Over the course of 2020, largely due to the pandemic, playing chess online has become exceptionally popular. There were already hints of this phenomenon, such as the great attention towards the Chess World Cup two years ago and the transformation of chess into a popular e-sport on online platforms such as Twitch. But the big online chess platforms have seen a huge increase in membership especially since this spring, when homebound people started looking for new hobbies. Chess.com, which together with Lichess is the most famous and used platform, had about 12 million new subscribers between March and November, compared to six and a half million in the same period last year. And this without even mentioning the TV series The Queen of Chess, distributed by Netflix since the end of October and has become enormously popular.
– Read also: If you love chess, look here
But, as the Wall Street Journal wrote a few days ago, while the number of people playing chess online increased dramatically, another phenomenon grew even more: those who cheat. According to data from Chess.com, the number of games in which “fair play violations,” the euphemism for cheating, have occurred in recent months, has increased at a faster rate than the total number of games. The absolute numbers are also impressive: in November 2019 Chess.com had closed about 6,000 accounts for fair play violations; in November of this year it closed more than 18 thousand.
The phenomenon is so serious that almost everyone involved in chess, from online platforms to professional federations, is at the same time worried and very busy finding a solution: chess cheating has always existed, but since the game has moved online have become easier and more widespread. Above all, cheating has become a major problem since it became impossible, due to the pandemic, to hold tournaments in person.
Until a few decades ago, cheating at chess was possible but tended to be difficult. There was almost always a need for one or more accomplices to help the player, secretly showing him what moves to do, with various gimmicks (one of the most creative: moving from one chair to another in the audience to show how to move). This assumed, among other things, that the accomplice was a more experienced player. The advent of technology has made things simpler: countless gamers have been caught wearing a headset for tips, or in the bathroom consulting their mobile phone.
Things have changed dramatically, however, after computers became better than humans at playing chess about thirty years ago. This is a fundamental concept: for decades no human being has been able to beat a high-level chess engine (as the artificial intelligences that play chess are called), and since 1997, when Deep Blue di IBM defeated world champion Garry Kasparov, things have evolved to such an extent that now the gap is huge. A child with a chess engine can easily beat the world champion, and these are not complex programs: a smartphone is enough.
As long as the tournaments were still held in person, for the referees and organizers it was a matter of checking that the players did not have devices connected to them or placed somewhere, perhaps in the bathroom. But since the tournaments are held online, the controls have become enormously difficult, and there have been many scandals even at a high level. The last took place in October, during a tournament called Pro Chess League and which takes place in teams: during the final Tigran Petrosian, number 260 in the world rankings, beat Fabiano Caruana, number 2, with a series of moves too perfect. The game was broadcast live and Petrosian often looked away from the screen, probably to look at another device running a chess engine. After an investigation, Petrosian was disqualified and banned from the online platform. He took it badly. To a member of the opposing team who accused him he wrote, in somewhat ungrammatical English: “You were peeking in your pampers when I was already beating players much stronger than you”.
– Read also: The chess Olympics ended earlier because of the internet
There is also a second order of problems, no less important: there are many cheaters even among amateur chess players, who play on online platforms to have fun and amuse themselves: just take a tour on the platforms' forums to read many complaints about it. In May Arkady Dvorkovich, the president of FIDE, the International Chess Federation, wrote that “computer scams are the real scourge of chess today”.
The Wall Street Journal says that for some time now the teams that deal with finding cheaters have become very important and have developed increasingly sophisticated methods of investigation: at Chess.com, there are more than 20 people who deal with them. . In online professional tournaments it is now necessary that during the matches the participants let themselves be filmed by two cameras, one in front that frames the face and one behind that frames the shoulders. They must also share their computer screen with the referees, to ensure they have no other programs open.
The most important investigative work, however, is done by algorithms created to recognize when a human player's game closely resembles what a chess engine would play. It works like this: for every single phase of the game, the chess engine is always able to identify the best move to make. When a player's moves are too similar to those recommended by a chess engine (there are many, with some variations in approach), the algorithm warns the platform managers. The algorithm is rather clever, it is not enough to change a few moves to escape it. Chess.com also claims to have a more sophisticated system that studies each player's way of playing and calculates the likelihood that a given game will deviate a lot from their usual style, a symptom of cheating.
A month and a half ago, an article in the Guardian about the Petrosian scandal quoted a chess scam expert that “paranoia has become culture” in the world of online chess, and the traditional and romantic view of the game is eroded. Professionals cheat for money to win tournament prizes. The amateurs, on the other hand, cheat to increase their ranking (the platforms give one to each user, to understand which other players they can compete with in the matches), but in this way they spoil the fun for everyone else. For this reason, the penalties are also very harsh: whoever is caught cheating can have their career ruined, if they are a professional, or they can be dismissed from the platform, if they are an amateur.
