#soldier
That was exactly my way of thinking. He registered one month ago maybe when the tournament was announced by lichess and he joined the tournament as a 1500. Very suspicious for me. Maybe its just a coincidence but i highly doubt that. Ofc no-one can be sure he cheated unless its proven otherwise.
regarding post #9
Lightsss, some people put in 24 hours of time and effort. Even if it's just an online event with no prizes, that should still be taken seriously. If someone sat there and watched an engine make all their moves, and someone missed out on a top 10 spot, that's not right.
Well, at some point it comes down to terminology. What constitutes a big problem? 1/400 players? More than that? Less?
No one is denying THAT people cheat. Of course they do. My point is that whatever the number is, at some point you have to do a cost/benefit analysis. To eliminate a higher percentage of cheaters requires more time and resources; at some point that cost is going to be greater than the cost of having that last cheater you otherwise wouldn't catch.
Of course, all of that is set within the bigger picture: past a certain time control (probably around 5 0), there's just nothing you can do from stopping a person from looking at an engine on their phone for 15 seconds in a difficult position. If they're a decent player on their own, that's worth a good number of rating points in additional strength, but that is impossible to catch unless you have someone physically supervising them.
Yes, some number of people cheat, and yes, it sucks. The catch is that there's only so much that can be done, and the vast majority of players don't cheat anyway.
If people's lives or livelihoods were at stake it would be one thing. As it is, all that's at stake are some people's pride. I don't have much of that, so I just don't care a lot :)
#12 we all played at the event and spent a fair amount of time at it. in the end i guess you take it as seriously as you want to, though it's probably not very healthy to take it too seriously :D
So you don't believe there are any examples of a strong player without an OTB rating? It is not fair to require such credentials from players.
Sure those players exist, but they are an extreme rarity to say the least. In 2008, at a peak, there were 1,192 GMs and 2,916 IMs, making a total of 4,108 combined. With over 7 billion people in the world, that comes out to .000058% of the world population. Now if you just want to look at the number of chess players, estimated to be 605,000,000 by FIDE, it comes out to .00068%. That's the percent of the chess population with a FIDE rating of over 2400.
The point being that even if someone did not have an OTB rating, achieving that level of chess mastery is so unlikely that it would be far more plausible by Occam's razor to assume they're using computer assistance.
Given this, it doesn't seem unreasonable to ask for credentials. This could even mean having them list accounts they use to play at other chess sites, if they really have never played in an OTB tournament before.
But to think that someone has never played officially over the board, never played on any other sites, made an account for the first time a few weeks ago, and now has around a 2400 rating is unbelievable.
Yeah, I absolutely agree that cheaters exist and cheaters will continue to exist, especially at the highest levels of play. That's the point. If you're getting trophies and the like that you aren't earning, then you deserve to be investigated. If you're in the top 5 or top 10 of a tournament in which virtually every titled player on the website is playing, and you suddenly come out of nowhere and win it, it's obviously going to raise suspicion.
I definitely agree with KC's sentiment here, that top placing winners in large scale online tournaments should be held under heavy scrutiny, awards should be held until results can be verified against investigation, particuarly when those players aren't already certified titlists performing as they usually do, especially in large online tournaments that have cash prizes.
At the very least, since lichess is not dealing solely in prizes of bragging rights at the moment, lichess should hold the results as tentative until the games of the top 3 are checked for large scale tournaments like this.
I've never seen 5 out of 10 top players from the marathon, just saying :P. But I got no suspicions against any of them.
