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Hallie Ayres
Contributing Writer

Throughout 2020, the number of online chess platform users surged, in part because professional players were forced online due to social distancing restrictions that made in-person tournaments impossible, but also because of a horde of novice players who discovered chess as a new quarantine hobby. This vast swath of players only increased after the release of Netflix’s popular limited series “The Queen’s Gambit,” which tells the story of a young woman facing off against much older masters.

According to the Guardian, Chess.com, the largest of the online chess platforms, tallied 12 million new users this year, up from 6.5 million new users in 2019. Along with all the new users, however, site administrators noticed a spike in suspicious gaming activity, prompting investigations with chess and legal experts, as well as computer scientists, to monitor gameplay patterns that may hint at a player using a computer program for assistance in their matches. In comparison to 2019, when nearly 6,000 users each month were banned from Chess.com due to cheating infractions, the site logged almost 17,000 accounts banned due to cheating in August of 2020 alone.

How to curb cheating in chess

Chess has long been a hotbed of suspected cheating scandals, with players using tactics ranging from:

Hidden earpieces connected to distant consultants playing along with supercomputers
Players leaving gameplay to consult software on their cellphones during bathroom breaks
Purposefully playing poorly in order to win prize money from a lower-tier bracket
Betting with opponents on a certain outcome and then privately splitting prize money
Using people planted in the audience to convey signals throughout the match

In live tournaments, players must now comply with rules that include going through metal detectors, having their phones confiscated before entering the tournament, and facing searches of clothing and bags.

With the onset of digital gameplay, players have been charged with creating fake accounts to play against in order to boost their own ranking, and scandals involving the use of supercomputers during gameplay have become much more common. But the typical in-person tactics to avoid cheating are not effective when players are sitting in their own homes without supervision by tournament officials.

Where there’s money, there’s an opportunity for fraud

To combat online cheating, tournaments have now enforced rules that compel players to maintain honest gameplay. For example, players may be required to:

Grant remote access to their devices
Be recorded by a number of cameras set up in their rooms
Have an official watch them in their home during the match
Not be allowed to take breaks during gameplay

Since Chess.com hosts tournaments with monetary prizes, the site has poured significant effort into curbing cheating tactics by using statistics to track irregular moves within gameplay. Kenneth Regan, a computer scientist and expert chess player, devised a model now used by the International Chess Federation (FIDE) to detect patterns that may allude to the use of cheating software. “The pandemic has brought me as much work in a single day as I have had in a year previously,” he told the Guardian.

FIDE President, Arkady Dvorkovich, speaking at an online chess event in July, said “Chess is still suffering because of fraud… There is no real doping in chess, but there is computer doping that hits us. Fighting it is one of the priority tasks for FIDE.”

As more business continues to be conducted online as a result of the shift to virtual systems that was brought about by the pandemic, Dvorkovich’s sentiments apply for fraud examiners across the board — not just the chess board! While the tips offered above focus on cheating in online games, it’s crucial to remember that any exposed weaknesses in online systems, whether exploited by chess players or by bonafide scammers, are important lessons to be learned and applied in all aspects of the anti-fraud profession.

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