So true! I can reach 1500 almost 1600 when not connected to my WiFi, but as soon as I connect I go down to 1350, all loses on time. Several times with an “advantage” in time of 10-15 seconds to 0 in the blink of an eye.
I do believe that the cheaters found a way to mess up with the clocks or got very proficient at abusing lag advantage. There are several games I lost within 1 move to checkmate, so annoying!
Time Cheating on Chess.com
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behappyhavejoy wrote:
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.
Timestamps show how much time was taken for each move played. But remember that we're are all in different countries. Your connection hypothetically 1Gig. and you live around the corner from where the server is. Your effective time per/move is 0.001 Sec -- Virtually no lag. Your opponent lives in the last Schack before mount Everest. He is powering his connection via wood burner. His time to the server is 2.5 secs. Your 1/0 game depending on the moves will be close to over two minutes. You will be able to build a replica of the China - Wall on matchsticks while you wait for your opponents moves.
There are no favours of disfavours only the time response to the server.
We could discuss why Chess.com allows players with poor internet but that's just Socialism and economics. If my man wood burner is paying then so be it. What you perceive as cheating it's only the shortcomings of the system.
Hyperboles used only to dramatize an nothing else.
Nov 6, 2023
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#24
this happend today .. but i know this and rating runs down if cheaters are around .. (i feel uncomfortable, but go on and do,nt care about rating) if time.cheaters are around , regular players seem to leave. there are times, where is more concentration of them and they have different abilities or different techniques. #time of opponent jumps back from 38 to 50 sec. for example. #your time jumps down from 17 to 7 sec. for example. ...yes it happens .. use sreen.grabber for documentation, if you like. it happens .. but for me it,s ok. but if it,s to much it can make feel uncomfortable and people leave for other app (perhaps there same) gg and nice day
Nov 9, 2023
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#25
Any programmer will tell you it's possible to time hack, and there may well be players who do it - but I don't think it's anywhere near as prevalent as some make out.
Nov 9, 2023
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#26
deeted wrote:
Any programmer will tell you it's possible to time hack, and there may well be players who do it - but I don't think it's anywhere near as prevalent as some make out.
The server keeps the official clocks so in order to modify them, the server would need to be compromised.
maybe only people with similar connection should be matched together that would solve the problem.
Nov 22, 2023
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#28
Negativecharge wrote:
maybe only people with similar connection should be matched together that would solve the problem.
There is an attempt to not pair high lag players with low lag in the random pools. However, lag can happen at any time and isn't always consistent, so can happen during the game.
Jan 10, 2024
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#29
PogosBest wrote:
No such thing as Time cheating
The only type of thing interfering with time that would get your account closed is stalling. For those who don't know, Stalling violates the community guidelines. Stalling is waiting until the last second of the clock to make a move, which can annoy or upset members. There is something called Vacation abuse. Vacation abuse in daily games is when you are losing and you want to lose as late as possible, You enable vacation mode and wait till the last second to move. Rarely, This can also happen with winning the game. This is considered disrespectful, related to sandbagging but Daily chess, and can get your account closed, even in unrated games! Premoves don't get your account closed, it is necessary in bullet and blitz games, or if you want to move quickly. Beginners in bullet games accusing you of time cheating may be bewildered that premoves exist, or they might have been trying to rattle you. You should immediately report or/and block him/her. Premoves usually take 0.1 seconds, but there have been cases where they have been shorter or longer.
Feb 29, 2024
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#30
This issue is quite real and not your imagination - it's chess.com's implementation of "timestamp" (though its likely much more convoluted than that) , and since it's closed source, good luck fixing it. The best server for fair play was ICC, but that went the way of the dinosaurs decades ago.
As others have mentioned, you can try a VPN and switch countries - it's worth a shot.
If youre feeling particularly bored and actually want to help the chess.com developers, maybe implement something like nVidia's reflex analyzer and post the results on system latency on chess.com vs other servers like lichess.
Feb 29, 2024
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#31
spamsky wrote:
This issue is quite real and not your imagination - it's chess.com's implementation of "timestamp" (though its likely much more convoluted than that) , and since it's closed source, good luck fixing it. The best server for fair play was ICC, but that went the way of the dinosaurs decades ago.
As others have mentioned, you can try a VPN and switch countries - it's worth a shot.
If youre feeling particularly bored and actually want to help the chess.com developers, maybe implement something like nVidia's reflex analyzer and post the results on system latency on chess.com vs other servers like lichess.
The site does not trust the client side clocks. The server tracks the official clocks and will apply some changes based on the lag compensation algorithm.
https://support.chess.com/article/423-why-did-the-clock-times-suddenly-change-the-clocks-seem-broken
Feb 29, 2024
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#32
how does one "time cheat" on chess? who have you been playing chess against? Dio?
With a TARDIS. I've been playing Doctor Who.
in before the lock
If you don't stop pretending this is a not problem, I and other people would just be encouraged to record it happening and post it on YouTube. That's easy enough to do to prove it. I don't know if time cheating is enough of a problem to encourage people to leave and go elsewhere, but it certainly enough to prove there's a problem.
Maybe it's not deliberate and it's not a hack. Maybe it's a problem in the code, the part that handles lag. The method could be trusting the users move and time info. But if the user sends invalid time the server uses it's own clock but decrements from the wrong user (i.e. the current move instead of the invalid previous move). Hack, or garbage code, either way it's a problem.
May 20, 2024
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#38
S0ulMate wrote:
Maybe it's not deliberate and it's not a hack. Maybe it's a problem in the code, the part that handles lag. The method could be trusting the users move and time info. But if the user sends invalid time the server uses it's own clock but decrements from the wrong user (i.e. the current move instead of the invalid previous move). Hack, or garbage code, either way it's a problem.
The server keeps the official clocks and handles clock updates based on that and the allowed lag. Nothing about the client clocks are used as far as I'm aware.
It's also highly unlikely that the clock adjustments are applied to the wrong player as well.
You have access to the source code? You have NEVER seen this problem despite hundreds of reports of the problem??
May 20, 2024
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#40
S0ulMate wrote:
You have access to the source code? You have NEVER seen this problem despite hundreds of reports of the problem??
I have seen plenty of reports and the vast majority of them are directly attributable to how the site handles lag and lag compensation.
And the developers have access to the code and while bugs certainly are possible, a major long term problem with the clocks is highly unlikely as they know what they're doing.
@behappyhavejoy - if you or I were Magnus or Hikaru, we´d have reason to worry about lag. But with our Bullet ratings, I suspect that there could be other more major factors causing us not to win as often as we think we deserve to. I shan´t start worrying about lag until I reach 2000+ in Bullet and Blitz (which is never gonna happen).