Two other points about cheating relevant to non-expert players:

- Until expert level you most likely won't to be able to notice in real-time that you're playing a cheater. You'll be blundering and getting out-positioned regularly against legitimate players, so it's hard to notice that for one game a cheater played a perfect game against you, because most likely you made clear mistakes in that game. This is different for experts because they mostly stop making minor mistakes, so they have cause for suspicion when they know they played a strong and consistent game but still got destroyed. You also won't be strong enough to really recognize that some moves are "inhuman", especially because you'll be playing against folks who make weird/wrong moves all the time, whereas experts can sometimes tell if moves are computer-like (typically because there is a natural and obvious move to make and the cheating move is marginally stronger but hard to find).

- Cheaters don't stay in low ratings for long. If they aren't detected, they'll be out of your rating in no time, like in 2 or 3 wins. This reduces the chance you'll encounter cheaters, because if a cheater plays 100 games but only 2 of them are in your rating bracket, you're unlikely to ever match against them anyways.

Keeping those things in mind, and knowing that reaching expert level (~2000+ elo) takes many years and is unachievable for most adults, online cheating becomes a minor concern at best for anyone who's picking it up as a hobby in adulthood.

> - Cheaters don't stay in low ratings for long. If they aren't detected, they'll be out of your rating in no time, like in 2 or 3 wins. This reduces the chance you'll encounter cheaters, because if a cheater plays 100 games but only 2 of them are in your rating bracket, you're unlikely to ever match against them anyways.

If only this applied to Counter-Strike or other FPS. While those that are trying to hack discretely rise to Global fast, there are a lot of cheaters that aim to stay in high Silver or low Nova. Add this to the fact that many cheaters suck at cheating, they can absolutely get stuck in lower ranks because they tactically cannot outplay better opponents without blatantly cheating.

This is a bit different from cheating in Chess and Starcraft where mechanical skill and the design of the game makes cheats less impactful. Like, cheating in Dota is really just wider POV, complete map awareness and spell casting macros. But those are just a few aspects of the game. In FPS games, the mechanical skill weighs so heavy that you will have a bad time at any rank against any cheater.

The question of what could be done about FPS cheating has been on my mind a bit lately. Yesterday while on a walk I had this thought that it's really because the shooting mechanic is in an awkward metaphorical compromise between the genuine mechanics of aiming and firing, and a symbolic representation of such.

If you actually had to play these games by holding a gun level with controlled muscle motions, it would be hard to cheat because even if you could insert a computer in there to automatically control your muscles, it's a fairly complex AI problem to make them move correctly.

In comparison a purely symbolic form would be like how most role-playing systems do it: you declare that you shoot at a target, and then perhaps there is some dice rolling done to determine if you do.

All an aimbot does is distill the vocabulary of mouse aim into the more symbolic form and automatically trigger certain symbolic responses. Someone who has played online FPS long enough develops a sense of when they are playing with these "symbolic adversaries" because even if they've dialed down the bot so they are merely "skilled", they start playing aggressively, with the assumption of fluent shooting to back them, while real players will hedge and look for a wider set of advantages, making more use of the game's vocabulary even if they can shoot through clutch scenarios. Cheater-vs-cheater matchups tend to suck the air out of the room as both sides flail about, eliminating the non-cheaters while never getting clear advantage over each other.

But then you look at a game like Rocket League, and it gets away with having more a discrete mechanism for moving and hitting, because not only is it all indirect through physics interactions, it's not clear what the right move is symbolically either. You can't win just by chasing the ball or by hitting the other players.

And there's a path for making shooting in FPS complex in that way, too - make all the targets large, trivial to aim at - and then ramp up factors that make it both indirect - slow projectiles, bounce - and symbolically complex, with various target prioritization and vulnerability mechanisms that deny simply spamming the headshot verb.

This is 100% true and cheating concerns evaporate (or are confirmed) when one analyzes a game with an engine. Its enlightening to take that game where you're "sure" the other person had computer assistance into an engine and see all the blunders you both had made.

Are cheaters really detected and banned? My guess is that there's a lot of lower grade cheating. Here are a few ways that would be difficult to detect:

Run a position analyzer only to alert you to the existence of a strong move that you haven't noticed. Don't use it to find the move, just to alert you to when your position is strong. For instance, you might see that your position score is +10, but not realize why - this would indicate it's a good time to put in more thought. You might be missing a subtle blunder.

Use lookup moves only for unusual positions to avoid traps in early games. Many eccentric openings are losing propositions against a skillful player who can sidestep the landmines, but are unfamiliar enough that an opponent either 1) falls into the trap, or 2) burns a lot of time avoiding the trap. A cheater could rely on a computer only so far as to avoid the traps, then play normally. Would that be detected?

Another cheater move would be to use a computer analyses only when things get sticky. Just for the occasional move. This is a cheating tactic in tennis, too. An unksilled cheater "hooks" constantly when it doesn't matter. A skilled cheater does it only on a critical point. You can call out a line judge, but with the advantage secured, the cheater can appear scrupulous for the remainder of the match (making the person who called the official out appear to be a high maintenance player). That said, over time in high level tournaments, officials often do see the pattern and a reputation eventually develops.

Another "advantage" of these cheating methods is that cheaters are usually not totally "drooling at the mouth evil laugh sinister people", I think people could use the methods above and lie to themselves that the weren't "really" cheating. Cheating, like most sin and trespass, often results from temptation and self-deception rather than a determinedly insidious mind.

I'm only a little bewildered that people cheat and do these things (or worse). I personally hate the idea that my actual real rating in an in-person game would tank compared to my online record, and I love the human aspect of the game. But it does seem relatively easy to sidestep an algorithm that simply checks for inaccuracies. My guess (hope) is that these algorithms are probably more sophisticated than that. Fraud detection is fascinating to me, but unfortunately this is one of those situations where the algorithm probably does have to be somewhat obscure.

EDIT: it just occurred to me that I have done all these things when I play against a computer - though chess.com builds this capacity into computer games (not human games, of course).

I think most people who actually want to cheat regularly on online chess also lack the skills to set up a highly effective and stealthy way to do so.

There are a lot of obvious cheaters that you can catch by looking at move times.

This is correct. I've played many thousands of games online and have run into obvious cheaters fewer than 5 times, and in those cases it is obviously obvious.

If somebody is cheating so stealthily, why do I care? Their rating will reflect whatever cheating they stealthily do. Remember: If the cheater won every single game, they would be caught immediately, so if their rating is around mine, then whatever cheating they are doing roughly makes them a player of my skill level. It really makes no difference to me if the person I'm playing is actually weaker and cheating to simulate my skill level or actually my skill level.

And from their perspective, what is the point? If you are a 1500 player and can cheat to be an 1800 player, what are you gaining from that? Wouldn't you rather play other people that are your skill level? And if you are a beginner (<1000) that is trying to pretend to be a higher rated player, you just won't have enough understanding of chess to pull it off stealthily.

The cheating thing is just not a major issue for casual online chess.

> in those cases it is obviously obvious.

Would it be possible for you to describe what it feels like to encounter an obvious cheater in chess? Is it simply who quickly they move, the strength of their moves, both, and/or something else?

The way to detect an obvious cheater is when somebody rated like 300-400+ rating points below you, a matchup which generally only occurs in tournaments or the like (normally you wouldn't be paired down to such a large extent), plays incredibly well and beats you. And then you do computer analysis and you see they played near flawlessly. You look at the move timing and make really complicated and deep moves instantly. Then you look at their game history and see they played their last few games nearly perfectly. Then you report them and your rating points are refunded a few minutes later.

Lower rated non-chess players, the kind that are most likely to cheat, can't just pretend to be higher rated people because they don't know what moves are suspicious and which ones aren't. And if you think they'll just cheat for the first few moves and then turn the computer off... it really just doesn't work as well. If they actually have no idea what they are doing they'll still lose, and it's super suspicious anyways based on move timing and computer analysis.

And to my original point, if I were an 1800 player and wanted to sneakily cheat to be a 2000 player, I probably could pull it off, because that is close enough to my skill level that I could pretend. Maybe by using an opening book to make sure I'm getting great positions out of the opening. Maybe by only turning the computer on during certain key positions. But again, if I did this consistently, I'd get a 2000 rating and now I'm going to be matched up against 2000 rated players, and from their perspective I'm just a 2000 player. And what have I gained? I now have to cheat to even be competitive in a casual chess game, whereas if I just had my true rating I could just play normally which would be easier and more fun. This is why sneaky cheating just isn't very common, because the only people capable of doing it really have no incentive to do it. The only people who think cheating would be fun are the people who are easiest to detect.

A few signs:

- taking a while to make an obvious move, especially in the endgame, where there might actually be only one move that makes any sense to make

- taking a very consistent amount of time between moves

- shuffling pieces around in a way that doesn't really accomplish anything but also doesn't cause anything bad

- playing normally, then a big pause and they go offline for a bit, then come back and start playing much better (connecting the client to an engine)

Most of your proposals can be detected by statistics:

- [...] just to alert you to when your position is strong. Oh, so you are a player that never misses a win? Hmm...

- [...] avoid traps in early games. Now you are a very strange player that never blunders during openings but blunders normally later on. Suspicious.

- [...] just for the occasional move. How do you know what move is that? Are you implying you never make _big_ blunders (but make plenty of non-huge ones)? Also suspicious.

In general, there are many signals you can collect. If other users are complaining about a player then you analyze them, and if your signals say "suspicious" then... you caught a cheater. If nobody complains about a particular user you don't do anything because it just doesn't matter.

Not bad! Yeah, wouldn't be surprised if those are part of the detection algorithm.

I would take longer to detect a cheater who is a bit more sly and only cheats on 5% of moves or less (the odds that someone would match a particular engine 99% of the time its pretty much zero), but over time, yeah, this would work.

I suppose another way to put its is that it's difficult to detect this sort of cheating from a single game, but not difficult to detect it in 100 games.

It seems like most of these would just detect when a player was unusually strong, which of course unusual things are suspicious but they can also be the case that some people are unusually strong.

The point is that in chess there's some variance between the opening/tactics/strategy/positional strength of players at the same level, but not _that_ much difference.

To cheat convincingly you have to boost all those facets at the same time, because otherwise you'll just give yourself out. For instance, nobody is extremely sharp at tactics but severely lacking (human-understandable) strategy.

Engines will help you in opening and tactics, but not too much in the positional/strategy game (they make good moves, but oftentimes it is just impossible for humans to understand them without very deep study, meaning they would never be casually played in an online game).

Another example, regarding cheating but only on the openings: even GM's make mistakes during openings. If you play openings at that strength level but then you often lose won endgames it is clear to anybody who knows the game that you are cheating (because opening theory is much wider than the standard endgame theory).

Finally, since you are not at the level you pretend to be whilst cheating, it gets very very complicated for you to know what you can or cannot get away with.

> Another cheater move would be to use a computer analyses only when things get sticky. Just for the occasional move. This is a cheating tactic in tennis, too. An unksilled cheater "hooks" constantly when it doesn't matter. A skilled cheater does it only on a critical point. You can call out a line judge, but with the advantage secured, the cheater can appear scrupulous for the remainder of the match

OT, but as someone who knows basically nothing about tennis, how does cheating work? Are there illegal ways to hit the ball or something?

Not OP, but they're referring to situations when players call their own lines. (Virtually all amateur matches.) If you are horrible (or blatantly biased) at calling lines, your opponent can call the tournament referee, and you may end up with a line judge. But that takes time, and only happens after you aggravate your opponent. If you wait until a key moment to make a bad call in your favor, your opponent won't be able to reverse it, even if they call the referee and get a third party to call the lines for the rest of the match.

This is a particularly big issue in competitive junior tennis, unfortunately.

Yes, that's what I meant. Agassi accuses Tarango of doing this as a junior in "Open".

A lot of cheaters are detected and banned, but like you say there's probably a lot of 'minor cheaters' not caught.

The issue really is the group who are detected and banned - they just sign up with a new account, and then carry on crushing players until they're banned again. The average game quality in this situation is pretty poor - because the rating of a player is very far from their true skill.

Lichess (a popular chess site) combats this issue by not actually banning cheaters. Instead, the cheater is not notified that they were caught and is still able play or create games, but they're only matched to other cheaters.

A bunch of video games do this ('shadow banning / shadow pooling') - with varying degrees of success. A lot of the cheaters still just create new accounts every so often.

Technically they get a warning label that they use computer assistance (dunno if they themselves can see this or not). Players can still play them if they choose. They just open new accounts though.

They also ‘refund’ the rating hit you took from losing to the cheater. I think it works pretty well.

Cheating in chess typically means using engine. There is big enough difference in how engine plays and how human plays for it to make game less fun.

Pls, it is quite natural for humans to care about notion of fairness. How and why we loose matters.

Yeah, although this is speculation, I imagine its less of an issue because cheaters would get board somewhat easily.

I mean whats the fun in copying what a machine says to win chess games against strangers?

Its not like its people they know who might be impressed and if they cheat then their ranking will rise far above their skill, so if they wanted to play a real game, they would then be crushed.

> I mean whats the fun in copying what a machine says to win chess games against strangers?

I mean, what's the fun in beating everyone in Overwatch / PUBG / Fortnite / Quake / Doom / etc. etc. with an aimbot?

To win. Because cheaters find winning fun, even if they're not doing it on their own skill. I obviously disagree with the mindset, but cheaters disagree with me (and clearly continue to use aimbots / chessbots / whatever to rack up "their wins").

Generally speaking, their excuses are along the lines of "I don't have the reaction speed of others", or "I don't find games of reaction fun" (etc. etc.). Similarly, a chessbot user would almost certainly say "I don't like having obvious blunders in my games, and a chessbot prevents me from missing obvious blunders".

---------

I mean, Centaur Chess is a thing. Human + Computer, if you really wanted to fight fair. But these cheaters don't go towards Centaur Chess servers, they stay on human-only servers and just wanna have an advantage on the opponent. Soooooo... yeah. That's their decision.

There's chess tournaments of 24-hours a move, no holds barred. (IE: Chess AIs are allowed to assist you). If you really wanted "blunder free chess", people can play in those communities. Those who continue to use computer-assistance on human-only servers are simply cheaters in my book.

> Cheating in chess typically means using engine. There is big enough difference in how engine plays and how human plays for it to make game less fun.

I've pondered moving to something different-but-close to get again the beginner fun, like shogi.

Also, there's more variety of movement with the lances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogi#Movement

I had a Romanian stats teacher that sneered at Americans' preoccupation with fairness. She would say, "Why do you use this word fair? Life is not fair. It is a useless idea."

That seems merely like a way of perpetuating unfairness.

I don't know the story, but it sounds like the teacher was in a position of power and someone said she was being unfair. Retorting "life is unfair" when you, yourself, are the agent causing unfairness simply inflicts needless pain. For what -- to teach the lesson that life is unfair?

As a parent, I try to parent my kids fairly. I try not to show favoritism. I try to recall which kid had the last cookie most recently. Obviously the kids sometimes don't agree with me and claim I am being unfair, but by valuing fairness at the very least I am trying, and modeling for them a world where they value fairness in turn.

(Of course, note, people may value different things. Fairness is its own category in the moral foundations theory[1], and some people rank it as less important than, say, authority or purity.)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory

This was a graduate level class and the teacher did not believe in partial credit. Someone had missed a sign and thought their B was unfair.

I agree, kids should be treated fairly and taught to treat others fairly. However, I think it is just as important to teach children resilience in the face of unavoidable adversity. It’s important to feel feelings, but to not let them poison you. Learning to get over a breakup, or an injury come to mind. I’d like to stress unavoidable adversity, in contrast to crimes like discrimination, battery, fraud, etc.

So, my harping on “life isn’t fair” is an indirect and misleading way of saying, “it’s important to be resilient”. I apologize for posting my comment without more context.

That sounds like much different situation. It was not about cheating and getting unfair advantage at all.

It was about stopping infinite debate about "what is fair" and "what are ideals rules" just so that one kid can get better grade. E.g. the claim that it is unfair was already motivated reasoning and your teacher perceived/treated it that way.

I am from former soviet blog and really, what teacher said is normal way to shut up bullshit complains. And yes, there is way more cheating in schools too amd bad teacher can get away with more.

But, the notion of fairness is important to both students and teachers.

  >I had a Romanian stats teacher that sneered at Americans' preoccupation with fairness. She would say, "Why do you use this word fair? Life is not fair. It is a useless idea."

I can see the point of that, to a certain extent.

We [well most of us] are brought up to play fair and with a deeply inculcated sense that it's shameful to cheat and that "cheaters never win". Then [in my case anyway], when we get a bit older and more worldly wise we realise that there are people everywhere, richer and more successful than us. Not because they're better or cleverer but because they went to the right school, or they knew the right people, or they had the right parents, or they could use money and/or influence to get out of trouble. That, in essence, they didn't have to play by the same rules as the rest of us. And, isn't that by definition "cheating"? In this case, cheating at life. I sometimes think maybe I'd have achieved a lot more, without the burden of having such a heightened sense of morality and fair play as I do.

I'd never contemplate cheating when playing a game for enjoyment though. Because that enjoyment comes from the self-satisfaction of getting a wee bit better each time. I think in most sports/hobbies/games the old cliché is true. In the end, you're competing against yourself. So there's no point in cheating.

Thing is, what you call unfair or cheating is only true when 1: the rulebook says so, 2: one is caught doing it, 3: when the evidence is indisputable & the interpretation of the rule is agreed upon.

Many big strides forward in sports are accomplished by re-interpreting understanding of said rules and coming up with possibilities that others have not yet thought about.

Take the Ten Commandments as example. Easy enough, at first glance. But the interpretation has been going on for about 6000 years with no end in sight.

And yet, Romania still distinguishes between little league, high school, and professional athletics; men's and women's athletics; etc. I'd guess they have some sort of anti-trust laws. Theft is still a crime, right?

I'm pretty sure everybody values fairness at some level.

It is not a useless idea. Fairness is something one can choose to strive for, notwithstanding that one will inevitably fall short of perfection. Much like proficiency in chess.

Isn't it argued that the English legal system (a form of enforce fairness) was responsible for the extent of it's Empire and was carried over in American success?

> Pls, it is quite natural for humans to care about notion of fairness.

Yes, but should we give up things we enjoy because the possibility for unfairness in that thing exists?

We may never know whether someone is using a chess engine assistant, but by observing what we can, their moves and game records, we can objectively argue that the match is fair. Statistically speaking, you have about a 50% chance to win. Is that unfair?