Chess.com FAQs and Discussion on Cheating

Grobe: I think that you drew the correct conclusions. After all, nobody wants to spend tons of resources to detect some idiot cheaters :) 

The whole issue with chess.com (and the reason for me to stop playing here) is their reluctance to ban obvious cheaters. I reported one two months ago, again, clear case. Still, nothing happened. 

Steve: You made indeed a significant effort. I think it would be a good idea to make up a tutorial with step-by-step instructions on how to do the analysis in Fritz. I had Fritz 8 for a long time, but I did not know how to perform the analysis you showed. You should post the tutorial in a new forum topic, not in this gigantic thread...

SteveCollyer - Thanks for the excellent series of posts. My sense is all the analysis you have presented was conducted by hand, move by move, a slow and likely painful process. Are you aware of any wrappers or tools that exploit an engine's  UCI or Winboard interfaces ptotentially enabling this process to be automated? Would this even be feasable given the need to first chop off the book opening moves before starting the top 3 analysis?

As I said last night, there's no foolproof method of catching all cheaters and letting all non-cheaters continue playing online. SteveCollyer's methods seem to be a decent starting point, but given many variables I would expect them to yield a certain number of false positives (perhaps one in 400 or so) and many more false negatives (perhaps 1 in 10 cheaters missed, including the smartest and strongest-playing of the cheaters). Adding a human element helps, but once again nothing is foolproof. You're going to have cheaters. If you're really worried about it that much, play OTB. If you're good enough that it matters, you shouldn't have a problem doing so profitiably.

But, as with law enforcement, surely the margin of error should be tuned in favour of missing the hard-to-catch over inflicting collateral damage on innocents, no?

You are an innocent lad, aren't you?

I did say should....

Richie wrote: "I firmly believe 70% of the people 1400-2000 are engine using 70% of the time and have statistics that prove it to me."

I think this is too high by an order of magnitude.

Question: I don't understand how Fritz alone does not get you to 2400, yet Fritz is better than me by a LOT, and I have made it [once, briefly] over 2400.

I find it suspect that the leading propoent of the undetectability and unprovability of engine assistance has "statistics that prove" some of the hardest to detect cases are rampant here.

It's terribly unstable footing, really.

So am I just lucky that I'm playing mostly humans?

A quick question: could somebody please enlighten me as to the meaning of "centaur" in this context? It's probably been explained somewhere in the thread, but that could be anywhere within 60+ pages.

Thanks. I'll now fade back into the shadows.

e4 is way better than d4

A centaur is someone who uses their chess skills to guide an engine in order augment its play as opposed to a pure engine user who blindly copies the engines moves.  A good centaur can typically beat a standalone engine.

 I dont agree with this Richie. My "badge" of NM certainly doesnt stop people using engines against me. I have been beaten by several ( about a dozen so far ) that were later banned for cheating. I think the opposite of you. A weaker player using an engine only some games is more likely to do so in tournaments and against much stronger players and/or titled players. To throw off suspicion they may then lose to much weaker players. I will go through my games archive just to see how many I have played that have been busted for "cheating".

ok guys. i love the discussion, but it's time to move it off the public forums. i've created a group for discussing this stuff here

=> http://www.chess.com/groups/home/cheating-forum

enjoy!