Internet Chess Cheating - Part 1 The Background

Part 1 - Background

Part 2 - Computer games and Internet strategy games

Part 3 - The fraud in internet poker

Part 4 - The history of cheating in over the board chess

Part 5 - Detail of recent cheating events

Part 6 - What the future may show

Chess has enjoyed an enormous been the past few years.  There are very few games that have had such a long history that test intellect of two combatants.  Go (Othello on steroids) has a similar reputation for complexity but far less people consuming their spare time with it.  The current highest rated player and recent voluntary forfeiter of his World Champion title, Magnus Carlsen, is arguably the best ever to play the game.  At times he has held the title in all three major “speeds” of the game, classical (slow), rapid and blitz.  Having a dominant player (The Tom Brady of chess, or choose your personal favorite sports analog) increases interest in the game in general.

Personally, I think climate change has helped the chess boom.  Given a choice between a soccer league in blazing heat or quiet chess play in air conditioning or at least out of the direct sun an indoor game is more attractive.  Similarly, the Covid pandemic likely lead to the massive rise of internet chess interest.  Or at least maintained the interest.  Not being allowed to be in close contact, what else is a kid to do?  Regardless, SOMETHING(S) happened and there’s been an extremely large number of talented and enthusiastic young players making waves.  Most notably India and smaller European countries have seen the biggest rise in interest, but the increase is truly global.

There is truth behind the stereotype of the nerdy chess player or evil genius.  Chess is a grand display of pattern recognition skills.  You don’t need to play perfectly to win, just good enough to at least spot a key idea at the right time.  A situation where your recognition of the pattern on the board is better than your opponent.  And people with higher IQs will tend to recognize those patterns easier than low IQ people.

Unlike gematria, the rules are clear.  You don’t get to stop the game part way and suddenly make up a new rule.  There are hard set rules on what determines victory, and when the game ends in a draw.  And although these have been tweaked to improve known deficiencies (.e.g. the en passant rule) overall the rules are same.  And both players know the rules before the game starts.  Or at least they should.  But never forget a basic axiom of humanity - people are assholes.  When a stronger player is playing a weaker player, the weaker player has to choose from a couple of options.

1). Hope to learn and grow and accept defeat until understanding the patterns better.

2). Accept defeat ungraciously and pout.

3). Cheat

With the play being over the board the cheating was far more difficult than with the internet.  Your opponent is right there, watching you.  And even concentrating on the position at hand.  You don’t have the Monopoly option of trying to be the banker every game and slipping yourself a couple extra $$ when nobody’s paying attention.  A lot of early over the board cheating would be distraction oriented.  Make sure the board is placed so the sun is shining in your opponent’s eyes.  Coughing.  Playing super slow before the time clock’s were in use.  Other petty and unsportsmanlike conduct.

So as a sporting contest, these unsportsmanlike options were deemed inappropriate and a generalized code of conduct assumed to stop them.  Which of course failed at times as playing fair would butt heads with those that don’t like things like taking an oath of office seriously and having prize money for chess tournaments.  

A lot of earlier cheating in the 20th century was minimized by the prize money really not being worth the effort.  Even today, only the top few hundreds of players have a serious shot of making a decent amount of money to make it worthwhile.  Only the top handful can extend their fame into a lucrative sponsorship arrangement with advertisers.  But having the assistance of a computer chess program, one that is better than any human ever was or will be and the secrecy of being on the internet instead of face to face, that’s a recipe for disaster and it was inevitable that the grifting mentality would ruin the fun.

The progression of chess cheating followed the evolution of AI and games.  Desktop computer games presented a challenge to the minds of those that had the pattern recognition skills to get tue warm, fuzzy feeling of conquering it.  Or we’re willing to search out cheat codes or pay for a hint book.  Early internet strategy games developed into those that you could only be successfully by outspending your opponent.  Or cheating.  And often the operators of the game itself would simply run AI to play their own game, to entice and encourage humans to spend money on it.  And hypocritically encourage talk about how it’s the players that are cheating, not that the site itself is a scam.  Internet poker was/is wildly popular.  And there’s little point to playing unless the intent is to win prize money.  A lot of the luster has disappeared, but back in the 90’s there were many so poker sites that scammed their users that eventually governments got involved, forcing people to stop.  Which has the same negative social impact as something like mask mandates during a pandemic.  Poker people hated it.

I personally achieved some success with correspondence chess in the 70’s and 80’s.  And I gave up on it because I already foresaw the inevitably of not being able to validate I was playing against human generated moves or a vastly superior computer.  The current chess cheating topics are mostly surrounding fair play over the internet.  But there’s a solid dose of how a handheld smartphone can be used to enhance the performance of the kind of person that would prefer to blow cigarette smoke in your face to distract you.