I'm just trying to figure out how you even cheat on chess, the only thing that comes to mind is moving pieces, and sneaking new ones on the board, but if there's enough cameras, how do you get away with it, eventually someone WILL notice, highlight it, point it out, and you will be shamed.
Just having someone who is following the game with a chess engine and who has a way to get a single message to you telling you that your opponent's last move was a serious blunder would be enough to give you a noticeable advantage.
For example look at the position in this video [1] from a recent game on Chess.com between Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana (the title of the video says Magnus vs Hikaru because the video covers 3 of Hikaru's games in the tournament).
I linked to a spot in the video a little before the part where one simple message could changed the game because the host is explaining what Hikaru is going to be trying to do. Briefly, trading pieces off is good for Hikaru, and that's what he starts to do.
You can see from the evaluation bar this Stockfish says he is slightly better.
Then he plays Bg5 which looks like an easy way for force a pair of bishops off, continuing the plan. But look at the evaluation bar! It quickly swings from 0.2 in favor of white to 1.7 in favor of black. But black can only realize that advantage by playing RxN, a move that Fabiano did not even consider. He went on to lose the game.
A prearranged signal from a confederate that meant "Hikaru just made a game changing blunder" would very likely have resulted in Fabiano seeing RxN. It's a move that many would spot if they were given the position as a puzzle and so knew there was a tactic somewhere.
> I'm just trying to figure out how you even cheat on chess,
You use a chess engine to tell you the best move - you can run a chess engine on a modern phone that will easily best the world's top human chess players.
The simplest forms of this are things like: "play online, chess engine open in another window", "use your phone hiding in a bathroom cubicle" and "member of the audience follows your game with a chess engine and signals you somehow"
There are also rumoured to be very subtle ways of doing this - like playing unassisted for most of the game, but an engine providing 'flashes of genius' at one or two crucial moves of the game.
Major competitions have things like metal detectors and time-delay video feeds hoping to make cheating harder.
Since even a phone has enough processing power to make Stockfish play better than a super-GM, the Faraday cage isn't enough to prevent, say, someone tapping the position into a computer on their person and feeling for some sort of vibration[1] in response. It takes very little information to represent a position, and commentators have pointed out that the minimum amount of information required to produce a decisive advantage is 1 bit ("A winning move exists").
This makes me want to cheat just as a technical challenge. Could I hide a computer in my hair? Could I ingest a capsule computer and communicate with it using the resonance of my teeth chattering? (No, I would not insert one in an inappropriate place).
I'm sure it would be a downer that I cheated but it would do them a favor by saying: "look, you cannot stop it. Time for something new".
There is a Java script plugin for lichess that verbally tells you the best move in each position. I installed it (only for eval) and won my game (so unfair! But it was a random and not rated game). I removed the script. So it would be easy to use this or something like this to announce game changing situations.
"... But had I started cheating in a clever manner, I am convinced no one would notice. I would've just needed to cheat one or two times during the match, and I would not even need to be given moves, just the answer on which was way better. Or, here there is a possibility of winning and here you need to be more careful. That is all I would need in order to be almost invicible."
Getting any kind of information from a chess engine would be sufficient to gain an edge for a good player. Even something as simple as a nudge that there is a high value move in a position with no information about what the actual move is could be enough. Big chess tournaments tightly control phones and other devices for this reason. That's on a single-match level. On a tournament level there have been allegations of collusion where players will intentionally arrange their own matches to either be quick draws (to get a break to focus on other matches) or to give points to a designated player to help them win the tourney, Fischer famously accused Soviet chess players of doing this.
In the old Soviet/US rivalry days there was an accusation of cheating that I thought was novel. The accusation was that the Soviet players in the middle rounds were doing subtle not-right moves with the US #1. This forced the lead US player to put way too much effort into figuring out if it was some new line that he didn't know about and tiring him out. Then by the time he got to the final he was exhausted and confused.
No? It's a technique that could readily be done by one person, and teams are allowed to strategize. Bluffing/deception is kosher in chess, just harder as the key elements of the game are all public.
> During adjournments, players could count on the help of other strong masters, called seconds. These seconds would analyze the position and tell the player what they should play when the game resumed.
In parallel to this (and Bobby Fischer explicitly accused them of this), the Soviet players had already decided who would be the champion amongst themselves, and subtly let that player win his matches so that he was fresh and well-rested when he ended up playing non-Soviet players.
The vast, overwhelming majority of chess games are not played in front of cameras or even in-person. The accusation in the article was about online play, and specifically blitz which is played online even more commonly than slower formats of chess because moving quickly is easier for many people with a mouse than a physical board.
The way people cheat online is by running a chess engine that analyzes the state of the board in their web browser/app and suggests moves and/or gives a +/- rating reflecting the balance of the game. Sometimes people run it on another device like their phone to evade detection, but the low-effort ways are a browser extension or background app that monitors the screen. The major online chess platforms are constantly/daily banning significant amounts of people trying to cheat in this way.
Chess.com and Lichess catch these cheaters using a variety of methods, some of which are kept secret to make it harder for cheaters to circumvent them. One obvious way is to automatically compare people's moves to the top few engine moves and look for correlations, which is quite effective for, say, catching people who are low-rated but pull out the engine to help them win games occasionally. It's not that good for top-level chess because a Magnus or Hikaru or basically anyone in the top few hundred players can bang out a series of extremely accurate moves in a critical spot - that's why they're top chess players, they're extremely good. Engine analysis can still catch high-level cheaters, but it often takes manual effort to isolate moves that even a world-champion-class human would not have come up with, and offers grounds for suspicion and further investigation rather than certainty.
For titled events and tournaments, Chess.com has what's effectively a custom browser (Proctor) that surveils players during their games, capturing their screen and recording the mics and cameras that Chess.com requires high-level players to make available to show their environment while they play. This is obviously extremely onerous for players, but there's often money on the line and players do not want to play against cheaters either so they largely put up with the inconvenience and privacy loss.
Despite all of the above, high-level online cheating still happens and some of it is likely not caught.
> It's not that good for top-level chess because a Magnus or Hikaru or basically anyone in the top few hundred players can bang out a series of extremely accurate moves in a critical spot - that's why they're top chess players, they're extremely good.
Interesting; I thought I'd read that even the very best players only average ~90% accuracy, whereas the best engines average 99.something%?
Top-level players regularly are in the 90-95% range aggregated over many games, with spikes up to 98-99%. If you have 98 or 99% accuracy over the course of an entire game (which happens sometimes!), it's either very short or you had significant sequences where you were 100% accurate. If that happened in one of my games it'd be clear evidence I was cheating, if it happens in a Magnus game it's him correctly calculating a complex line and executing it, which he does pretty often.
Edit: Even lower-level cheated games are rarely 100% accurate for the whole game, cheaters usually mix in some bad or natural moves knowing that the engine will let them win anyways. That's why analysis is usually on critical sections, if someone normally plays with a 900 rating but spikes to 100% accuracy every time there's a critical move where other options lose, that's a strong suggestion they're cheating. One of the skills of a strong GM is sniffing out situations like that and being able to calculate a line of 'only moves' under pressure, so it's not nearly as surprising when they pull it off.
To compute accuracy, you compare the moves which are made during the game with the best moves suggested by the engine. So, the engine will evaluate itself 100%, given its settings are the same during game and during evaluation.
You get 99.9something% when you evaluate one strong engine by using another strong engine (they're mostly aligned, but may disagree in small details), or when the engine configuration during the evaluation is different from the configuration used in a game (e.g. engine is given more time to think).
Accuracy is a poor measure for cheating since better chess players will put you in a more complicated position. I'm not especially good but I've played some games with high accuracy just because I just did some book moves and the opponent makes a mistake. Accuracy was high but the correct moves were never especially hard to see.
reading your description of the "invasiveness" of chess.com's surveillance of high level tournament play, I realized that chess.com could issue their own anal probe, a sonar listening device to check that there aren't any other anal probes in use. finally! we can be assured of a good clean game played fairly from both seats!
Getting tips from another person or a computer on what best move to make. This could be as simple as a compatriot in the audience giving you hand signals.
