Don't know how long its been around or where to post this, but it seems someone has released an app, the main purpose of which is to cheat at chess on this site.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chess-cheats-for-chess.com/id457432170?mt=8

Surely the way this is advertised means something could be done about it?

Sure looks like it. Post this in the cheating forum group, and it'll get more attention.

Im posting primarily to keep this topic hot. But I think it should prove easy to weed out cheaters...

THIS is why phones are banned OTB.

I'd guess that cheating is WAY more rampant than we would dare to guess... Although I have been accused of it in chat from time to time, which is absurd as I totally stink... Chess is really best OTB... sigh...

Thanks, waller. I hope staff does something about this soon. You're a hero. These people who need a machine running at 3 billion computations a second to outplay others are disgusting.

Well I don't see that I'm a hero! And I'd like to pass along credit for spotting it to oilpig who mentioned it in a note in a group I'm in. Just trying to raise awareness. Hopefully it can be brought down. I mean, it just makes cheating ridiculously easy, literally advertising itself as an app which facilitates cheating and makes it easy as possible. Absolute disgrace being sold on such a reputable website.

The ratings here are meaningless because you never truly know if someone is cheating or not. With that in mind it's best to focus on how well you actually played a given game and not if you won/lost. We will never be able to eradicate cheating on the Internet which is why most sites openly allow engine use for correspondence chess. Whether you lost to a human or a cheater with an engine, focus on WHY you lost, learn from your mistake and you'll become a better player for it...which is more than someone letting a machine play for them can say.

Ugh, yuck.

TTT

I dont understand cheating online. You dont know, and will never meet, the person you are beating, and you can't be proud of your results since you know you are cheating, so what exactly is the benefit to this?

I'm afraid one can never understand chessplayers through simple logic...

If anything, this site has taught me many times over that chess and logical thinking are rarely if ever correlated.

Previously, I thought it was just me.

But what does the cat say?

Probably something like:  "Hey, how about worrying about a Seafood Combination for a change, huh Al?"

Wouldn't it be logical, Mr. Spock, to bring me a lousy can of tuna once in a while?

And stop that collaborating, will ya? (talk about tacky).

Actually I'm quite sure that staff is fully aware of these.

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Hope there is a way for chess.com to detect the use of this app.

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I guess they do what they always do: They take the games and run them through Rybka, Fritz, Stockfish, Houdini etc. If a player uses the computer moves all the time, he's either Kasparov or busted. 

there is no such thing as a 'lag cheat'.

lag is not related to what one does, it is related to internet connections and the time it takes packets to relay via the internet.

not controllable by humans.

doh.