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by mewpmewp2 1809 days ago
It's odd that it would be 1 out of 6 or 7, because when high elo streamers like Hikaru or Chessbrah are doing speed runs, they very often go on a 100 win streak, which sounds exceedingly unlikely if the odds of facing an engine user would be 1 out of 6/7.

An engine user would definitely beat them, unless they were using it sparingly of course, which can be, but I don't think it would be that obvious for you in this case as well.

There are examples where they face an engine and it's obvious, but it doesn't seem 1 out of 7 times.

6 comments

I guess the problem is that most users that play with an engine don't play bullet/blitz.

I do meet a lot of engine players on 3 minute blitz but then I just do very fast bullet moves and all of a sudden I'm losing with a 90 second advantage that cannot be recovered if the user persists on playing with an engine.

Maybe, but there are also few rapid "speed" runs, like from Daniel Naroditsky, while he has also faced cheaters, it doesn't seem 1 out of 7.

And Daniel Naroditsky definitely would have good internal cheating detection even when the user does it sparingly, as he can basically understand most lower rated opponent moves, and if it seems too good for this rating, he can know this from just few moves.

Check Daniel's rapid speed run account: https://www.chess.com/member/ohmylands

145 wins and 3 losses. The 3 losses had, were lost purposely, if you look here in 3 or 4 moves with 5 accuracy, for whatever reason (to drop ELO?). https://www.chess.com/games/archive/ohmylands?gameOwner=othe...

If there were 1 out of 7 opponents using an engine, he would never have 145 wins against 0 losses.

And again for bullet and blitz there are also quite many examples with 100W to 0L.

If you'd look at all the speed run videos Daniel has done, it definitely doesn't seem 1 out of 7.

Daniel also posts all the times he's facing a cheater to youtube, same with Chessbrah and others as it makes for a good content, good views as people are always interested in seeing a GM playing against a cheater.

Different crowds probably.

Not sure what the aim of cheating is, probably going from a rating of 1500 to 2000 and the status that it brings. In the end you still win 50% of the games, just against higher rated players.

Playing against a GM would reveal your cheating instantly, it seems. It's like robbing the police station :)

People like steamrolling. It's part of why higher rated players smurf (for theirs and/or their audience's enjoyment) and do 'speedruns' in chess and most online games with ranking.
Hikaru and Chessbrah are playing at GM level. It'd be difficult to cheat at this level. Every player tends to recognise every other player, and it takes time to climb to this elo. A far more representative example would be to observe games from a NM or IM. These guys often bump into cheaters. 1 in 6/7 isn't unrealistic.
> playing at GM level

Not always. Hikaru does speedruns[1] using an alt acct with entry-level ELO to race to ELO 3000. I've watched a fair bit of this, and seen him encounter the odd cheater or suspect game, but much nearer 1% than 10% of the time.

1: e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOd222WIEk8

I don't disagree with what you said, but for context: when these players do speedruns they typically start from 600 ELO and work their way back up to GM, so they face players at every level as part of that 100-game streak.
>It's odd that it would be 1 out of 6 or 7, because when high elo streamers like Hikaru or Chessbrah are doing speed runs, they very often go on a 100 win streak, which sounds exceedingly unlikely if the odds of facing an engine user would be 1 out of 6/7.

I would guess that even with the engine you would take some games to rank up to that high so if chess.com is good at banning cheaters most of them would probably get caught sooner.

Yes, but those streamers often start from 500-600. And often when they do actually face those cheaters, they have gone undetected for 100+ games, maybe at 2000 elo, and they seemingly only get banned because of the publicity they face against the streamer. Meaning chess.com cheating detection by itself hasn't managed to detect them for so long, and who knows how many are there wild in the open managing to do more than 100s of games, without facing any publicity and doing it a lot more intelligently than the obvious ones against the streamer.
Even against engines, a pro player will often win due to the other player running out of time due to the time loss in every move from copying the engine. You often see the game being slightly equal with the pro player slowly falling behind but then as the time starts to run out for the cheater they completely fall apart.
But those pros will usually make some sort of subtle (because they don't want to openly, straight up accuse unless chess.com has actually banned the opponent after) comment that is clear they think they are playing against a cheater, but the odds are definitely not 1 out of 7. I have been addicted to YouTube chess videos for quite a while now...
Maybe it's not an engine but a GM on a 'speedrun'. I am pretty sure I couldn't tell the difference. :)
Speed runs are 3min game, or even less.

It's much hard to cheat in 3minutes games. The chess engine takes somes time to think about the next move

Chess engines destroy humans at speed chess. The time use creeps in if you're using a low-tech method of cheating (i.e. manually punching moves into your engine and the website).
AFAIK cheaters still manually input moves into engine, so cheating on 3min blitz against a super GM won't so be easy.