[switz]

Chess is in many ways, the perfect esport. I'm sure I'll take some flack for calling it an esport due to its rich history and the fact that it was not originally a "video game", but in 2021 those lines are blurred. In my opinion, it checks all the boxes.

[hardwaregeek]

It really is! The rules are fairly easy and a significant amount of people already know them; the game is free to play with no freemium model; the skill ceiling is really really really high. Sure you may not understand why Magnus makes his moves, but there's something very fascinating about watching a master at work.

[wraptile]

I'd completely disagree with you here.

Chess is only there because of history but it checks none of successful esport checkmarks. One might even argue that it has been a "solved" game for decades which is the opposite of what you want for a successful esports game.

One of the most important esport features is updates be it meta changes or new patches. That's why our current esport games are so huge even though they are relatively very new.

[lofatdairy]

While I completely disagree with your characterization of chess as a "solved" game, whether it's solved or not also doesn't really matter. Aimbots can crush CSGO pros, and OpenAI beat TI winners OG in 2019, but at the end of the day the strength of computers is irrelevant because we want to watch sports being played between humans, the strength of algorithms or computers (mostly) doesn't play into our enjoyment so long as the game remains complex for the human players and spectators.

As for meta changes and new patches, chess kinda sees this in the rise and fall of certain openings. For example, the popularity of the London System in the recent decade and the development of new theory within popular openings (I recall the Tal Variation of the Advanced Caro-Kann being popular in a recent tournament even though the Short variation was seen as the most critical way to continue for white for a long time). And this is just at the highest level, anyone in online blitz has had to learn to refute the Stafford Gambit because it "entered the meta" after Eric Rosen popularized it a few months ago.

[usehackernews]

I disagree. Meta updates take away from the enjoyment for me.

Id much rather watch competitors competing on 100% equal terms, without any developed advantage other than one created through the competitors skill.

Rocket league is a fantastic esport, and it’s been the same mechanics for years. There are no ‘special items’ or OP’d power ups. Both sides are 100% equal. It’s why I love it, the game is pure - Competitor vs competitor.

[semi-extrinsic]

Chess is "solved by computers" today, as in they will outplay the best humans, but that's in part because chess provides you with perfect information about the enemy's position at all time.

Most (all?) esport games use fog-of-war (RTS) or level design (FPS) or some other mechanism that hides the enemy from you. Without that, esports games have also been "solved by computers" for decades.

There is of course a chess variant with fog-of-war (dark chess). As far as I know, computers don't beat humans at that.

[glenstein]

Solved by computers has a formal meaning, pertaining to absolute knowledge of the best move in every situation. My understanding is that chess not solved in that sense.

I understand what you mean though, so fair enough. But I think it's generally only worth being nitpicky about definitions if it's important to maintain them and I think in this case formally solved is one of the important ones.

[semi-extrinsic]

Yeah, you are absolutely right, this is why I put it in scare quotes. (I felt that this distinction, though important, was not relevant to the point I was making.)

[WJW]

If we take it outside the esports realm, you could say the vast majority of sports has been "solved" since cars are trivially faster than humans, trebuchets are way better for throwing things over long distances, hydraulic cylinders beat anyone at lifting heavy stuff, etc. Nobody is advocating to stop holding athletics events because machines can do the specific task better, so why should we stop holding chess events for humans because a computer can do it better?

[glenstein]

Well I agree with your conclusion, I do think chess is meaningfully different from your examples.

Chess is often played on software and tracked on software, and my understanding is that there are sometimes issues related to cheating.

You can't similarly use the strength of hydraulic cylinders to aid your strategic skills in a heavy lifting contest, or trebuchet skills, etc

[nvarsj]

Some of the best esports with the deepest meta have no/little patch updates and their meta is constantly evolving. It’s the same in chess too. If anything, continuous patch updates that change the meta are a sign of weak game design.

[shawnz]

Chess does have meta changes, though. Especially as chess engines become more advanced, like with the release of AlphaZero, different strategies have become popularized as a result

[manquer]

Perfect ? It is the one of easiest online games to cheat! Very hard to play professionally online when it so easy to cheat .

Online chess( pandemic apart) would never be considered equivalent to tournaments over a board

[usehackernews]

Its easy to cheat, but also easy to get caught. You can’t cheat yourself to a high score.

The same engines that people cheat with are the same engines used to detect cheating. If you’re using an engine to play your moves, you’ll be caught very quickly.

[tromp]

It depends on how you use the engine. Obviously, picking its best move or nearly best move when they're close in value, will get you caught.

But suppose you sample from the engine's ranked moves to have some decent ACPL (average centipawn loss) error rate. Just a slightly lower rate than you'd have on your own.

If you further bias your sample to moves to that look reasonable to you, then I don't see how you'd get caught.

Current engines may not have the right support for such sampling, but it wouldn't be hard to implement, e.g. with a private fork of Stockfish.

[pertymcpert]

They already check for that.

[manquer]

I can imagine training ML models that can imitate human play closely enough and even your play specifically to increase the odds you win.

Detecting a stockfish moves over enough sample size is easy sure, but detecting a engine which is designed to imitate human play not make the best move everytime is not easy with number of moves a human would play in their lifetime.

[usehackernews]

Sure, but this isn’t an easy way to cheat.

The original commenter say it’s easy to cheat at chess. While potentially possible, I wouldn’t consider building a ML model to mimic your own play an ‘easy’ cheat method.

I’d also say building a model to mimic your own play consistently would be incredibly difficult. But, that’s for a different conversation.

[manquer]

While ML model building is bit more difficult , fuzzing a standard engine moves do only what you can understand is certainly possible without too much difficulty.

The point is cheating is bigger concern in online chess than other eSports

[usehackernews]

Yes, it’s a concern. But that doesn’t mean unfair advantages and cheating doesn’t occur in other esports.

Anyway, I don’t think we’re disagreeing on chess cheating. For me, the small chance someone is cheating doesn’t ruin the esport for me - For you it does, which is a perfectly reasonable response to it.

Secondary thought in the engine idea you had - chess fraud detection, I imagine, goes well beyond just the engine and move likeliness. It will also human-like interaction (Can’t confirm this, but the PM in me has me consumed with thinking about solutions to this problem)

When people play a chess game online, they are frequently evaluating positions. This results in cursor/mouse behavior that’s sporadic. If a user is considering moving the queen, they’ll move their cursor over to it. A user relying on an engine for every move would interact with the board in a very precise manner.

A player with a perfect engine to mimic humans will still get caught as their interaction with the board would differ greatly because only one position is considered for each move.

[nikanj]

It's too easy to cheat in chess by having someone run the moves through alphazero or similar.

[noir_lord]

the big chess sites have gotten really good at spotting cheats.

I've been playing online since the 90's and I can count one hand the times I've been certain I was playing a cheater.

Lichess and FICS are great (and free).

[nikanj]

How do you tell? With CS it's reasonable easy to notice people headshot at uncanny accuracy / see through walls / etc. How can you tell someone didn't think of pawn D4 on their own?

[noir_lord]

With 100% certainty you can't but you generally get a feeling that something is off, in the case of an actual straight out and out cheat it's easier because typically 1500 rated players don't calculate accurate exchanges 12+ply deep.

The "smarter" cheats use the engine only when they need to and those are harder to spot but again it's moves that make no "sense" with the direction of play - be like playing sunday league football and having the chubby dude with the beard take of down the pitch like Messi.

Mostly they catch them by running engine(s) over the games afterwards and looking for correlation between moves played vs what the machine wanted to do.

The funny ones are the players who drop a piece from a blunder then immediately start playing like Kasparov for the rest of the game.