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Are you sick and tired of being accused of cheating on the net?
Re: Are you sick and tired of being accused of cheating on the net?
Sometimes people accuse me of hacking in Starcraft. Not my fault you can't even micro vultures! One time I trashed this guy ZVT on Heartbreak Ridge... Just some standard 3 hatch mutas, some delaying, took the bottom right base above him, held him off with lurkers, got hive tech and smashed him up with guardians. Then he accused me of being a B+ player and got all pissed off and left. What a lady of the night...
people are simply justifying their loss by telling themselves "well, my opponent was cheating.
In most my cases they justify themselves with: "My positions was easily won", "You don't know how to play", "You won only by flagging me" (in 1 min games :D ) and spiced with curse language.
Having initiated this thread it's interesting what happened to me last night. There are 2 things that arouses my suspicions that someone is cheating against me:
One is if they are moving at the same tempo per move no matter how complicated or simple the position is (as in 3 seconds, move, 3 seconds, move and so on regardless of the position). Of course humans will play a series of moves quickly and when things get complicated tank a bit about the position and then move quicker again.
Two is when they play some obscure and weird combo (a computer tactic that a human wouldn't see right off the bat) without even taking any time to think about it.
So yesterday I was playing someone and he pulled this amazingly complicated combo that came out of nowhere in no time flat. I stopped playing and said "wow nice engine, where can I get it?" and he replied "houdini chess." I said "I haven't heard of it" and he said "it's a windows-based program, google it." How about that?
I googled for that Houdini engine and it leads to what looks like a very decent engine and it seems the author makes his own telescopes (!) According to the pics, I'd say he is quite a craftsman (of telescopes).
I wonder why someone (I assume you weren't playing the *author* of Houdini?) bothers using an engine to play online unless it was just to test the engine and gather some games for later analysis... Still, I would have thought it polite to mention that in his profile or somewhere?
Re: Are you sick and tired of being accused of cheating on the net?
Many of the people in this thread show themselves to be decent people. Decent people, when it comes to online chess, are incredibly naive. There are many, many people out there who cheat for absolutely no logical reason. When I worked for WCN, one of my jobs was spotting and catching cheaters. I would estimate that about 5% of the accounts (not 5% of the people, as many of them had multiple accounts) were operated by people who were cheating one way or another. When I asked them about it, some did it to test their programs, some did it to embarrass other players, some did it to show off (remember John Pyykka posting his bogus game here a few years ago?), etc.
This idea of having rated tournaments, and ones with cash prizes, online is daft. Even the GMs cheat!
(Excerpt from a column by Nigel Short in the Telegraph):
"One of the very rare cases of a cheat being punished (however lightly) was that of the young German grandmaster Arkady Naiditsch, who was caught using a computer in an internet tournament in 2004. For this, he was disqualified from the event. The German Chess Federation also took a fairly dim view of his behaviour.
At Cesme, Turkey, in October, I asked Naiditsch why he had ruined his reputation so senselessly. He agreed that he had made a serious mistake, but emphasised that he did not use computer assistance in all games (only most of them, apparently). Besides, he said, he had to because the other participants were doing the same thing (TO: emphasis mine). It is curious to me that many organisers seem indifferent (or perhaps oblivious) to such transgressions.
Perhaps they are more forgiving than I am."
"Tom is a well known racist, and like most of them he won't admit it, possibly even to himself." - Ed Seedhouse, October 4, 2020.
What's your story? Do you get accused of cheating a lot? And what do you reply to such allegations?
I've only been accused of cheating (falsely) in online simuls. Servers that require installed clients can detect if you're running an engine, though not necessarily if it's following your game.
Still, you might want to play only on that kind of server if the cheating or accusations thereof gets to you.
Re: Are you sick and tired of being accused of cheating on the net?
Bobby liked to see the other guy squirm. We've ascended to a more diffuse, spiritual realm. So I'd reckon that internet-chess-computer-cheaters like to imagine the other guy squirming.
Interesting that FICS guests are so likely to be computers. But I wonder if knowing that has ruined my pleasure in ipod FICS'ng? Time will tell.
Re: Are you sick and tired of being accused of cheating on the net?
I also noticed that after I started playing on ICC there are a lot less people accusing me of cheating, probably because they understand that I am not good!
When I played on some other sites I would get that once in a while, I would usually just thank them for thinking so highly of my chess skills! If I think that someone is cheating against me it doesn't bother me, because all that will happen is I will lose a few internet rating points. Who cares?
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