Are my opponents in live chess always real?

I love chess.com.  I'm a big fan and former Diamond member for 2-3 years.  But something is bothering me lately.

I seem to get matched up in "live chess" against players who generally have a few letters at the start of their name that do not "mean" anything followed by 2-3 numbers. For example (and this is a made-up version) "Feghjos76".

They don't have a profile picture and have often played a LOT of games. Also, they never chat even when you ask a simple question and invite them to say 'something'.

Now, I wonder if these accounts are real players or perhaps fake?

If I was in chess.com's shoes, for example, few things would concern me more than the idea of having members who clicked "play" but had to wait 15, 20, 25 seconds for a match-up and grew impatient and then went off to play on a rival site where the match-ups were quicker.

#ConspiracyTheory

Interesting theory 🤔 It wouldn't surprise me if you are right.

My epic farts are definitely real.

You mean to imply that chess.com creates fake accounts to make it look like the traffic and available players are always there, and that in reality chess.com might pair you with a bot of approximately your strength?  I don't think this is the case, but people with a lot of time in their hands might create several accounts.

the names are due to the name being taken, so chess.com suggests names with numbers at the end

I can assure you I'm real, and I for one never chat. Certainly not during the game, and afterwards I usually have other things to do. For the same reason I never accept a challenge for a second game by my opponent.

mayve true,mayve not,The worst case scenario is that you feel something, but you can’t really describe it.sorry,but we just can admit we are not almighty ,admit the world , don't thinking too much about a thing that you can't prove,Unless you're the person behind Chess

just play,play

I've noticed it, maybe it's true!

Do something unpopular, like play crazyhouse 5 minute unrated or 45|45, and you see how flipping long it takes. 

Plus, you can tell when you play a bot. 

Ha, fair point binomine!

There are no bots masquerading as human.

I'm surprised at how often this sort of theory pops up. It would be an interesting topic for a psychology study.

As for names you don't understand... not everyone is a native English speaker. People also choose fictional characters, song titles, etc that they like. People will put their initials and year of birth. JDsmith78 for John Davis Smith born in 1978.

Most people don't post... there are easily fewer than 1000 active contributors on the forums, vs millions of active players. Literally 1% of 1% of people write messages.

And as for the other side of it... I've been around chess for many years. Even in the early days (e.g. FICS) there were thousands of players and the wait times were not long... there's simply no need for chess.com to have bots masquerading as human. Especially with the multiple waves of new users (COVID and Netfix's Queen's Gambit) if anything chess.com wants fewer people on their live chess servers (so the servers aren't overwhelmed).

So to summarize, there are simple explanations for odd names and unresponsive accounts, and it doesn't make sense for chess.com to run bots that pretend to be human.

Just noticed the OP has a name that uses a number as a letter.

Of course English speakers will see "Jackal" but imagine someone doing the same for Hindi.

bhed14

Could simply be wolf, the actual word being bhediya. In fact bhediya is (unsurprisingly) an account.

@bhediya

I agree. But wouldn't it be interesting if they did it just to test how often a bot will get reported? Especially, if it played at a lower rate. Just to backtest their reporting system.

I'm guessing they get... at least 10000 reports of cheating every single day, and that only 10% of those are actual cheaters.

Adding more to that volume is probably the last thing they want to do.

From what they've said, and testimony from titled players they've shown it to, their cheat detection is rigorous and state of the art.

Short of staff directly posting, if you disregard first hand knowledge mentioned about titled players seeing things, then everything is essentially speculation.