Chess Pro Explains How to Spot Cheaters

That move is so ridiculous.

Only a bot would play that.

A human would never play the move queen to D5.

[Narrator] Because that move would be totally risky

and counterintuitive.

A computer, they will sacrifice a queen,

something that traditionally humans don't do

because they're risk averse.

[Narrator] But since Levy's opponent is using AI to cheat,

it's all part of a trap that leads to checkmate.

Guys playing like Magnus Carlson on Adderall.

[Narrator] In the wake of the recent

chess cheating scandal,

Wired asked chess YouTuber, Levy Rozman the question.

How in earth do you actually cheat at chess?

[Narrator] And how can you actually spot a chess cheater?

If I had to describe cheating in chess in one sentence,

it would be the act of receiving external assistance

most often in the form of a chess computer

to tell you all the best moves in the game

that you're playing.

[Narrator] During the more than 25 years

since Deep Blue Beat Gary Kasparov,

AI chess engines have evolved to be way better than humans

at the Royal game.

I once lost to a treadmill at a hotel

because the chess computer they programmed was so good.

[Narrator] Top chess engines like Houdini, Revenge

or Stockfish can run on an iPhone.

If you let Stockfish, the best chess computer in the world

analyze a game from start to finish,

we can trust it to say what the best moves are

throughout the game.

Far more accurately than any human could ever come up with.

[Narrator] So basically all chess cheaters today

are somehow accessing an AI analysis board during a game

and therefore know all the best moves to make

in each position.

But how can you tell if someone is cheating in person

at a chess tournament?

Now, I've played hundreds of chess tournaments in my life

only been suspicious of a handful of players

and generally it's a mix of a few things.

You have an opponent that seems extremely distracted,

maybe a little bit too jittery, looking around a lot,

or leaving the board when it's their move.

[Narrator] With all eyes on them,

how do cheaters access an analysis board?

One of the most common methods to do this

is to go to the bathroom

but our cheater has left a cell somewhere hidden

in the stall, and during their game,

they will go input the same exact moves of the game

that they were playing into that smartphone

and the smartphone will tell them the answer.

Then they will go back to the game

and repeat this process multiple times until they win.

[Narrator] In 2019, Latvian Grandmaster, Igors Rausis,

was caught red-handed on the toilet studying an iPhone

he had secretly stashed behind a bathroom tile.

But there are other examples

of cheaters that use accomplices to relay the best moves

to them.

Most elite chess tournaments have a board called a DGT,

where every single piece is connected to a magnetic field,

and every time a move is made, let's say like this,

the board itself is connected to a computer.

So that move will now register on the DGT

and go out to a live broadcast.

[Narrator] So in this scenario, one of the spectators,

miles away in the comfort of home is accomplice number one,

who plugs the game into their engine and sends a text

with one to three characters to someone at the tournament.

In fact, that's what happened in 2010.

First, there was 20 year old Sebastian Feller

playing the game.

Then there was the person watching the game

and using the computer.

There was also a middle man.

That middle man would stand in the tournament hall,

in a certain location depending on what the person watching

the game would say.

[Narrator] The middle man might go stand

in the northwest corner of the room

or the left side of the stage,

depending on the suggestions he was being relayed.

They basically had a pre-programmed compass

of the room where one side meant one thing

and maybe a certain position meant what square, what piece

and so on.

[Narrator] But what if spectators

aren't allowed at a tournament?

A chess player could theoretically

bring a vibrating device in their shoe, under their arm,

attached to their chest into the playing hall.

Now, some tournaments have metal detectors and scanners,

but if you walk in through an airport style metal detector

in a chest tournament playing hall,

there isn't a guarantee that it'll pick up

on a small transmittable device that you're hiding

under your armpit.

[Narrator] In 2013, Borislav Ivanov was disqualified

under the suspicion of using a device in a shoe

that received vibrations, either in Morse code

or some sort of coded sequence.

But what about other vibrating devices?

One of the biggest memes to hit the internet

as it pertains to chess

over the last few weeks has been anal beads.

It became a copy pasta on Reddit.

Then Elon Musk retweeted it, and it got way too big,

to the point that people actually think it happened.

Now, theoretically, if we are talking about a device

that can relay chest moves to you by vibration,

I'm sure if it can go into your shoe,

it can go into other places,

but I don't think that's what was happening in this case.

[Narrator] But what if you're using a simple board,

not a DTG board and the game is not being streamed

or simulcast anywhere online?

Well, some folks have shown up to games

with little watches that have a camera inside of them,

so they hover the camera over the board

but they still need to have somebody relaying the moves

into their ear or maybe some sort of other device.

Well, those people might have tried to wear an earpiece,

which is another common method,

especially one that you can dig deep into your ear canal.

[Narrator] Sounds like cheating over the board

at a tournament is hard and rare,

but cheating in chess online is rampant,

and the first place to spot a cheater, say on chess.com,

is by studying their online profile.

Look at the age of the account, a lot of cheaters

have an account that's maybe a couple of weeks

or a month old.

So here's a profile with a couple of red flags already.

It was created 48 hours ago.

So the biggest red flag in my eyes is the win rate.

Most people win about 45 to 55% of the games that they play.

I myself win about 60% of my games.

So if someone's winning 75, 80, 90%, something's not right.

[Narrator] The next red flag is that cheaters

have a high accuracy score,

a metric calculated by the website you're playing on

that compares your play to the best chess computer.

I'm looking at an account right now

that was made literally yesterday,

got to play only six games, but because the average accuracy

of their game was 97, 98, 99,

93, 95, 96, even the best chess players

in the world can't do that consistently.

[Narrator] Another red flag

is that a suspected cheater might be beating players

with a higher ELO score, a metric from 100 to 3000

or so used to determine your ranking in chess.

It's like if they're rating or their ELO is 1000,

they're just clobbering people who are 2000,

might have been playing the game for decades.

How many rating points have they gained

over the last seven days?

Oh wow, they've gained 900.

Oh, that seems a little bit suspicious.

That's just really not how people grow at the game.

[Narrator] When Levy suspects someone's cheating online,

he'll watch them play a game,

turning on his own local chess engine,

which will evaluate the current position

and tell him what the best moves are.

When you watch someone who you suspect of cheating,

they will most likely make moves that match that first

and second line, sometimes the third line as well,

of your local chess computer.

It doesn't matter what engine they use

and what engine you use,

95% of the time the moves will match up.

Another giveaway sign that somebody is cheating

while they play a game is the fact that they take

a consistent amount of time on every single move.

You might say,

well, they're just thinking about their moves.

But no, it always falls into a range.

Let's say a person makes their move between five

and eight seconds every single time.

That's strange, why?

Because if you think about it, that is the process

of watching the move happen on the board, relaying it

to an analysis board, seeing what that computer tells you

and then coming back

and where this looks really funny is when cheaters

don't realize that they have one legal move.

Let's say their king is in danger, they're in a check,

they can just block the check, they have no other option,

but they don't know that 'cause they don't know

how to play chess.

[Narrator] But apart from these red flags,

is it possible to tell if someone is cheating

from the unusual or bot like moves they make?

Sometimes the dumbest move in a position

is actually the top computer move.

[dramatic music]

Some moves are human moves and some moves are AI moves.

I would consider a move not human

and something that only a bot would play

if it breaks principles of chess entirely.

They will sacrifice a pawn, a knight, a bishop, a rook,

a queen, something that traditionally humans don't do

because they're risk averse.

Computers will because they do see the future better

than any human and they don't have any emotions.

A computer just finds the best plans.

The best grand masters in the world only evaluate

the position about two or three moves in,

but the computer finds that final act

and I can show you exactly what I'm talking about.

So take this position for example.

Here, a cheater was playing with the white pieces.

A human here might retreat the queen.

A computer instead finds this move, knight to G5, check.

If the queen goes to either of these two squares,

the queen will get captured.

Here, white plays the move queen to D5.

Yes, you can take the queen but if you take the queen,

it's basically checkmate because these two bishops

laser beamed the king in the corner.

So here the cheater with white sacrificed a knight

to lead the attack forward once again

and then white sacrificed a queen for basically nothing.

White gave away a queen for one pawn,

and that led to the devastation of the black king.

White sacrificed multiple pieces to even get to this point

with no guarantee of victory at all.

But when you're in AI, the victory is guaranteed

because you have seen the future to that extent.

[Narrator] That was an example of a sacrifice

that to a human mind felt like a mistake,

a seemingly counterintuitive idea,

but not to a chess computer running tons of outcomes

and finding a way to get the king.

No human in history has ever played a sequence

of moves like that.

[Narrator] So why do people cheat at chess?

People cheat in chess for a variety of different reasons.

Obviously, if there's prizes involved,

that's extremely incentivizing.

When you're sitting in the comfort of your own home,

and it's just you and a screen, it's much more impersonal

and the cloak of anonymity makes people empowered

to sometimes do bad things.

You might literally be playing a chess prodigy

from halfway across the world who nobody's ever heard of,

but the chance of that happening is very, very unlikely.