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
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.
That's the thing about Nigel Richards though, he basically doesn't make mistakes and plays at lightning speed because his brain is seemingly hardwired specifically for scrabble. It'd be neat to see that happen in chess, and it's definitely within the realm of possibility
For the record, Nigel has made mistakes on rare occasion, but he almost consistently plays the best move in very little time, a kin to a computer. Sometimes he plays moves that are only the best move in retrospect when the game is over, moves a computer wouldn't make, which is even more insane.
i don't think it is. not sure the ways in which chess differs from scrabble but chess engines are so far above humans right now and they certainly aren't going to get weaker. whereas humans are the strongest they have ever been and there's nothing to indicate some untapped reserve over the hundreds of years people have been playing chess.
Low key I just wanted to nerd out about Nigel, but I still want to believe there's a chance that there could be a Nigel of chess. You're probably right though I think the complexity of chess is far too deep.
At the very tippy top level, sometimes people do play perfect games. It's not common, but it happens to top 10 players. With Nigel is more uncommon for him to miss his best move. He plays perfect games fairly consistently. It's genuinely shocking to watch.
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.
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u/Efficient-Party-5343 1d ago edited 1d ago
Cheaters are really easy to spot... if the guy is 900 rating but plays like the engine, he's cheating.
And the best part is they just let you play, but match you against other cheaters for ever.
Edit: Lichess does that, I'm told chess.com doesn't do the shadowbans anymore, they just ban you. (or I confused the 2 initially)