tournament policing

i'm super bummed about the overwhelming presence of cheaters in the tournaments and was hoping to open a discussion about what can be done to catch and ban these people in real time. reporting them has little effect since they just get a new name, and do the same thing once the old one gets a mark the next day.

I believe the only way to stop this rampant problem is to catch them real time, and remove them so there is no motivation to play in tournaments as a cheater. is this technically feasible? is there more stringent restriction that can be added to tournaments to make it harder for pop up accounts to join? can the top few peoples games be scanned for assistance real time, and then given the boot if necessary? i feel the U1500 touranment is the prime place for cheaters and sandbaggers, maybe someone can chime in if the higher tier tourneys suffer as much.

i love this site, but this is killing me. the presence of cheaters is very demotivating to play and really just a scourge in general. i think this site is good about it, but it really good be great about cheaters if this and other measures were available to stop cheaters in real time. the real problem besides demotivation is they are stealing our time. i'm playing a computer, and while some say 'you can learn from a defeat' its pretty rough playing games against stockfish.

aruguably it would be nice if it was applied to all games, but this is likely processing power infeasible, but maybe tournaments have a chance? or stricter bars of entry will make it less easy for them to register an account real quick and come back?

thoughts would be nice from other players or the mod team.

this is internet. i was a member in a photographic community. you had to register with clear name and identity card, which is the only way to stop fake accounts, multiple accounts, pop up accounts and the like

that would be nice, but an unlikely solution as the manpower required would be pretty hefty. the user base is probably big enough that it would be a problem and i'm sure we have younger members that have no id yet.

i'm surprised more people don't care about this, i just played yet another tourney where the winner was an obvious cheater. does anyone care? how can this just go on and on with nothing being done about it? seems absurd.

I suspect there are not nearly as many cheaters as you assume.

You suggest scanning the games of the top players in a tournament, which I take to mean you think the leaderboards will be teeming with cheaters. But I opened the last 10 or so tournaments you played in and quickly glanced at the top 10, and saw exactly one player who since the tournament has been labeled a cheater.

Imagining that there is a boogeyman around every corner is far more harmful to your experience than the small number of cheaters are. Let it go.

Please use lichess.org/report

i completely disagree, i've reported something like a dozen cheaters, all from tourneys in the last week or two, todays example has already closed the account. i would say more winners of these tourneys are cheaters than legitimate, its not a boogeyman, its just what happens. also you are incorrect because these are 4 of the last 5 tourneys i've played in, reported the winner after examining the games, and they were marked. it is a rampant problem, not made up.

lichess.org/tournament/bR9zOjHq
lichess.org/tournament/VouYiVIl
lichess.org/tournament/ljpSKRcH
lichess.org/tournament/td7397lX

buffer: i use it often to great success. the problem is it doesn't solve the problem to have the person banned a day later, they just get a new account and repeat the behavior. the only solution is to stop it while the tourney is going on, so they know they will caught and removed, then quit coming.

Two of your four examples are the same player, and one of them was not won by a cheater as you claim. Of the 40 spots in the top ten of those four tournaments you linked to, I see exactly three occupied by cheaters (and again, two of those are the same person, so two cheaters total). I will continue to think you are causing yourself more stress than the cheaters are.

The person who cheated and won twice was not yet labeled a cheater when I looked earlier, which is why my previous comment now appears wrong. It was true at the time that there was only one, now there are only two. Still doesn’t make a big difference or make it worth worrying about.

@rxd3ath Why do you think, that it is only very few persons who create permanently new accounts? Why don't you believe in always new cheaters?

Lichess does have live cheat response for larger tourneys. In the Weekly/Monthly Classical tournament there's often a handful of cheaters that get caught pretty quickly.

In Uxxxx tournaments, it's much more likely that your opponents were sandbaggers rather than outright cheaters though.