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Incorrect link trophy winner of the marathon.

It was spotted right after the end of tournament. Staff knows about that.
Just to avoid "egg on face" scenarios which seem to repeatedly occur in high profile online events (especially when cash prizes have been involved), perhaps we should give time for checking out the authenticity of the winners?! This would also serve as a clear message for potential engine abusers in future events - that they merely passed "stage 1" even if they were not expelled right during the event.

Before highlighting the winners, I really hope that the top 3 winners (or maybe even the whole top 10) need to be put under great scrutiny for engine accuracy as a matter of due course for this and other high profile events.

In fact it may be a good idea for the site to formally request their real world details - OTB rating, etc. Additionally I would like them to sign that no engine assistance was used during the event, and bring this up as a matter of potential fraud if engine abuse did occur - fraud to the other players in the event and the site as a whole.

Thanks, K
Yes, again a good idea from KC. I wasn't able to play in this tournament because of scheduling, but did try to look at the results. The fact that the winner of such a large event had just joined the site within a month seems a bit suspicious to say the least. Not to mention that he play a nearly flawless game and pull a draw with an IM.
KC, i was rooting for you, big fan :)
If that banned guy was banned earlier results could be different. I support the idea of increasing the anti-cheating measures.
Good days all.
What if one has no relevant real world details? Some players such as me play almost exclusively online and may not have any OTB rating, or may not have a remotely accurate one.
Registered 1 month before the marathon that is little bit sus[icious and didnt play anything else almost except the marathon? Must be check Voat in my opiniuon. And top 10 also .
Eh, that by itself isn't so surprising. Some good players like to have alternate accounts where their identity isn't as known. It's pretty common on ICC, for example, for a GM to have a public account and then some unknown accounts.

As for drawing the IM, it's a long tournament. Everyone has games well below their level. I even split with the IM 1-1 in the tournament. Was I cheating? No [God no!, if you see some of my games, you'll wonder how I ever won a game against anyone :)], he just had a couple bad moves. Play hundreds of games and that will happen.

If Voat were cheating, he was doing it in a way that's really hard to detect. I even managed a draw with him in our only game, but I got crushed by lixes and KC.

It's just a big tournament; there will be many surprising results. At any rate, distinguishing cheating from strong legitimate play in an online event with a time control as long as 5 0 is quite difficult, both because the quality of play of strong legitimate players goes up, and because players have time to cheat in less obvious ways.

Unfortunately in online play, the only consistent way to mitigate against cheating is to make the time controls short enough for that to be quite difficult without making it obvious (in bullet, for example, there's just not enough time to cheat without using a bot, which makes the cheating really obvious).

Of course, very short time controls are not everyone's cup of tea, so as much as i dislike it, cheating in slower online games is just something that we can only mitigate a little bit, and the possibility of clever cheating in the slower games is something we just have to live with, due to the nature of the beast.

It sucks that there are people out there who make trusting other players online problematic, but in my experience, those players are fortunately quite rare. It often seems otherwise, because they make such a big fuss when they're caught, but when you consider that thousands of players play here daily, it's really fairly uncommon for players to cheat.

Ultimately, you just have to 1) Mitigate what you can, but accept that it's always possible to cheat in slower games in ways that are impossible to detect, and/or 2) Play much faster time controls.

Sure, some people suck, but I'm not going to obsess too much about a relatively rare occurrence. I'll just play chess and have fun. If I play a cheater who crushes me (like my game against DutchPatzer), then I'll just grin, learn from the game (easy to do, since mistakes are punished ruthlessly), and move on with my life.

I play chess for fun, and worrying constantly about cheaters just isn't worth it. There are some basic measures that can be taken, and that's it. C'est la vie :)

fully agree with rated694, do we really have to take it that seriously for an event like this?
i would also like to see a bullet marathon eventually, could the server handle THAT? :D
Of course everyone isn't rated OTB. I've never played in an official tournament either. However, neither of us would be close to the top ten. KC is talking about checking credentials of players who come out on top and are crushing titled players to get there.

And sure, this may be one of his alternative accounts. That's fine. But it should be verified.

While crying cheat when you lose is poor sportsmanship, it's also a bit silly when people are so adamantly defending someone who later turns out to be exactly what they kept claiming he wasn't. Seen it happen numerous times.

For those who don't think cheating is a big problem on this site, maybe you just haven't been around here long enough. Ask the devs for the statistics on how many accounts have been flagged as using computer assistance. And those are only the ones they've managed to find.

In fact, one of the high rated players I've recently been running up against in the hourly tournaments was flagged in this past marathon. Never suspected him myself, but great work from the mods (that's assuming it wasn't a false positive).

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