Hello everyone! Welcome back to my blog. Today we will be talking about why cheaters cheat and how you can report them.
Cheating is a big problem on Lichess. I, myself, admit that I have done it once even. But, cheating is causing a lot of confusion and problems in the online chess community.
But why do cheaters cheat? Look down below for some more information.
1. Higher Elo
People usually cheat because they want a higher Elo so that people can recognize them and that they will gain followers. I mean, does your Elo really matter that much? It's just a rough approximation of your chess level in the variant, but I mean your Elo doesn't really matter. How well you play matters. For example, you could have an Elo of 1400 in atomic and still be really good at it. For puzzles, too. Some people cheat on puzzles by looking up the game that the person plays. I mean, that doesn't really improve your chess skills. You could have a puzzle rating of 3100 and still not know how to solve a 1 move checkmate puzzle without cheating.
2. Public recognition
Some people cheat because they want to have a profile with lots of trophies on it. Not being mean to all the good players and titled players who have trophies and actually earn them by playing, not cheating, but I mean is a digital trophy worth more or a physical trophy you earn at a competition? Probably the physical one, right. Cheaters who cheat for public recognition most often cheat for followers and think that they're really famous. Everyone, please don't mix up Lichess with social media. You can go try to get followers on social media, okay?
Cheating is also bad for you because once you cheat, you develop a habit of relying on the stockfish engine to play chess for YOU. Relying on machines to do the thinking for you doesn't really improve your chess skills and you aren't really doing anything to help yourself by using engines to cheat.
The key element behind all of this is dopamine. Dopamine is a chemical that fuels your brain to keep on doing something because you get a reward for it. More importantly, you get the reward randomly. I mean, if you got followers all day you wouldn't really be cheating, right? But getting followers randomly fuels your dopamine and makes you keep on wanting to cheat so you get more followers.
You can roughly "see" if a person is cheating by looking at the game analysis at the end and if they have a high accuracy then they might be cheating. One way you can tell for sure is that if they spend a lot of time on moving pieces. This might signify that they are cheating because they have to switch between tabs and look on their other screen or something. Also, it would be better to play chess virtually with your camera on so that people can see what you're doing.
You can stop cheaters by reporting them. You report them by clicking on the little triangle with an exclamation mark on it and you write a report to Lichess. It is probably better to include a link to the game you played with the cheater so that Lichess can review it. You can also block the cheater by clicking on the circle with a diagonal line through it do block them.
Thank you everyone for reading this and I hope you enjoyed it!
