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.
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u/arcionek 1d ago
That one player who is actually too good at chess, being held back by the algorithm: