Time Cheating on Chess.com

There have been many posts about cheating the clock, especially in short time games like bullet and blitz chess. Posters swear it is happening, and then their dog piled by responders who claim it is impossible and that it is just due to server lag and premoves. Make no mistake, through simple testing and experience, there are players who knowingly or unknowingly are able to use server lag to their advantage. Server lag favors those in certain countries when playing against a player in another country because of the number of jumps and servers that one player's moves have to go through to get to chess.com's servers. Even in my case, where I have gigabit internet service, when I am playing on my phone, I have to disconnect from my ultrafast Wi-Fi connection and use my phone's much slower cellular data signal, or I get killed every time on time. In the thousands of games I've played, what I often experience, especially in bullet chess, is that the 10 second warning will not even register on my device, The other player will move, and my clock will instantly jump from + 10 seconds down to 0 seconds and whatever move I had attempted to pre-move gets taken back and I have lost on time. On the flip side, I have seen this happen to other players where they have more time than me and then all of a sudden their time is at zero and I have just suddenly won. when you play bullet chess you can count the seconds in your head or out loud and they never match the last 10 seconds of the game.

https://support.chess.com/article/4720-online-chess-performance-optimizations

https://support.chess.com/article/213-how-do-i-fix-my-disconnect-lag-issues

https://support.chess.com/article/423-why-did-the-clock-times-suddenly-change-the-clocks-seem-broken

sounds like...

skill issue

No such thing as time cheating

There is a much bigger issue though....paragraph stealing. I think the OP is a victim.

Look at all the responses already doing exactly what I said they would do. It's like a bunch of chess.com bots or something.

There are a number of things that impact clocks and lag. Once that's understood along with how the site handles those things, what is being seen with the clocks for some members is expected.

Unfortunately, remote communications are not instantaneous and are influenced by a lot of things, many outside the site's control. The only things the site can influence are the robustness of the code, the site connectivity, and how to handle lag and disconnects.

The site could allow all lag, count all lag against the lagging connections, or compensate for it in some manner. The site has chosen the latter method, allowings some lag, but not all. That means there will be cases where it appears there are clock issues

The compensation would explain why I have to increase my lag in order to fairly compete against opponents in laggy countries. If I am using my gigabit internet service, the lag compensation unfairly penalizes me and surprises me at the end of the game.

in before za lock!

All lag is treated equally. Players with higher lag don't get more forgiveness.

Not "time cheating", just "house has bad internet".

Nobody cheats time.

You could cheat time by doing planks in real life (not related to chess anymore)

Not sure how you can say no one beats time when I just explained above how I myself can improve my win/loss rate by switching to a slower speed connection.

The live server would need to be hacked to do that. While it may be technically possible, there is very little chance that it's happened and that it's well enough known to be impacting many games. I'm fairly confident it isn't happening at all and the reasons given by the site (and the way the internet works) are the real reason of seen clock issues.

Whenever I win, it is due to skill. Whenever I lose, my opponent cheated.

The faster you move, the slower your time.

Ive had premoves take several seconds…

Of performed several empirical studies and definitely can confirm that bullet chess is the crapshoot when it comes to time on the clock. One interesting thing, is that the time cheating issue somehow favors me over anyone from the UK, and disfavors me when I am playing Germany or New Zealand. Go figure.

I also just had a game and take a screenshot of it showing that both me and my opponent's clocks were at ultimate zero, yet somehow I lost. And my clock did not say zero when my opponent took the last move. So it suddenly skipped to zero while he was taking his move.

The client clocks are estimates of time. The server holds the official clocks and will update the clocks after each move, though at game end, that may not happen. Games in the archives will show the official times.