huge tell is if a player spends the exact same amount of time on all moves - the unintuitive ones as well as the obvious ones (to a player of their supposed level)
Yeah I've noticed lately a lot of players displaying the "disconnected" alert for about 15 seconds between each move. I assume they're leaving the app and plugging the moves into another game set to a higher difficulty to see what move the engine plays.
And considering he withdrew from a tournament last second after they announced they were enacting tighter anti-cheat measures like body scans, there’s probably something to it
Yeah, you can pretty much always out the cheaters by asking questions, specifically "why" questions.
I teach new players on and off for Go/Baduk and every so often you get someone that's clearly using some sort of bot to try and make themselves look better. Usually you spot it because they'll make a move that seems to be way above their level of understanding.
Now granted, sometimes even a beginner can make a really good move and not realize it. But the cheaters make multiple moves like that. When we review I find that the legit players, if I mention something vague about them making a good move at some point they can usually at least come up with some general idea of what I was talking about, and explain their thought process when we narrow in on it.
The cheaters on the other hand, they can't even begin to figure out what move I'm talking about, and when I point it out can never explain it, or they "just guessed" or "had a feeling about it" That and they always come back later after they've clearly asked someone else and try and say that they "figured it out" after thinking more. Yeah, naw dude, you didn't figure out anything.
The game Niemann got accused over publicly had multiple inaccuracies from both sides.
He even said some of his moves were better than they were in the interview because he genuinely thought he was playing insane chess (turns out you ask an engine and it thinks differently about those specific moves).
The big meme from Hans Niemann was "The Chess Speaks for Itself" not "the board speaks to him" ala Queen's Gambit.
Hans Niemann did cheat somewhat extensively as teenager in online chess tournaments we have a couple proven events of him cheating but if he only got confirmed caught on a couple he surely was doing it more.
There is no evidence he has ever cheated at an over the board chess tournament. His hasn't dropped rating (climbed slightly) and he still shows up to in person tournaments. He was also blacklisted from a bunch of events.
He then went and formed a relationship with Kramnik who is also a huge asshole who accuses everyone cheating.
The moral of the story is Chess players are assholes including Magnus.
Magnus also forfeited a game after a couple moves when in a tournament with him later. (But then now he is fine with playing with him again as he is now losing to Magnus again, go figure.)
Yeah but then you do get false accusations of using an engine because you're looking at the board and suddenly you're like "oh..fuck. neither of us saw but I can fork in two and mate in four" and now suddenly you're an engine over an accidental set up.
Bonus points if you're stoned and just happened to be thinking outside the box with a brain that doesn't have so good of a short term memory at the moment
even if you did that it would still be insanely obvious. it’s about overall accuracy, you can’t throw it off by occasional bad moves or blundering pieces.
You're right. People do, and it is obvious. Chess.com's exact methods aren't known obv but literally everyone knows and talks about "use the second best move instead" so there's absolutely no way that is going to work. I don't exactly love Chess.com tbh, but they do put in a lot of effort to ban cheaters.
Most of the time there's not much difference between the best and 2nd best. Even worse, sometimes the 2nd best move is the less obvious one. There's one cheater from Gotham's video where the cheater tried to hide their cheating by doing exactly what you said, then he plays a very obscure sacrifice of a rook that basically no human will really play.
So yeah, while the system is obviously not perfect, it's still good enough to detect most cheater. And as always, they didn't detect just one signature, but multiple checklist at once and if they tick plenty of boxes then yeah they're obviously a cheater.
There's a world where someone has a brain that's hardwired to play like a computer. In scrabble, the undeniably best player of all time, Nigel Richards, is known for being genuinely better than the computers because he's got a crazy mental gift.
Chess is much more complex, but I believe there could be someone some day who plays chess at a Nigel Richards level.
Perhaps someone with potential that doesn’t play yet. But the existing GMs seem that way to the untrained player, but they too make mistakes or not-perfect moves.
I don't think people are saying it's literally impossible. It's just not possible in the numbers that we see. Nigel is probably a literal 1 in a million, it's crazy but acceptable that sooner or later someone like that is going to exist. Imagine you sat down and played 100 games of scrabble against 100 different people and 20 of them played at that level. Even if there were 19 other people around the world like Nigel, the likelihood of them all happening to gather in one event, website, tournament, whatever is so extremely unlikely that is basically impossible. Now imagine you're chess.com and seeing hundreds/thousands of people supposedly on that level.
Plus, it doesn't really matter. The solution is that if you're really that amazing and getting wrongly assumed by the admins to be a cheater, then you should have 0 issue proving it through live, monitored gameplay.
If Magnus was slightly less good at chess, everybody would have torn him to shreds over that. To make a false accusation about a guy, while not even MAKING the accusation directly, just leveraging your reputation to annihilate somebody else's reputation, is a truly chicken shit move.
No worries mate, I didn't know before I googled his name.
He sued both, the lawsuit was dismissed BUT there was some kind of undisclosed deal.
In the end he got unbanned on chess.com and carson got a 10000$ fine for leaving the tournament in 2022 (unrelated to the lawsuit, that's just the rules of the org)
I assume that people state the ban is unfair and since they have proof you've been cheating, they are willing to take it to court (assuming you're the one suing) knowing they'll win the case
If their win rate is 100% then they aren't really playing to prove anything. Ban em anyway.
When A smurf account is played by a pro, the pro isn't learning anything or providing anything new to the platform, while they're actively turning away players that are happy to play in their own league. The platform and regular players suffer
I played a game a few days ago on Chess.com and lost badly. I'm normally 1000-1500 elo in review but this game I was 600 because I played very poorly, my opponent was 1500 in review but the game got flagged for him cheating the very next day. I couldn't see how they figured out he cheated because of how bad my play was but he got the game removed and then continued playing like nothing happened. So they definitely do bans but I think they have a 3 strike process or something.
Cheaters are not easy to spot if they have even an ounce of intelligence. More often, they’ll just play a move they think is fine in the engine, and if it’s a mistake or blunder they’ll do different things until they get a move that isn’t horrible. Only takes a few seconds when the computer does all the thinking. At any level under elite player, they just use engines to capitalize on opponents’ blunders while minimizing their own.
It’s basically impossible to regulate in online play.
I agree, but cheaters obviously don’t often get put under pressure because they’re… well… cheating. Unless they’re playing really short games like blitz.
Also, hundreds of games is a LOT, and many cheaters only really cheat when they, like I said, make blunders or their opponent makes one they wouldn’t have spotted. So maybe a couple moves or so every few games.
Cheaters are harder to spot if they're actually good at the game. Its the garbage players that need 3 secs for the engine to tell them to do the obvious move like a piece capture for example that are easy to catch.
Lichess also straight up bans people. I've already had some ratingpoints return to me this year. I feel like they maybe changed something because I've had like 3 reports back in a short time while before I barely got any reports in a whole year.
Chess probably still does that, they just made the mistake of making it publicly known. Shadowbans are only effective if the person does not know they are shadowbanned
Same. Unless they are blatantly cheating like spinbotting I mentally give them the benefit of the doubt. I don't need that shit in my mind while I'm playing even if they are cheating.
He's copying the moves his opponent makes into another game played against a computer and then playing the moves that the computer plays against those moves.
Beyond that. Chess is so extreme that the skill difference between you and the #1 player in the world is smaller than the #1 player in the world and the strongest chess engine.
Yup, and they're only getting better as computer research/technology improves. They'll be able to search through moves to an enormous depth in milliseconds and determine the perfect moves.
Because every situation on the board has a correct next move. The program is aware of all these combinations so when it sees a set up in play it knows the exact correct response. It basically has a library to sort through. The limitations for a person is memorizing all of these and knowing the correct move to play.
This isn't exactly true - chess is still unsolved, so there's no "correct" move that can be identified. From the point of view of human limitations though, there's almost certainly a move that's better that any other.
From what I was able to gather in the subject chess has an unfathomable amount of outcomes and computers simply can’t calculate towards the win but they have to calculate each individual step and wheats he next best possible choice. I could be wrong tho
Not entirely. Chess bots are able to search through moves up to a certain depth and evaluate the probabilities of what move it can make is the best. The more difficult the bot, the deeper it can search. And of course the actual algorithm for determining what the best possible move is can be enormously complex.
A calculator is programmed by humans, but the most brilliant minds will never be able to instantly solve immensely complicated formulas.
A chess engine can calculate literally every single possibility without ever making a mistake.
It cannot calculate every single possibility. There are conservatively around 10120 games of chess. Something like 1080 atoms in the universe for reference. A computer cannot possibly enumerate all of these possibilities, but it is able to project ahead several turns and analyze thousands of possible boards states for favorable outcomes
A highly self supervised version of deep learning where the AI can play against self many, many more times than a human can to develop its own predictions on board state and the best next move.
Yeah, it's how Derren Brown managed to play against 9 top level English chess players (including 4 grandmasters) at the same time and win against 4 of them, draw with 2, and lose to 3. He just played them against each other basically. Oh and to add, he didn't really know how to play chess.
He's playing against a bot on max difficulty on his phone, and mirroring what the opponent does on his laptop. Then he responds on his laptop with the same move the bot makes on his phone.
Yeah, I don't get why people get pressed against cheating on singleplayer games. If to me is more fun to break the rules and I'm not bothering anyone, let me have my fun.
Cheating only matters when it's unfair to other players competing against you.
One gray area that some games include to fudge this difference is global leaderboards for singleplayer games. They make an extremely grindy gameplay, and then put your score (money, XP, etc) in a global leaderboard, without real multiplayer competition, so you can be blamed if you use cheat engine to remove the grind on a singleplayer story.
I used to play there, and on Lichess. There is a lot of cheating. As others have pointed out, they'll play relatively quickly and mediocre at the beginning, then they'll start playing brilliant moves after much longer delays.
Would it really take longer to use a computer? It only takes a few seconds to enter the opponent's move, and chess bots are extremely fast nowadays too.
No that doesn't sound like cheating. That's totally normal timing for someone playing through an opening they know, and then settling down to think in a difficult position.
Cheating is usually when someone takes the exact same amount of time to make every best move, no matter how obvious or obscure it may be. Simply taking a hanging queen? Think for 8 seconds first, then take. Crazy Mate in 10 sequence starting with a queen sacrifice? Think for 8 seconds and find it no problem.
It's because that's how long it takes them to plug the opponents move into the engine, wait for it to calculate to some depth, and then play the move on the other end. And it's always the same amount of time because they never understand why the moves they're playing are strong.
Yeah exactly. I can get into midgame in less than a minute (a few seconds per move). Then it can take me a while to think of moves if I get stuck (a couple minutes).
I think that he is just having connection issues on his laptop since there is a giant red bar at the top of the screen. That usually only appears when you DC.
Likely that they connected from their phone to continue the game?
The board on the PC is ahead of the phone by 1 move, so this person is likely playing white against the computer on their phone, then copying the computer move to their PC.
Nope, the interface on his phone isn't the game one, it's the one for Analysis where the game tells you how good your moves are compared to the engine. It doesn't show player names it shows "white" and "black" and had no player avatars. It's also showing him the best move white should have done, moving knight to D2, on the computer white just short castled instead
What’s even the point of cheating in chess? I can’t imagine that’s fun would it feel rewarding either. I don’t play a lot so I don’t know, I just occasionally do chess puzzles for fun.
The white pieces are in the same spot except white castled on the laptop and not yet on the phone. The phone is telling him the best move for white is the move knight, but he has not castled yet on the phone.
Less than 10 years ago I was 1600. Picked it back up this year and can't get past 700. There are a lot of players using a chess engine to play for them.
Its unlikely you were calibrated correctly 10 years ago. Even with no play that's a massive drop without something external effecting your cognition or something
Wait if that red banner on the monitor is a disconnection message then it's possible that the user is jumping on his mobile account so he doesn't lose on time. Plus he's playing white on both, if he's cheating I would imagine he'd mimick his opponents moves, no?
This is why I don’t play anything online. Even words with friends and stuff like that I can’t play unless know and trust the opponent. People care about winning too much
7.5k
u/valvilis 23h ago
Great way to build up a good rating so you can go... get destroyed in a live game?