800 rated players cheating is interesting but simply I never play 800 rated players. It has always been my policy to play higher rated players than myself. I learn more from these games and it hurts my rating less if I lose.
It happened to me once in a tournament that an 1200 who is supposed to drop pieces left and right all of a sudden started making engine precise moves and has beaten me. ( Even in this case I may be wrong. ) The lesson is that in tournaments you are forced to play very low rated players. I have always preferred playing single games against selected players than playing in tournaments.
All in all it has never been my impression ( at any site ! ) that I'm playing against cheaters in any considerable content. In the very few cases when it did occur to me the player tipically had a high rating rather than a low rating.
#5: hehe. :-D
My first feeling too. But then I can understand how you feel (@ pawnbreaker) if this really has ruined your experience on several websites. Just tell your buddies to come over as well.
Frankly my feeling is that we pay too much attention to ratings. I understand titled players would get concerned about it, but at our level I'd be tempted to think that if I can beat an average player who is using a software, there has to be some wicked Viking warrior in my ancestry; if not, meh, that was bound to happen. But the chances that this may occur recurrently are very slim, heavy cheaters usually don't last long. The issue is: what if my opponent used a computer for only two critical moves? Surely you'll never know, but at least you will have been confronted to two good moves which may have taught you more than any mistake.
And yeah, the glicko thing is kind of awkward: I've never played chess seriously but I took up correspondence chess recently. Somehow did rather well in the first couple of games (I'm positive my opponent was looking at that cute neighbour taking a shower during my first victory) and got 520+ points or something, then kind of maintaining, and I thought "this has to alert the cheating detector, 'this guy can't be 2000+'"... Makes no difference, correspondence has completely changed my view on chess and while it is more likely than in any other type of games that my opponents will resort to some kind of help, each and every game takes a new meaning; be it against John Miller or Houdini 4.
I hope you enjoy yourself here, see ya.
I don't mean specifically 800 rated players. I mean any rating. Literally anyone of any rating can cheat. They don't instantly jump to 2000+ the moment they turn the engine on. Yes, even those with low RDs can decide to cheat. And if they do, they will not be 2000+ for a long time.
Oh, and sorry about the long read. I didn't realize.
Sandbagging is a different kind of cheating. It is not one to one related to using engines. Players that do not cheat by using engines still do sandbagging. Again this is very rare. It happened to me that a high rated player with white played out their queen took on f7 with the bare queen and then resigned. But in 10000 games this happens once. In poker you can have a royal flush but who plays every single hand in poker in the hope of a royal flush is a fool. Also one that plays every single game at a chess site in the fear of cheaters and sandbaggers at every corner.
I don't know if that was meant for me or not, but nothing I mentioned has anything to do with sandbagging.
Cheaters are often trying to aggravate their opponents and therefore it would not be out of the realm of possibility for them to have deceptively lowered their ratings as well.
GM chessbrahs mentioned a number of cheaters he's recently run into on lichess. If anyone has the video links and times for these games, they would be entertaining to watch.
I regularly look at my opponents rating charts after playing games. My typical range is 1600-2000 depending on variant, my mood, time control etc. I consider myself a reasonable amateaur player, at longer time controls even relatively strong. I have never seen in my category a player who say won a game against me as an 1850 but it turned out after the game that time ago they were a 800 rated player with an established rating who after a while started to cheat. This may happen mathematically but I have never seen this in practice.
What really happens is that a player who is 1400 established in bullet somehow is 2300 established in correspondence. But this is very easy to spot. In correspondence you have the luxury to look carefully at your opponents before starting a game.
"In poker you can have a royal flush but who plays every single hand in poker in the hope of a royal flush is a fool. Also one that plays every single game at a chess site in the fear of cheaters and sandbaggers at every corner."
Nice.
#18: Be careful scouting correspondence players that way. Correspondence ratings here are very inflated because of timeouts and just a lot of ridiculous blunders. I'm 1300s in bullet (of course, I don't play that and have just horsed around at it) and well over 2000 in correspondence (completely legit). My rating in correspondence has not been challenging to achieve at all.