Chess Engineer

[Rosette Allaband]

Idon't see how you could detect someone cheating online. When I lose I just look back to see where I went wrong, usually it's obvious before the game is over. To actually accuse someone of cheating when you can't prove it is just redundant. There's no money involved here so it really doesn't matter anyway. Whoever is cheating to win knows they're not really winning no matter what their rating says. As for Fritz, it's a tool for learning the game, I play against it all the time to sharpen my game and to store my completed games, whether online or not. I think its amazing that I can look back on a game I played 5 years ago and remember being in that exact position. I might use Fritz to help me figure out what I should have done after the fact, but only if I can't figure it out for myself. That's what it's for. I'd prefer to ask Kasparov but thats not an option. Plus if you get beat by a human, a computer, or a dog, there are lessons there to be learned, ultimately it makes you a stronger player. You learn and grow but the cheat doesn't.

I thought there are tools for catching cheats. How do ICC, Playchess etc detect if you are using an engine? I'm not saying we blindly accuse anyone, there must be telltale signs of engine use in ther games.

Yes if they are running software on the same computer I guess your right there ought to be some way of finding out, whether that violates privacy or what I don't know. Then again there's nothing to stop someone using another computer to run their engine. I can't get to grips with why anyone would want to cheat in the first place. A friend of mine did that to me about a year ago when he thought I wasn't looking. I didn't mention it because he screwed up his position even more by cheating. LOL. So did he cheat me or did I cheat him? I guess he cheated himself. I often wonder how he'd justify the win had the game went in his favour as a result of cheating.

Some interesting info has been posted on my blog about some engineers and how one of them has not lost to people banned for engine use - he must be using a stronger engine then. There are also examples of from "zero to hero" chess experiances, how do you become that strong without assistance?

Chess engineers must view online Chess as sort of impersonal and figure its ok to cheat if its improving their game and nobody knows about it. Other than self improvement I can't see the point to doing it. I don't think its about ratings or winning games or tournaments. Outside of professional Chess ratings don't seem to mean much.

I mean if there's a really strong player who finds himself in a position that's a bit out of his depth, can't decide what is the best move, he may consult the software for a 2nd opinion. If he takes the advice of the software then he is cheating.

Chess requires calculating moves and using logic. That is basically mathematics. Engineering is based mostly on mathematics. Also teaching requires some sort of initiative and you have to be able to handle the situation no matter how hard it gets, just like an important chess game.

For those with mentally demanding jobs, how do you manage to play/study chess after work? I am a software engineer and I'm deep thinking pretty much all day long at work. I feel mentally exhausted after work, but I would like to play chess. What are strategies I can adopt?

I was in that situation. The only solution is to look for a better job. For example, you can work for the government. Maybe you will make less money, but you will have an increase in your quality of life.

A chess activity that is very flexible is solving chess puzzles. You can have the chess puzzle on a chess board or on your computer permanently and see it when you have time. You can do it once a month, or one a week, or one a day, depending on your schedule.

Besides solving chess puzzles, another option is correspondence chess on Lichess 1 move per day (Lichess does not allow the use of chess engines). You only need to do 1 move every 24 hours. However, play only one game. I do correspondence chess. It is fantastic for learning. I have the game open in my computer all the day. I see it when I have nothing to do.

Finally, I hate speed chess, but 99.99% of chess players love it. If you play an ultrabullet chess game per day, you will need only 60 seconds per day because every player has only 30 seconds for the entire game. You can change the formula, switching from ultrabullet to other slower rhythms like 1-minute, 3-minute, 5-minute, etc.

Something that I am missing is playing an active chess tournament per month. For example, our club organizes an on-site United States Chess Federation tournament the second Saturday of every month. Usually, active chess tournaments are 25+5 (25 minutes for the entire game and 5 seconds bonus per move). The tournament starts and ends the same day. If in your area you do not have this kind of activity Lichess has it for free online. So, this activity will require only around 4 hours per month (usually an evening, afternoon, or morning).

You can probably cut things down that aren't that important to you like watching TV, using social media, etc. There are many time controls available to play but playing speed chess or slow games can help save time.

The best option would be to go for a Daily game where you get 1-7 days time to make a move. You can even miss a day or two and still enjoy the game. Many chess websites have the facility to take notes while playing which helps in remembering the lines you need to play. (I often play Daily when I'm super busy.)

There is a fantastic app called Chessable where you can learn openings using MoveTrainer. It has a feature of daily revision where you have to make the moves on the board so that you remember the lines forever. (I often revise the lines if I can't find time to play as it only takes a few minutes.)

One day I finally gave in and accepted a challenge from him. Needless to saythat I lost completely. I knew the rules and the rudimentary of the game,having played a little bit as a kid, but my brother was obviously no match.Looking at the post-game analysis in chess.com I sawthat my disadvantage only grew, move by move, until reaching a +9 evaluation(equivalent to having lost one rook, a bishop and a pawn to zero), which isbeyond any hope for a comeback, where I resigned. This blueprint was followedduring another couple of matches, where I understood I had to do something toavoid being demolished every time.

My first attempt in trying to improve at the game was to do the obvious: headto Reddit and YouTube to see what other learners recommended. Between atutorial fromGM Naroditsky, somereading and puzzle solving on Lichess, I also played afew games with random people on the Internet. My rating stayed pretty lownevertheless (1300 - 1400 Rapid on Lichess).

After another couple of lost matches against my brother, it dawned on me that Ihad no hope of beating him. I was following his same steps to improve (playing,studying the game, watching videos), but I was dedicating much less time. Atthat point he was playing hundreds of games a month and I was willing to playmaybe 10. At that pace I was only going to get further and further behind.

I started by downloading the games he played by using thechess.com APIs and splitthem between black and white games. I focused on the games he played as black,given that I felt I had better chances at guiding the game where I wanted if Iplayed as white.

What results is weighted directed graph (not a tree because a position can bereached with different sequences of moves) similar to this one (a synthetic onebecause the real one would be too big to fit here):

I also wanted an evaluation of each position in terms of advantage for whiteand to do so I used Stockfish. Given that the process of evaluating thousandsof positions is somewhat time consuming, I decided to do that separately andcreate a JSON object mapping each unique FEN position to its Stockfishevaluation.

I needed to map this evaluation into something more manageable, like a numberbetween 0 and 1. To do so, I decided arbitrarily that an advantage of 300+ ismapped to 1.0 and a disadvantage of 300+ is mapped to 0. Additionally, any matein X (even if X is 20) is 1 or 0.

The information was then all there, I just needed to find nodes in the graph(i.e. positions) where black was at a disadvantage, along with the sequence ofmoves that was most likely to reach it. I needed to weigh the edges in such away that it was possible to easily compute the probability to reach a certainposition. My reasoning was as follow:

As you can see the situation for black is pretty bad (+8.9 according toStockfish), because g6, the last move for black, was a mistake. White will goon, take the e5 pawn and the rook. The game for black is pretty much over, asthey scramble to save the knight, the h7 pawn and the bishop. Another resultwas this one (white to move):

Another problem was related to sequences of moves that happened only once, butcoming from common positions. The probability of the final position was thesame as the probability of the last common position, because every edge had aprobability of 1.0 (given that no other possibilities have been played). In theexample below (edges marked with their probabilities), you can follow the edgeswith 7 and 6 (the most common position at move 2), but then follow one of theedges with a 1. From that point on, all the subsequent moves will have beenplayed only once (because only a single match reached that position) and soevery step will have a probability of 1.0.

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Now, the catch here is that the limit applies to the entire game, not to a single move. This means that I can spend 3 minutes on one move, and 2 minutes on all the other moves combined, or I can use exactly 5 seconds on each move. This is entirely up to me to decide.

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