Chess Cheats

As you seem perfectly cognizant of, the forums is not the place to discuss this. - CrystalMoon

Admins, before you lock this post with your usual response, please consider this - your stock reply to posts of this nature says to go to the help>report abuse and notify you there. 1) This location cannot be found on the android app. 2) now on the desktop, the report abuse section does not make it obvious what precisely you should do to report suspected cheating as the area is geared towards reporting members who have been verbally abusive. 

Please, as cheating is becoming more widespread on chess.com, make reporting easier. Making the reporting of it harder might lower your stats when compared to the other platforms, but it is only storing up problems for the future. Address it now. 

So to my complaint, I won't name names here but I'm sure anyone who desires it can probably uncover the person I suspect of using an engine.

I recently joined my local chess club and put out my username on the club WhatsApp so other members could challenge me. Soon after this I got an invite from one members whose name I recognised from the club. But I also got an invite from someone showing as being from the UK who I didn't recognise as a name from the club. I assumed they must one of the players I haven't met yet, potentially one of the juniors as they were rated as 800 in daily. I'm rated 1600 in daily. 

I was playing a number of games at the time so I didn't pay too much attention to the 800 player. They were not talking in the chat and were just playing normal moves. They were playing normal moves until they starting putting together combinations that were much more advanced than their rating would suggest. 

I put game through Stockfish. By move 17 my lowly-rated opponent had played the best possible move 8 times and was crushing me. His other moves were fairly decent too, just not the best possible. By contrast, I played the best possible move 4 times. In short, he was playing at easily 1600 level and probably a fair bit higher. 

They are either a much better player playing on a low account, for what reason? to catch players napping who do not give due consideration to moves against someone so much lower than themselves? hardly a worthwhile thing to do but I wouldn't put it past some people. The other thing is that the low-rated player is using an engine to select strong moves and get wins. 

This particular player has won his last 10 in a row... I wonder how he is managing that huh?