What is your chess rating? Fav opening? Wanna play?

I used to play occasionally on the "Gameknot" chess site. Mostly I worked the tactical puzzles. I think my rating was around 1850, but I just checked, and I think it reset since it's been so long since I played. I'm now a 1200 rating, with zero games played. 🤣

I did play on my high school chess team, but I was one of the crap players. I guess my brain just wasn't designed for chess.
 
Triple_D said:
Yes, or either of the other two queens in that lower right corner.
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True, for stalemate, but stalemate is a draw. How can white lose?
 
I was all excited around this time last year, give or take a month or two, because I was at my highest chess.com rating of all time, around 1094 I think. But I crashed and burned and dropped down to under 850 a few months ago, and am scraping my way back up. Sitting at 1030 now. It probably helps that I am practicing tactics puzzles most days (peak rating of just over 2100, but back down around 1700), and watching Eric Rosen's new speedrun playlist.

 
Yep, totally saw through my transparent trick question 🤣 :thumbsup:
 
I used to play chess a lot, but not online. The problem with online chess is that cheating is rampant and there is no way to police it. All your opponent has to do is load up an AI chess engine on a separate device and mirror all of your moves to it. Then they can counter your moves with whatever moves that the chess engine comes up with. They'll basically beat you every time because the chess engine they're using can think more moves ahead than you can. They're literally making you play against a computer. That's how people cheat in online chess, and there's no way to stop them from doing it.
 
Guy McVer said:
there is no way to police it.
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Not even close.


That Article said:

Fair Play By The Numbers​

  • 2.5 million games are analyzed per day.
  • Over 1 million account closures in 2023.
    • Approximately 3,000 account closures per day.
    • Approximately 90,000 account closures per month.
    • Total account closures are equivalent to approximately 0.6% accounts on Chess.com.
  • 165 titled player closures in 2023.
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There is more to the article. Long story short, you have a team of 30 people for the fair play team consisting of programmers, engineers and titled chess players and masters, who put systems in place to detect cheating and dole out justice.

Every so often, I will get a notification from the site that says one of more of my opponents was detected violating the fair play policy, and I receive a ratings adjustment accordingly.
 
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David Mary said:
Not even close.




There is more to the article. Long story short, you have a team of 30 people for the fair play team consisting of programmers, engineers and titled chess players and masters, who put systems in place to detect cheating and dole out justice.

Every so often, I will get a notification from the site that says one of more of my opponents was detected violating the fair play policy, and I receive a ratings adjustment accordingly.
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That's not saying much at all. And it's not impressive in the slightest. The real question is how many actual humans are associated with those accounts. I guarantee you the number of actual people is going to be much lower than the total number of banned accounts.

I'm sure they do catch plenty of accounts of people who aren't smart about how they cheat. And then those people just go and make new accounts and keep on cheating. Many of them will get smarter about it, and become harder to catch. And if they do get caught again, they go ahead and make new accounts as many times as they want. You can't stop them. Ultimately it is a loosing battle. The only thing they are accomplishing is giving people like you the illusion that something effective is being done, while the cheaters get better and better at not getting caught.

In an anonymized system, there is no real way to stop a determined cheater, and chess is just about the easiest game to cheat at online because you can run a local chess engine on an air gapped system, you can set the parameters of the engine however you want, arrange the board to start or stop cheating at any point in the game, and you can generate multiple different countermoves to each move your opponent makes and choose the one you want. The only thing anti-cheat can do about it is run statistical analysis to try and figure out if your moves are human or computer generated, but this has its limits.
 
You seem to think you know better than the actual chess industry and chess masters who have full confidence in online chess. Sustain that belief as long as you want, I won't try to change your mind any more.
 
I guess I don't understand how that Chess.com site works. Would I need to have cameras and microphones set up to play some random stranger in a game of chess, or is that only for tournaments? I don't have any interest in becoming a chess master, but I might enjoy playing an occasional game, just for the fun of it.

Or I guess I could just play the computer. I tried that just now, but I picked a beginner opponent and it was too easy.

I do have a stand alone chess game I bought nearly 40 years ago. It has a nice board/pieces and that darn computer is much better than I am. I actually got it at Radio Shack. The best I've ever done is take it to a stalemate. I've never beaten it. :(
 
Triple_D said:
I guess I don't understand how that Chess.com site works. Would I need to have cameras and microphones set up to play some random stranger
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Oh I see what you’re asking. When you register an account and then play a few games the software establishes a rating for you based on how you do. It takes maybe half a dozen or a dozen games to establish a rating that is somewhat accurately representative of your abilities. After that whenever you click new game the algorithm pairs you with someone else who also clicked new game who will be relatively close to your level.
 
David Mary said:
T Triple_D I’ll play with you. You don’t need a camera.
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Thanks, but this thread is the first time I've thought about chess in several years. I think I need to practice against "a computer" a few times first, so I don't totally embarrass myself. My brain just isn't wired for chess, so I have to think about it for several games, before I start to see anything that is going on.
 
Meanwhile I am basically the same way even after playing literally 13,000 games 🤣
 
I used to play a fair bit of chess many years ago, while in highschool & post ...

these days I've somewhat graduated to computer strategy games with similar but much larger possibility matrices, ... civ6 is a good example.
I honestly tend to think of it as an open-ended chess 'real-life' game/sim, where you have to decide when to build a pawn, or knight, or bishop ;)

Add to that research & expansion & military & diplomacy... its really all there, except the rng sometimes really gets on my nerves lol

(a few other games also, like stellaris, victoria2, hearts of iron, etc etc)
 
Excited to have recovered from last year's two major nose dives, and surpassed my previous best rating by a few points, and also broken the 1100 (chess.com) elo mark for the first time in my life. 😄 Of note, I still play the Modern Defense for the most part as black, but as white, I have switched recently from the e4 Italian Game to the d4 London System, and feel very solid in that opening (against others around my level). Anyway, 1100 has been a goal of mine for some time now, and a New Year's resolution of sorts. Time to set that bar a little higher now.

1707713863141.png
 
On cheating in online chess: These clowns always give themselves away in the end. I have played over 13,000 online chess games, but I have reported cheating only once. However, I am sure I have played against cheaters at least a few times. But I also receive this message from chess.com every now and then:

1707844950268.png

That means that cheaters that I didn't report because I didn't suspect them of cheating.... were either reported by someone else, or flagged by the site's cheat detection algorithms.


But because I received one of those messages today, I decided to do a little digging, as the one and only time I have ever hit report for "cheating" was only three days ago. Here is the game that made me suspicious before it was even over. I played with the Black pieces, and I know I made a couple inaccuracies and mistakes, but after that ridiculous Kf1 move, White made nothing but "excellent" or "best" moves according to the engine:

Cheater vs David Mary

Cheater.gif


And after I got the message that my rating had been adjusted, I looked and sure enough this same account had been closed for fair play violations. The account was originally opened a week and a half ago, and started at a rating under 500, and was over 1000 by the time he got to me. And then in a "clever" way of avoiding cheat detection, it lost some games along the way, as if it would not set off red flags that a 500 rated player would lose to a 600 rated player, and then less than two weeks later regularly crush players another 500 points stronger using novelty openings.

Everyone this bozo "won" against has had their rating points refunded to them.
 
I really don't understand why people cheat. I know a lot do, but to me, the main goal is to improve my playing, and the actual wins and loses are secondary. Of course, we all want to win, but I want to do it through my own skill.

I signed up and have been playing the "bots" for a while now. The number of blunders I have made is ridiculous, and clearly I am A LOT worse than I remember. 🤣 I did play a few live games a couple of weeks ago. I blundered the first one. I started a second game but was so pissed off about the first, that I resigned after a few moves. I came back later and won the next five, but they were sloppy, so I decided to stick to the "bots" until I feel more confident.

My rating started at 550, dropped to 536, and then went up to 668 over two days. I have a long way to go.........

On your opponents Kf1 move, I guess he may have been trying to castle, and dropped the king on the wrong square. I've done similar blunders a few times now, costing me games against the "bots". It's very frustrating when I do something like that.
 
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