Playing sacrifices or gambits is asking to get cheated against. All the cheater has to do is turn on their engine for the moves afterwards to get out of danger or consolidate their position. Then they can play as themselves for the rest of the game up on material. This kind of cheating is impossible to prove.
Playing a complicated position or irregular opening is asking to get cheated against. The cheater can just play as themselves and use the engine to blunder check. You'll spend a lot of time making sure your moves are sound while the cheater uses the engine. You'll get into time trouble and either blunder or lose on time. This kind of cheating is also impossible to prove. What's worse is you can choose not play gambits or sacrifices but you have no choice if the cheater wants to complicate the position or make the opening irregular.
Knowing how to play sacrifices and complicated positions is essential to getting better. If cheaters make you lose disproportionately playing such positions, your mind will become conditioned to avoid such positions. You don't just think in chess, a lot is memory and pattern recognition.
I would not be so pessimistic.
If the engine proves that the sacrifice was not correct and the irregular opening stupid and after having lost the game you will not play such moves in similar patterns I would say that you have just being trained by the engine. Indeed, you were playing a bad line, maybe a winning line against normal players, and you are thought to play a better line!
And..do you really think there are so many cheaters? Maybe they are just good players..
none of the chessbrah's cheat
You didn't say one correct thing.
1. You don't play chess against the engine, you play chess against other humans. Many sacrifices are not engine sound but are human sound because there is too much complexity for even the best players to find the correct defense every time. According to you, Tal is a bad player because the engine says so. According to you, the King's Indian defense is entirely unsound because the engine says so. Even though top GMs play the KID, you and the engine know best.
2. There are that many cheaters. I made a thread about it.
en.lichess.org/forum/general-chess-discussion/2-new-points-about-cheating-scumFirst, you're using the sour grapes ad hominem to defend cheaters even though I have a higher rating than you, incredible. Second, I'm experiencing a 10% obvious cheater rate. Look at my bookmarks. Cheating that is so obvious that it can't be denied. And 10% is just the obvious cheating, that's not counting the cheaters who hide it.
allo je suis humain
To #5 watermelontrip. The 10 percent cheater rate that is so obvious to you, is just that, heresay, your personal opinion, baseless accusation, unsupported by any true evidence. You are just below 2000, obviously a strong player, and your gut feeling tells you the other guy is cheating. Maybe. Or maybe not. This is a virtual encounter. You could be playing against a GM, stockfish, or god himself. Prove the other guy is cheating or stop whining.
To get conclusive evidence of cheating, you would have to physically observe your opponent's computer screen AND their actions through a camera. And if people wanted that, they would go to a local park and play against real people.
You keep talking about proof. Are you unable to read or just willfully ignorant? I've bookmarked cheater games. If ultra low centipawn for a low rated player isn't obvious enough for you, you need to get your head checked. Yes it's possible some GM is sandbagging but that happening even 1/100 times is unlikely. The other 99/100 times are cheating. Also, a feature should be added letting people see how long the games were. Most my cheater bookmarks not only played with extreme accuracy but also with very little time used. Some extreme examples even finished the game with more time than they started due to increment. Not even GM's can play that accurately with that little time. If you look at the PGNs for the world rapid championships, even the super GMs average 20-30 centipawn, at 15/10. Most my bookmarks are under 20-30 centipawn played at 5/8, 10/0 time ranges and most their "mistakes" are made after the game is already won for them, you can see for yourself, it's mostly "Not the best checkmake sequence" mistakes or making one when they're +10. If you cut those out, the centipawn is even lower. Only an idiot would think it's not cheating if that many people can play better than super GMs with less time.
All I heard is blah blah blah. You've managed to convince yourself, and maybe a few other people. Good luck with your cheater hunting.
@watermelontrip:
Its true that there are cheaters out there (if you are unlucky its possible that around 10% of your classical games are against cheaters). Thats a well known problem in online chess and takes away allot of fun. Its sad but there is no real solution available, you have to accept that a minority of people are dishonest.
But on the other hand: The majority of players is clearly not cheating! Take this into consideration and you could keep a positive attitude even towards sometimes fishy online chess.
But I dont understand your point with gambits. Gambits are hard to play in short time controls for both sides. You have to defend but you also have to create a resounding attack if you play in gambit style.
Good players are often able to refute many gambits because they are unsound and they have enough experience to do so. I oftenplay against weaker player who try some fance gambits without success.
Try to play solid chess without mistakes. Thats by far the best way to be successful in the long run.
Best wishes
Nada