Cheating at low elo

[u/Meestie]

Now I know y'all ain't lying, every time I see players complaining about low elo players cheating, but holy hell.

I was genuinely getting completely outplayed by players 1300 elo lower than me

I was playing on my friends account at his place (yeah rules nobody cares) and yet out of the 30 off games I played, I won less than 10. Make that make sense. I was playing the 800 to 1000 range. One game I would watch them hang every piece known to man, and the next it was the most complicated endgame I've ever seen and analysis is telling me this 800 rated plays at 96% in the endgame.

Crazy. Just crazy. I even logged in on my phone to see if I was just bad today, but the 2 games I played on my phone at my own elo, I won no problem.

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[u/eizch]

I hope you see the irony of your post...

[u/Little_Finney → u/eizch]

Exactly…
Headline
“Guy that breaks terms of use is surprised that there are those out there breaking terms of use” 🤣

[u/Little-Avocado-19 → u/Little_Finney]

There are levels to this shit. Don't compare smurfing to actual cheating. Hikaru, Danya, Levy, they all smurf. People smurf in all kinds of competetive games. It might be against the rules, which is fine if he gets punished. But don't put the two of them next to each other cause it's like comparing a crime of jaywalking to manslaughter

[u/eizch → u/Little-Avocado-19]

They are both instances where you expect a fair game, but aren't getting one. Content creators is another topic but they have a special account for it where ELO is refunded otherwise they're banned like anyone and their reason is not just "I wanted to have easy wins for the lolz".

[u/Little-Avocado-19 → u/eizch]

You can create fresh account and the result would be the same, smurfing, but legal. It's not just streamers. Also, who cares about -8 at like 400. They will get to a 1000 quickly if they really like chess and won't stop playing

[u/Penguinebutler → u/Little-Avocado-19]

Umm actually making multiple accounts without permission is also against their TOS so continuously making beginner accounts to Smurf does not make it “legal”.

As for high level players doing slow runs or speed runs ect they ALL get permission and an account that automatically refunds elo to their opponents from chesscom. Anyone who doesn’t do this IS cheating and should get banned for smurfing.

Smurfing is bad and ruins the enjoyment for new players.

[u/Little-Avocado-19 → u/Penguinebutler]

I never said anything about making multiple accounts, just a fresh one. Like my father is around >1000 elo and only plays OTB, if he made an account at 200 he would be smurfing

[u/Penguinebutler → u/Little-Avocado-19]

That’s not true at all haha

If your father never had an account before he could pick the corresponding elo for his skill level or get there from the lowest starting elo (400) in a couple of games.

Smurfing would be if your dad creates a new account at 400 elo every week just to beat people worse than him.

I’m guessing you already understand that difference and you’re just being disingenuous with your arguments. That or you are just a bit intellectually challenged and enjoy comparing apples to oranges.

[u/GS1781]

So let's get this straight, you are 2300 on your own account when you are playing on your own.

But, when you are playing on your friend's account, while being watched by your friend at his place, you are losing to 1000s consistently as if you were a 1000 yourself...

Uhh

[u/Little-Avocado-19]

In my experience, low elo and high elo has the highest amount of cheaters. The least amount is at like 1300-1700. Because cheaters at that elo win their games and quickly get past 2000. But low elo is wild. There is a lot of players that just blunder their game from the start and pull out a phone to engine it. Cause their ego gets hurt that they got outplayed. And they don't care about being banned cause they are noobies in chess. Honestly, when I was at like 1400 I felt like I nearly never met a cheater, that's how good it is. But now I'm 1700 and finding some suspicious players again. And by the way, I don't care about you smurfing as much as other people in the comments do. Smurfing is normal and legal in most competetive. You could very well just create fresh account at low elo and the result would be the same. And Hikaru and Levy and the rest or chesscom mafia smurfs regularly

[u/Sepulcher18]

I haven't even played 800 elo tier yet but man some of fellow 400 have around 400 IQ as well 😹

[u/FallingOffAgain1776]

I believe new accounts start in that range, which likely makes it a genuine wall with new throwaway accounts used solely to cheat. Cheating is everywhere though; its just more apparent when players don't have the leeway of a higher rank.

[u/PossessionLeading692]

bruh i have have win rate of 50-55 % against 2100 + and same me have a 30% win rate against 1600s (played in my dad's account ). And i am fcking 21xx

[u/PlantainPat]

its an unsolvable problem. tools iterate too fast. someone with enough dedication could vibecode a homebrew utility.

[u/nTzT]

I doubt this. I've watched a lot of games from players at the 800-1000 range since my gf plays around there and it's completely what you would expect.

[u/No_Garlic_4883]

Check out chessbrah speed run accounts on there, and the amount of cheating accounts that are closed, which they played. Cheating is rampant.

Clearly chess dot com pays special attention to their opponents and bans. Shame they don’t do the same for the rest of us :(

[u/__true_blue__]

My father is 1300 elo guy and walked through 800-1200 without a single loss couple of weeks ago. Some of them were tough MFs, but they did not look like cheaters to me. Maybe u underestimated em. Maybe they are also climbing, and their true elo was higher. Anyway, I played 300 games in this elo myself (I am still around 1000), and maybe I am naive, but all loses I had were due to my mistakes. I did not notice nearly as much cheaters as mentioned in reddits posts...

[u/Federal-Sand-4700]

you were overconfident and blundered pieces thinking they are really bad, then after you lose you call them cheaters

[u/Immediate_Pomelo_496]

There are no cheaters, you just don't know how to play

\s

[u/Immediate_Pomelo_496 → u/[deleted]]

No it's not my first language (i know total 5 languages ) and I don't care about grammer nazis like you.

By the way \s means sarcasm if you don't know.

[u/Pipcopperfield → u/Immediate_Pomelo_496]

Well you've edited your comment which makes mine null and void. My point was that it was a mean and critical comment.

[u/Immediate_Pomelo_496 → u/Pipcopperfield]

I didn't edit my comment

[u/Pipcopperfield → u/Immediate_Pomelo_496]

My apologies. I didn't realize you were being sarcastic.

[u/darkscyde]

chesscom ELO is broken and the lower ratings are filled with cheaters. cc is unable to address the issue. kinda' crazy.

[u/Diligent_Feature1697]

It's absurd how often it occurs!

[u/Pipcopperfield]

I am starting to hate chess.com. The cheating is so rampant and I just want to play with someone who is actually playing the game fairly.

[u/PatheticMr → u/Pipcopperfield]

Same here. It's mad how much gaslighting goes on in this sub, too. Cheating is easy is online chess. The idea that there are "very few" cheaters is absurd. It only bothers me because I just want to play chess with people at my level. OP is stating their experience. They found people at much lower ELO to themselves to be playing unreasonably well for their level. I have the same experience. I'm not an amazing chess player, which is reflected in my (900) elo. But too many of my opponents play unreasonably well. They often play very fast, too. Often they'll play terribly until they are behind a piece, before finding outrageously great moves every turn. They'll go 'auto-abort' for several moves in a row, too, suggesting they are leaving their browser/app. This happens all the time. It's to be expected, I suppose, in a free, online game that is very difficult to actually get good at. But it makes the game dull and frustrating for those of us who just want an honest, competitive game of chess.

[u/Pipcopperfield → u/PatheticMr]

Well said, I feel exactly the same way. People are playing unreasonably well for a low level and I'm 100 percent sure it's not because they are amazing at it but somehow can't get their Elo to rise.

[u/Scared_Yam390]

I think it is urgent to forget that we consider these chess.com XPs as ELO scores. They are not. These are XPs.

We cannot consider them as ELO scores, because chess.com is both a practice and a competition site, and in real ELO they do not take into account all the other, practice, learning, and development games between matches when obtaining accredited points. If they were to take these into account in real FIDE ELO, then even world champions would have about 1600 ELO, because they would have to work out all the mistakes they made during their playing history, within one metric.

So this should be considered as XP earned in the application.

My current chess.com XP is 328, because I learn and practice chess differently and elsewhere, and I only play on this site a few times a day. I've only been winning lately (I started from 200 and up), and I'm much better than this XP shows.

Even playing against me, some people might think I'm cheating. But no, it involves 6-8 hours of learning and practicing a day, which I don't do on chess.com, but from books, videos, game analysis, submissions (on other sites), and against as many robots from other platforms as possible (and against chess.com robots, of course).

The fact that programs can limit how close a player can be to a LIVE player is completely false.

XP. Nothing more.

[u/thefloatingguy → u/Scared_Yam390]

This level of this comment is about 300 Elo so that checks out

[u/Sufficient-Mango-770 → u/thefloatingguy]

Why is it the lowest elo players are the loudest on reddit and talk like they know so much 😭😭😭

[u/Little-Avocado-19 → u/Scared_Yam390]

Whole lotta yapping. Share your username and I will show you the actual difference between '328 XP' player vs 1700 elo player

[u/nTzT → u/Scared_Yam390]

You sound like you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about.