It's not a hack or a sly tactic. It's lag. Most likely what happened was that your opponent was suffering extreme server lag and he played the move but took a long time for it transfer across the servers to your side.
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Schachgeek wrote:
Not all players who have a laggy connection are intentionally manipulating it to their advantage, but...yes, there are ways to cheat the clock in this manner.
There's really little to no advantage to introducing lag intentionally, and any extra time you might introduce through fortuitous timing will also be received by your opponent:
If you introduce it during your turn your clock will continue to count down.
If you introducte it during your opponent's turn, their clock will continue to count down, but it would have done so anyway.
If you introduce it during your opponent's turn but don't turn it back on until after they've submitted their move your clock will have started to count down on their computer but not yet on yours. That said, you won't see their move until you turn it back on so your extra thinking time will be spent on the position before their move. Not that your opponent will also get the extra time.
If you introduce it during your turn you won't be able to turn it back on after you've submitted your move because you won't be able to submit your move so this is basically the first case.
If lag correction is implemented properly there's just no advantage to intentionally introducing lag in a turn based game like chess.
If it's possible to use lag on the connection to your advantage, I would love to know how. I have certainly not figured it out yet, and here I was thinking that it was a distinct disadvantage.
I'm not saying people don't try it, but there's little to no real advantage to doing so.
As I've said previously, so long as the lag correction is implemented correctly then for every second you see added to your opponent's clock, your opponent sees one added to yours. That's because the lag correction is for the round trip, not the one way connection and you and your opponent simply measure it from different start and stop points during that trip -- effectively from the point your submit your move to the point you receive notification of his (and your opponent the same, only from his perspective).
I started to continue down a different line of thought in this post but realized I'd stumbled across a way in which one could potentially cheat in this manner and this may in fact be what you're seeing. It's not exactly what we're discussing here and I'm not going to post it for rather obvious reasons.
i thought i was involved in a fifteen minute match with my opponent on 20 seconds and me on 4 minutes so i didn't play my best moves; was just running the clock down and then -pfff- out of the blue more 'magic' time starts appearing on his clock. What's all that about? Either it's a 15 minute game or it isn't. That's really sly. How did he wangle that? I think that's sneaky. It's not clear in the codings.