Chess.com, one of the if not the biggest internet chess site posts a monthly report on the results of players reporting bad behavior of other players. Personally, I take this as mild bragging on their part. See how transparent we are? See how seriously we take internet baddies? Likewise, as they seem to brag about these numbers being a good thing, I view them as an example of the coming shit storm and nightmares.
58k, almost 59k accounts closed in one month. And that’s not including inactive accounts because someone hasn’t played for years. It’s their Fair Play report - Accounts closed based off their system of reporting cheaters and acting on those reports. Let’s guess that all the other sites combined have similar account closures. And we’ll round that down so in total 100,000 accounts are closed per month across all internet chess sites. That’s 1.2 million accounts closed per year.
Statisticians have tried to guess the number of people that play chess. And an internet search ranges from 300 million to double that. Not all of those people play on the internet. Not all of those people care about ratings or take it seriously, they just know how to play. So the number of internet chess players is hard to accurately nail down. Doesn’t 1.2 million out of 300 million sound like an awfully lot of cheating? It sounds like it to me.
Buried within the account closures are die hard cheaters that get caught and simply boot up a new account. Note there are 323k reports for March. Some of those are multiple reports on the same cheater by different people. And there’s certainly some bogus reports by spiteful people just being vengeful douchebags. Millions of rating points refunded. People muting others and blocking the algorithm from pairing them up with someone they don’t like. Fair play issues are already a full time job.
Grifters follow tried and true patterns. Invading anything popular and seeking out maximum engagement, relying on the math of capitalizing on the set of people falling for tactics of being made to feel smarter than they really are. I suppose some bogus chess site may come to be and include a chat feature during games. But let’s not worry about that now. The existing sites have forums. And the talk is not always chess related. And like mainstream social media, pretty much impossible to moderate effectively. The same people in the cheating world, the cheaters and the victims are getting exposed to all the off topic scams that have gotten traction before.
Well sure. Ask the guy who is pretty obviously focused on getting you to sign up to his Patreon because the Jesuits allegedly rig sporting events for jollies what he thinks about weight loss drugs. Cause that makes aaaaallllll kinds of sense. Like you’ve never heard of doctors before. There’s about to be a crowd of horrible heroes devoted to chess sites that really aren’t that good, but faked their way to false credentials. And the young and cognitively biased will believe that their opinion on any topic matters.
And there is even more interesting news. Former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik was suspended from playing on chess.com.
His story is he cheated to learn more about cheaters cheat. I’m not pointing any fingers about who is right and who is wrong here. The idea being conveyed is that chess cheating and discussion on it is a huge topic. Only offering free games probably isn’t a big enough draw to pay all the bills. Prize money tournaments have already started to be ruined with cheating accusations, both real and imagined. And that’s without the content in the forums that will be something like this:
“Don’t worry about your weight because you park your fat butt in a chair and play chess all day. I’m international master Skinny McGoodshape and I lost weight using Pawnzembic. It works just as good as Ozembic but costs just 1/5th of the price! Link in bio.”
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