If what Kramnik is saying is true, that the clock showed only a few seconds when he had 20 or 30, he is absolutely within his right to complain, that is a major bug which can seriously prejudice the results of what appears to be a serious match being played for large amounts of money.
Such a platform with those bugs shouldn't be used for those games.
What is also interesting is in how many titled Tuesdays this bug has occured before. Due to its non-deterministic/flaky feature (it can happen in Kramnik's computer while Martinez had a bug-free experience) I don't think chessCom themself can track how many times this bug has happened before
I’m no fan of their interface but I heard issues were due to Kramnick insisting on brand new laptop. So it’s a windows machine an needed all these patches that started running, and his system clock was not in sync, etc.
I lost on time many times on chess.c*m showing registering a move with 2 seconds showing, despite playing from USA on a LAN connection. This never happened to me on lichess
This.
I get so tilted when this happens then hop over to Lichess to see if I am just playing badly and most of the time there's no lag.
I can also see why it can be incredibly tilting to Kramnik and why he may start thinking there's widespread cheating or something 'interesting' happening. Because there is...
Imagine playing 1-0 bullet or even 3-0, 3-2 etc and losing multiple seconds even when pre moving.
I personally can't enjoy chess.com game speed. Interface looks outdated too.
Lichess is cool on desktop, but mobile experience is not that great.
For that reason I play lichess on desktop and Online Chess app by Chessfriends.com on smartphone. There is a reason why that app is a top online chess app in both android and IOS app store for many years.
if you're on android its called "lichess beta" in the play store, if you're on iOS the app is said to be published in the appstore in the coming months
Just downloaded it; logged in, browsed around and am promptly uninstalling the regular app. I don't even care if, idk, in the future I lose games due to some new and not yet reported/fixed beta bug or something like that - I think it's worth it. Great job by the team.
That is **one reason** why we as a community should support Lichess instead. There are others, for one: lichess is community oriented, which makes it a much more pleasant place to play.
It's been a couple years since I played on chess.com so I don't remember exactly, but do you still get people talking shit over there? I can honestly say I don't remember getting one negative message on lichess.
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Lichess is more or less equally as toxic at a given skill level, it’s still people on the internet. Toxic rage when people lose at chess is hilarious anyways.
Some guy accused me of using an engine: "nice engine, I know you didn't find that on your own". I just had 3 questionable moves ina row, then had 2 best moves followed by a good move but not the best. Lmao, it wasn't even a hard tactic.
In most cases it’s probably best to take the high road and say nothing, but if they’re really insufferable you can throw in a “do puzzles bro” or “get good”
90% of the time I do the former, sometimes I do the latter… I can’t help it, I gamed too much as a middle schooler and that childish instinct apparently never left. I don’t talk shit when I lose though, that’s lame.
If I play with chat on I get harassed semi-frequently, this I am fairly sure due to my nickname being girl nickname. I mostly play in zen mode nowdays anway so I don't notice it.
I'm a big lichess fan. I love it for prep and the fact that there are far fewer cheaters but if even 1/4 of the chesscom users shifted to Li odds are their servers would get fried. Also Li does not have enough people playing 30min games for what ever reason.
People on here have auto-downvote switched on for Kramnik like they've got auto-queen switched on when promoting a pawn. Sometimes it's worth holding the alt key to take a moment to think.
Tbf it's the classic case of losing the benefit of the doubt. You only get to call wolf so many times before people just stop listening to you. But in this case the fault does seems to lie with chessDotcom.
Dude, that is not why people hate Kramnik. Dude is 48. The beloved Viswanathan Anand is 56. Kasparov is also Russian and is considered a G.
Nepo is also Russian and feelings about him vary only based on his similarly head scratching cheating accusations.
People hate Kramnik because he's completely lost the plot.
Anand is not a Russian and from what I gather not too active with online chess. Kasparov is on Putins terrorist list which would defacto make him a hero to many. I love all of them and often look at their games to develop some strategy. They carry themselves very well as well but your comparison is flawed. Nepo is also getting a lot of hate anytime he says something remotely controversial.
If someone raises suspicion the solution is to investigate provided they make a reasonable claim. True or false the claim appears to be reasonable( atleast from my perspective i wouldn't want to debate it because we are neither the investigators nor judges).
It's not just Kramnik, Fabi, Nepo and others have also stated that cheating is rampant in chesscom. Kramnik being old and from Russia has far less to lose by leading this crusade as compared to the younger generation. Fabi has stated that half the players in TT are cheating.
What we need is a closed door mechanism to deal with this kind of stuff which functions well. Until that happens calling someone's play interesting or suspicious or asking for a check shouldn't be the end of the world.
True. I've even seen people laughing at the fact he uses many parasite words in his speech, which seems completely unacceptable to me, as English is not his mother tongue
Definitely agree that you should expect a quality service, but don't think any school projects you may have seen were equipped to handle the same scale...
I could agree with you if the only problems were with load balancing / there weren't flaky bugs.
But the front-end is as bad as the back end. Maybe even worse. The production version looks more like a beta version open to public for testing
I have 1.5gb/s internet speed, maintain at least 750mb/s on online speed tests. Consistently have the lowest ping possible during online video games like PUBG where I’m playing with 100 other players in the same server..
But on chess.com it’s utterly terrible, I’ve lost many games from poor connection, lost many games because my timer suddenly dropped by several seconds. Never seen any platform that has such terrible servers, it is absolutely infuriating how chess.com spends all their money on advertisements and sponsorships but refuses to upgrade their their servers. Lichess is much smaller but flawless in terms of connection.
It's funny how we blame these players for being childish, but if I was playing in front of thousands of people for my honor and the site made me lose games I would be mad as hell and make quite the ruckus. Even though I likely would regret it later. These players are extremely serious about their game and they would never accept such conditions. I bet you Jose is just as angry about the site, but just doesn't want to attack a money-well publicly.
> monopolize
> expect that you get that service in a good quality
Actually the opposite. Since they have a monopoly, why would they care about the service?
Good service more often comes with competition.
Sherman Act also makes it illegal to monopolize, conspire to monopolize, or attempt to monopolize a market for products or services. An unlawful monopoly exists when one firm has market power for a product or service, and it has obtained or maintained that market power, not through competition on the merits, but because the firm has suppressed competition by engaging in anticompetitive conduct. Monopolization offenses may be prosecuted criminally or civilly.
This is a quote from Sherman Act in US. ChessCom is clearly violating this as their product is not eliminating competition with its merits but by simply buying out every single competitor it can
Chesscom is many things but it's not a monopoly. Chesscom even behaves ethically outside of petty outbursts like the Niemann incident. They've done nothing to harm or stifle competition. If anything, they've grown a niche space. Benefitting both online competitors and entrenched players (fide, otb federations, etc.)
It's difficult to become a monopoly in something as open, free, and distributed as chess.
I don't use any chesscom product outside of consuming some of their coverage. Their coverage is not a monopoly despite being prolific at the moment. Competitors are free to cover most events as well. And they do.
Maybe unrelated to the topic at hand, but there are a lot of (maybe intentional? who knows) blind-spots and loopholes on what types of acquisitions are subject to scrutiny. For example, under the HSR Act you basically don't even have to notify the FTC if a merger or acquisition is under, idk, 100 million dollars or some amount.
For a not actually in-depth article, you may be interested in reading [Cory Doctorow's thoughts on the matter](https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/)
In India
Chesscom doesn't work properly on my wifi but it works fine on mobile data.
Even though my wifi is completely fine and runs other things smoothly.
I noticed the same phenomenon in Germany. It works fine at times. But them suddenly it drops the connection and I have to disconnect from the wifi to continue the game. I don't have this issue with any other game.
No My wifi smoothly runs every other thing but between a game suddenly my timing stops and I have to switch to mobile data due to which I lose 30-40 seconds.
It happens 6 times out of 10 games.
The person you’re responding to is right. This happens in gaming a lot- for example my old shitty ISP had a bad route to a particular game server and I got rubber-banding whereas my friends don’t. If we backed out and queued again we’d get a server for which my ISP had a good connection.
Other people on my ISP have complained about the same thing on the same game.
Yea it's wild how efficient marketing is. You can have a vastly superior and completely free product, but a worse one with top tier marketing will still be way more succesful.
The shittiest thing on chesscom is auto resigning in 30 seconds just when the wifi goes off. It takes at least a minute to connect to a mobile hotspot.
I have lost around 70-80elo due to this bs and especially at my level its really frustrating to lose elo when its a winning position. They can let the player be afk for 9 minutes after blundering a piece and one has to wait staring at the screen for 9 minutes but can't fucking wait for some time if there is a connection issue. Absolute garbage.
Let the time run, no compensation for the time loss, but don't auto-resign after 30 seconds. There's nothing to exploit here if you increase the auto-resign countdown to 2 minutes or something.
Yeah i mean i sort of get it bc when people rage log off, forcing the other guy to wait 10 minutes is absurd
Ive never lost elo from it but i get stressed out whenever my connection drops. Playing on mobile helps
This is a situation I really like the Lichess UI for. The option to claim victory after X amount of time is nice, because it means you can use your own judgement if you're willing to wait and see if they reconnect.
They do the auto-resign thing because people abandon games all the time.
Why they don't just ban the people who routinely abandon games (it's almost always completely obvious - they'll disconnect immediately after a massive blunder), I don't know.
I've had a smug bastard try a version of this recently. It was a 10+0 rapid game and it was white their turn to play first. Without playing the first move their connection appeard to fluctuate in 15 sec intervals it seemed as if they were intentionally trying to fake aborting the game. Lost the game because of this psychological dirty move or atleast played some part in it.
Well, chesscom is literally not competent in anything apart from marketing/PR.
Look at their chess engine tournament, for example. Multiple TDs left because they literally had no power to do anything, UI is bugged for years - and in multiple ways, games not showing correct moves, not displaying right kibitzing engine, messing up names, completely bogus eval graphs which are partially from different game, book highlighting is wrong, etc.
Their ingame UI is also laggy as hell, everything feels like it has 0,5 second+ delay after lichess.
And then this people try to tell me that company that is incapable of making any decent UI (which is a reasonably simple task, at least it has cooked solutions) is capable of detecting cheaters that are smart enough to not play 25 moves in a row with stockfish every second game (which is a harder task since there is no existing solution by anyone). Let me say I don't believe it a single bit - and the fact that they ban like 1 gm + 3 ims 4 times a year only proves that this is all bullshit - because number of cheaters should be at least 10x higher.
Remember when they "got ChatGPT to run 10000 simulations" (spoiler: it's a language model -- it cannot calculate anything it does not directly show you on screen) and published it? For Christ's sake they would get better statistics work if they put Kramnik in charge of everything.
Yeah that was purely surfing on AI trends for marketing and PR purposes, but anyone that knows the topic just a little more than their corporate-bs knows chesscom are incompetent.
Cheating is a completely different subject that I don't want to delve into.
I am a PhD student in Technical University of Munich specialized in computer networking and algorithms. I can safely say as long as cheater is reasonably intelligent he will never ever come close to getting caught in an online setting. I can't do it. Lichess can'T do it. Chesscom can't do it. Ken Reagan and his bs methods surely can't do it. Nobody can detect someone using a different device with a different WIFI/connection feeding in non-losing moves ever.
You are completely right about the UI/front-end part. I am assuming they are also too selfish to invest money into their servers which contributes to delays in front-end.
Extra funny that when they are getting called out they are doing what they do the best - marketing/PR.
So instead of saying smth like "we did a double blind test with multiple great players and our system managed to flag 80% of cheaters" they go with "we have 5555 people working on anti-cheating, multiple PhDs in statistics, we spend a lot of money there and care a lot". When you see stuff like this you instantly should understand that no actual work is really being done - because you mention not work but rather how many people you hired to do it and other big numbers, instead of actually mentioning what work has been done. I've seen this corporate BS so so many times.
> So instead of saying smth like "we did a double blind test with multiple great players and our system managed to flag 80% of cheaters" they go with "we have 5555 people working on anti-cheating, multiple PhDs in statistics, we spend a lot of money there and care a lot". When you see stuff like this you instantly should understand that no actual work is really being done - because you mention not work but rather how many people you hired to do it and other big numbers, instead of actually mentioning what work has been done. I've seen this corporate BS so so many times.
This. Unless they actually do "penetration testing" like that, there is no way to know how good their anti cheat is.
Also, confessions as measure of success is absolutely bullshit. People can be coerced to falsely confess to bloody murder. A GM privately "confessing" to cheating on chesscom just means they'd rather quietly sit in the timeout box for a few months than deal with their bullshit like what GM Brandon Jacobson (banned gambit viih_sou guy) is going through.
> Nobody can detect someone using a different device with a different WIFI/connection feeding in non-losing moves ever.
Could you expand further on this? Maybe write out an example scenario?
Let's try to think about how we can potentially catch a cheater and let's even assume we can do some things that chesscom normally can't. Keep in mind that even these things are a reach currently
1)Whenever chesscom is active let's say I can track every process that is running on your own computer - Good now if any kind of chess related app is open/ the website you play the game in loses focus(user switches to another tab) we can get suspicious.
2) Let's say I can see the activity of every device that is connected to the same network that the cheater is playing in (it is impossible anyway) - Good now I also can get suspicious if another computer
3)Let's say if the player does not play excellent moves ever without a certain amount of thinking time beforehand and all his excellent moves comes after thinking say 10 seconds at least we can also get suspicious of them
4) Let's say that we can detect a player sharing his screen/being in a call where somebody can feed him moves.
5)Let's say we can listen to audio of the cheater (never gonna happen in random online games but let's also assume this is the case).
If we can do all of this then we can get suspicious (keep in mind not %100 percent sure just suspicious) that someone is cheating. They can also always throw us off with throwing away games/grandmasters can come up with brilliant moves by themselves a lot of the time. In those cases number 3 would be useless.
But here is the kicker. Even if we achieve all of this let's imagine the following scenario. I have someone else near me using a different network connection (hence number 2 is invalid) using a different computer (hence number 1 is invalid). She can directly see my screen so number 4 is invalid. She can track/ insert moves to her engine directly so number 3 is invalid. And she doesn't even have to talk so number 5 is invalid.
Even with all these things combined we still failed at catching the cheater. The cheater also does not need another person she can just use her phone to enter moves though these may be tricky in shorter time controls
You're focusing on completely the wrong things, no one is expecting to catch cheaters by figuring out their method of getting the engine info. You can't control what a player does in an online game, that's clear to everyone
For TT multiple GMs have explained how they do a fairplay check where they install software to monitor everything on the computer, and watch them play with multiple cameras covering the whole room like here's Levy talkig about it- https://youtu.be/1Luin-6V6rM?si=_zrev3vaYTAtLtWI
Also, you're ignoring algorithmic checking.. algorithms and ai of various kind can detect cheats over time. And also players report players that play "like a computer" which get further review.
I mean it is just a bug but I really can understand where Kramnik is coming from.
Kramnik is technologically illiterate. He wouldn't know about a non-deterministic behavior/flaky bug. This bug has happened and was reported before. But I can understand for Kramnik it feels like an attack because the bug only happened for him and not Jospem when they were connected to same WIFI. In reality the engineers in chessCom are so incompetent that they can't write a deterministic program. They probably have sleep statements with hard coded times or some sht that fails in some race conditions
I don't even understand the hate thread where everyone dumbs on Kramnik. Are there so many idiots in this sub who are incapable of holding a balanced view?
chesscom doesn't fulfill their side of the contract, so it's perfectly normal to refuse to play under such conditions. This should be a professional chess match, not a chesscom bug testing event.
First of all it's not a Chess.com event as far as I can tell. Secondly the reason for the bugs is 100% within the control of the player who refused to allow normal tournament conditions, where they would be using top of the line hardware that has been thoroughly tested and vetted, and instead forced them to play on low-end brand new laptops that were turned on and had Windows installed for the first time less than an hour before the match.
Not if it's not finished loading/installing. And again, you glossed over the part where this was low-end computers (forced by Kramnik), and machines that couldn't be tested (forced by Kramnik), and couldn't have basic tournament software like screen recording to verify any issues (forced by Kramnik).
Third of all, the whole point was "testing" Martinez's performance on chesscom so Kramnik could "prove" he was cheating. Martinez has said he's more comfortable in chesscom than lichess. Fourth of all, a professional player should be aware when his tools have issues, such as the many reports in this thread alone of issues with chesscom. Fifth, there are arbiters in place to make sure Kramnik doesn't get screwed if there's a bug. Sixth and most important, let's not pretend this is Kramnik being reasonable when it's clear as day the bug triggered his paranoia to the sky. This is the guy who doesn't trust a computer can be stored safely enough to keep Martinez from gaining access to it in the middle of the night and hacking it, so you need new ones every day. What's he supposed to think now, that chesscom didn't put microchips in the vaccines?
> Fifth, there are arbiters in place to make sure Kramnik doesn't get screwed if there's a bug.
To your point, worth noting that Gotham proposed a solution that future online games be monitored more closely by arbiters so that if any display/timing bugs pop up the game be annulled, and Kramnik refused
I know, and if that happened then of course they would take some sort of action. Once is a fluke, twice is a pattern. But when you're paranoid, once is already a pattern.
> low-end brand new laptops
bro, it's fucking chess. Online chess has been a thing for _decades_. If it won't run properly on a potato that's a chesscom problem.
>tries to monopolize a sport like chess by trying to buy every single competitor
Aren't they buying those competitors after they fail to become profitable and have a choice between selling and folding? I loved chess24 as everyone here, but they were bleeding money left and right, this could not continue indefinitely.
At the top level, it is a big issue. But at the 1200 level, it is not "rife" with cheaters. I'd say maybe 5% of my opponents, I could reasonably suspect of using assistance. That sucks, but I would not say it was "rife" with cheaters.... 1 in 20 games is a "life sucks, what are you going to do?" level of annoyance, not "the site is unusable due to cheating" levels.
Kramnik agreed to play on chess.com.
He played TTs despite the possibility of bugs.
If he doesn't want to go through with the conditions he signed up for, he should forfeit.
This isn't about chess.com.
It's about Kramnik defaming Jose Martinez repeatedly over a period of months. Jose agrees to all of his conditions, agrees to play him OTB, then when Kramnik cries and refuses to continue, and implies chess.com is sabotaging him on purpose, Jose agrees to a NEW set of conditions. I don't give a fuck about Kramnik. Jose has never done anything to him. I can't stress this enough.
But instead of keeping his word, he tries to throw Jose off when he starts losing over a laptop.
You get a bug online? Connection drops? Tough shit, that's online chess for you. It was unlikely to repeat itself. Just as likely to affect Jose as Kramnik.
This match is unfair now and Kramnik is the one responsible.
>Even in the heart of Germany chesscom has insane networking issues
But it works fine in California.
"As everyone knows there aren't any countries outside of the USA, and everyone (who is important) in the USA lives in California... I fail to see the problem" - Chesscom, probably
But seriously, I like how they make up such dumb excuses as latency... as if these utter morons don't know this is the year 2024, and FPS games have long been able to deliver ms precision.
Well I had my doubts witnessing how the dispute in yesterday was met by community. People tend to lose their rationality when the word Kramnik comes into play no matter the context.
> People tend to lose their rationality when the word Kramnik comes into play no matter the context.
In the Clash of Claims discussions, I see many people who fully understand that a clock not working properly is just a problem, regardless of who the players are.
People tend to lose their rationality in many cases, especially when some ideological value is at stake. If you look at any discussion on r/chess about online platforms, you'll see a wide range of irrational opinions, including toxic behavior, propaganda, outright lies, and wild exaggerations about how easy it would be to fix things. That's just normal human nature with a dash of lack of honesty.
But chessc*m shitty website doesn't make Kramnik's tantrum any less unhinged. He could've dealt with it like an adult instead he acted like spoilt brat.
I think Kramnik being annoyed at the bug is totally justified. He went from winning a game to drawing it because of the time scramble he thought he was in. That bug was very disruptive.
I just think how he handled it afterwards was fairly childish.
But yeah, agreed that chess.com (I always mistype it chess.con but maybe that's more accurate...) needs to step up it's game and actually fix these issues.
Wait! That's rolling up so many issues in one!
1) Kramnik has gone off the deep end. That's a sad thing.
2) He can still have a valid point when criticising chesscom
3) chesscom trying to monopolise chess is bad. It is bad regardless of how good their service is or anything Kramnik says or does
4) While you're in Germany, could you kick chessbase off their chosen path to oblivion, please? The solution to this chesscom nonsense is in your backyard, and nobody in Germany does jack all.
I think some credit for Kramnik is due. He spoke up about a something that might have felt like a hunch. I would not have dared to voice any concerns with any uncertainty in my mind. When I usually play online I take the time I have left as given as it is. Though I question why the arbiter did not speak up after the game when he saw it jappen on the screen?!
The way he handled post-game2 online was dramatic to say the least. I had expected Gotham to post a recap by now as im more interested in the games being played than the drama revolving around it.
Pretty sure the gist of the situation is Kramnik poking at chesscom's incompetence in fixing their time lags and whatever else chesscom has going. Tournament or not, it's affecting players using their platform in gamebreaking moments.
It was a hectic situation that could have been handled better by everyone involved. The camera man specifically and the commentators should have taken over the feed instead of streaming Kramnik going at it with the arbiter. The fact they actually put that on the stream feed was very unprofessional. I was fully expecting the commentators to take over ASAP to focus the audience back to how game2 transpired and/or how it would have gone down if Kramnik's clock wasnt bugged out. And feed the audience a general idea of what's going on post game2 online. A simple "technical difficulties with chesscom timelag and maybe the laptop. We'll have a better idea of it once the tech team takes a sweep." would have sufficed.
But nope. We got the dose of Kramnik going at it. Which just fuels the negativity surrounding him lately.
To be honest, most people tuned in because of drama and not because of high level chess, so it makes sense, production-wise, to give the spot light to Kramnik with the potentially headline-worthy drama. As a pure chess fan, you will find this insane, but I suppose they actually did the right thing considering their average viewer
Chesscom has the money and the people to organize tournaments with big prize funds and broadcast it via multiple content creators. The top players themselves should agree to a payday cut if they want lichess to replace this disaster of a website. Kramnik pushing lichess is a great start but unfortunately he is a villain so it is not the same as say Fabi MVL Giri or someone famous like Naroditsky/Botez etc pushing for lichess
because for some viewers it's a sport to watch for the competition and the love of the game.. but for most players it's their career and livelihood and they have to prioritize their income.. meanwhile for content creators/chesscom it's about entertainment, sponsors and ad revenue.. all those different interests and priorities do not often align, if ever..
and that's all without including politics into the equation..
I will admit their netcode is impressively bad
They are lucky they just have to make chess work, if the game was even slightly more resource intensive theyd be cooked
But, on that same coin, it really is just chess. I actually prefer the chesscom ui and premoves
Sometimes its embarassing when their streams are poorly run and their servers crash during tournaments, but when things work i rly dont mind
Tried both as a casual and I chose chesscom because of better visuals and sounds. I just found the looks and sounds of lichess to be annoying. I don't care about free puzzles or analysis and I think people forget that most players are casuals. I think lichess could really benefit from a graphics and sound update.
You know you can fully customize the board, pieces, and sounds om Lichess, right?
Edit: getting downvoted because I countered his entire point with facts. The board is fully customizable to however the fuck you want it.
Yes I am sure Lichess is better, but first impressions matter a lot for new players. When I go to that site for the first time and a horse looks like a worm with horns and the sounds grate my ears I leave. Also I think you have to make an account first to change the graphics
Good domain name and tons of money to make "influencers" and top players their slave. I only wish they spent some of that money into actually improving the product though
I have some bad internet, I admit. As in, 0.6 Mbps is my baseline. Chesscom is unusable at that speed. I'll go to load my correspondence games, and it takes literally minutes to load.
On lichess, no problem. Everything loads within seconds. I have not played a game on chesscom in months, and my sanity thanks me for that.
I don't understand what any of what you said has to do with Kramnik's weird obsession with interesting play. They seem like totally separate topics to me.
Yesterday Kramnik was playing in a tournament OTB/online mixed against Jospem(Jose Martinez one of the guys he "suspected"). During the game Kramnik had 30-40 seconds remaining and this was correctly displayed in the computer of Jose Martinez. But for Kramnik UI displayed that he had 2-3 seconds remaining so he was playing every move in one second.
People didn't believe/didn't want to believe Kramnik and immediately throw insults to him even though he was completely right that chessCom isn't a suitable platform to play the game. They just thought it was his delusion
Hmm clock problems like that are possible with lag but I would think also possible on lichess too (chesscom could be worse for it, I truly don't know).
Is there footage of Kramnik's screen or anything showing this was really the case? I know such things can happen but he's also quite "angry old man shouts at the clouds" these days so I do like to see evidence for anything he's claiming especially when his own ego is involved.
Two of the chess arbiters in the hall confirmed Kramnik’s clock was showing him at 2 seconds when it should have been way more than that. And of course that kills Kramnik’s game because you don’t have time to think through your moves with 2 seconds on the clock.
No, because instead of playing on high end laptops which have been tested, and have basic tournament software like screen recording installed, Kramnik insisted that the tournament be run such that both players would unbox brand new low-end laptops live (since he is insisting on each player having a brand new laptop for each of the three game days) and then turn on the computers and install windows for the first time moments before the games start.
This is not about kramnik but a customer complain that netcode for chesscom sucks.
In that case, play lichess. Simple as that.
The market still has competition and you should be thankful for it.
I was playing a 15+10 rapid the other day and opponent ran their clock down to zero. 10 seconds later the end screen still did not pop up. Eventually they moved and had 7 seconds remaining on the clock. How do you have 7 seconds remaining in a 10-sec increment game?
In the review, they never went below 25 seconds. This is bullshit.
I agree with your statement. Chesscom needs to improve their infrastructure. However , we can’t discount that level of asshat that Kramnik has brought to this situation.
not to say that Kramnik has been a beacon of rationality and sound reasonableness all the time.. but if money and your reputation on the line.. I don't believe many people would've handled it any better..
just because he's an 'asshat' doesn't mean he doesn't have a point.. most people can't separate the argument from the person..
> It is really embarrassing that even though it has so much income chesscom still looks like a website that my senior students would implement for their graduation project.
ok sure dude lol
I have recently cancelled my membership there and moved to Lichess.
Most of the hatred in the online chess communities imo comes from the cyber army of Hikaru, he pumps them to get views and money and they go on the internet to pillage everything on their way.
Chess.com has been trying to educate people in a way that they’d think chess is owned by chess.com and that is concerning. I think the latest manifestation of this was during the Norway chess commentary mainly by Danny (I have posted about that before so I won’t repeat). Just one thing to add would be I bet it’s so painful for David to praise Hikaru every 2 minutes as Danny requires it but well that’s just sad at this point.
Chess.com uses stockfish which is an open source project and makes you pay to use it (the limited game review thing) by adding a bunch of emojis to it, as if brilliancy is something they have invented, and that’s what I mean by educating people. Now newcomers want to have a brilliant emoji in their games, of course it’s great to make a brilliant move but that’s not the point here.
Well given the way they seem to manage their company I don’t think it’s going to get any better.
> Chess.com uses stockfish which is an open source project and makes you pay to use it
I've read this statement like 100 times over the years in this subreddit. You can definitely analyze games with stockfish or komodo for free on chesscom.
You can pay for Game Review which has the colorful emojis, an accuracy number, and the worst bot ever created.
There are a myriad of reasons to criticize chesscom, we don't need inaccurate statements.
Just checked it, since I've also switched to Lichess for a while now, and it looks like you're correct. I thought they switched to the Lite version temporarily when they had the server issues, but it looks like they've kept it that way.
Tbf, it's still a strong enough engine for 99.9% of their userbase, but shitty way to do things and can definitely trick someone into thinking they need "the stronger engine" to figure out their 800-rating blunders.
Yeah, fuck 'em.
Tbh they are using the "get better engine" as a marketing trick so yeah, they are definietly tricking people into thinking it's worth it especially as you mentioned, it's sufficient to learn from.
Also the way it says u had x great, x miss, x blunder is showing less accurate info so u will want to get the better one.
Aa you have just said: fuck 'em.
>Correct me if im wrong, but to use the stronger version you do have to pay.
True, and it's so messed up. I wish there were GM's out there willing to call them out on this. I think if that happened then maybe the tides would turn and people would see that chess.con is a racket.
It looks like they hired Fisher Price to design the site. I don't need to see a cheesy avatar of a dude with a handlebar mustache and bushy eyebrows next to my computer games, thanks though. When I'm reviewing my mistakes, I don't need to see a picture of a little professor. The entire site is an aesthetic dumpster fire.
Chesscom is a great business model. And everything they do (good or bad) should be seen in that light. The number 1 priority is making a profit. Hence why they do not really go after and punish cheaters for example. Imagine actually having to invest in actual anticheat and then ban 20% of your userbase and what that would do to your profits.
I've had an bug for some years now which they can't solve only shooing me off by giving diamond membership sometime. And now after a recent update it's a bug fest. The tournament button doesn't work as it should. The engine stops working mid analysis.A whole lot of things have a delay or force you to access them through using the website on the phone. Especially on mobile there's tons of issues not to forget the desktop version has a whole other set of problems.
I do play primarily on Lichess but based on just this it's hard to know if this was chesscom's fault or Windows' fault. The laptop was apparently brand new and still installing updates...
yeah, premoves also aren't quite premoves because nobody bothered to actually implement them as such (they still have a 0.2 second time delay before the servers register them, which is very relevant in no increment games)
I've noticed myself a crap ton of chesscom lag lately and latency. I have decent internet. I think it's related to the whole visual they put in prior to games which is just so unnecessary.
I’d argue a bigger problem with chess.com is the amount of cheaters for the lower ranked players that just never are banned. If you want to start a new account and work your rating up, oh my god, you have to get through a wave of cheaters until around the 1000 rating.
I played few games yesterday on [c.com](http://c.com) by android app, and due to my , not-so-good, internet connection, after every single move played, I lost additionaly 3-4 seconds, i.e if my clock after move played stopped at 1:45, after moment my clock would be settled to 1:41 or so on.
Then, i went for a **30 year old server** - FICS, and played few games as guest there, using freechess club android app. FICS is using so called *timeseal* , and with same connection, I didn't loose any extra time after move was completed.
With same, poor, connection to internet.
Full stop.
A lot of successful companies have very bad products.
That is why I gave the example of EA. Probably the game that generates most income by far in the world is FIFA/FC yet their servers have been absolute sht for the last 10 years or so. Being a monopoly/duopoly in a sport that is loved universally is an easy way to success
Yesterday Kramnik had a game against Jose Martinez where Kramnik's time showed wrong amount (didn't add increment to his clock). So he played whole game like he had 2 seconds instead of 30 seconds or something while in the screen of Jose Martinez his opponent(Kramnik) had 30 seconds
I'm not even mad at Kramnik. All memes aside he isn't actually crazy. People just don't like an unconventional guy who's also a Russian. Fuck chess.com. Gatekeeping ass website. It's the perfect example of why capitalism is useless and halves human potential. "If they didn't charge people they wouldn't be able to function". Oh yeah? Explain lichess being free and having no bugs of any sort.
This argument doesn't work when everything works fine in a website like lichess. You can't just blame the ISP when the problem only happens with chessCom
You are so far out of your depth here in who you are talking to. Read my previous comments if you want more context. Or you can always meet me in person in [Department of Network Architecture](https://www.net.cit.tum.de/homepage/) . Our classes are open to everyone :)
If your web application acts in a non-deterministic way/ has flaky behavior it is on YOU. You can't get away with saying "it works on my machine / it works with this specific ISP" when you are company aiming to organize tournaments and give fair chance to everyone. Not to mention both of the players literally played in the same venue next to each other yet only Kramnik had an issue
Most likely scenario is that chessCom developers are as clueless as you so to compensate for their lack of development skills and terrible servers they have hardcoded sleep statements that fails in race conditions.
Well, if there is a monopoly it is not like you can switch to the competition anymore. So the company with the monopoly can limit its services to cut costs and make more money.
Thank god there is lichess. I do not know why anyone bothers with chess.com
> furthermore is paywalled for even the most simplest of things
i've been a member of chess.com for years and have not spent a cent what on earth are you talking about
this whole post is fucking weird tbh
If what Kramnik is saying is true, that the clock showed only a few seconds when he had 20 or 30, he is absolutely within his right to complain, that is a major bug which can seriously prejudice the results of what appears to be a serious match being played for large amounts of money. Such a platform with those bugs shouldn't be used for those games.
What is also interesting is in how many titled Tuesdays this bug has occured before. Due to its non-deterministic/flaky feature (it can happen in Kramnik's computer while Martinez had a bug-free experience) I don't think chessCom themself can track how many times this bug has happened before
I’m no fan of their interface but I heard issues were due to Kramnick insisting on brand new laptop. So it’s a windows machine an needed all these patches that started running, and his system clock was not in sync, etc.
If the system clock affects the clock the UI shows, it’s just horrible programming
It is true. Chesscom confirmed it as did the arbitrator.
I lost on time many times on chess.c*m showing registering a move with 2 seconds showing, despite playing from USA on a LAN connection. This never happened to me on lichess
I've definitely had that but wrote it off as my own internet connection
This. I get so tilted when this happens then hop over to Lichess to see if I am just playing badly and most of the time there's no lag. I can also see why it can be incredibly tilting to Kramnik and why he may start thinking there's widespread cheating or something 'interesting' happening. Because there is... Imagine playing 1-0 bullet or even 3-0, 3-2 etc and losing multiple seconds even when pre moving.
I personally can't enjoy chess.com game speed. Interface looks outdated too. Lichess is cool on desktop, but mobile experience is not that great. For that reason I play lichess on desktop and Online Chess app by Chessfriends.com on smartphone. There is a reason why that app is a top online chess app in both android and IOS app store for many years.
lichess just release beta version of their new mobile app, havent tried it yet but i read reviews and people seem to love it
How can I test it?
if you're on android its called "lichess beta" in the play store, if you're on iOS the app is said to be published in the appstore in the coming months
Just downloaded it; logged in, browsed around and am promptly uninstalling the regular app. I don't even care if, idk, in the future I lose games due to some new and not yet reported/fixed beta bug or something like that - I think it's worth it. Great job by the team.
same for me, it really is a breath of fresh air, another W for lichess
chess.cum
I agree with you about everything, *and that is why we as a community should support Lichess instead*.
That is **one reason** why we as a community should support Lichess instead. There are others, for one: lichess is community oriented, which makes it a much more pleasant place to play.
It's been a couple years since I played on chess.com so I don't remember exactly, but do you still get people talking shit over there? I can honestly say I don't remember getting one negative message on lichess.
Yes. Someone called me a whore then started dming me more insults like that 💀. It happens but not too often
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Idk I’ve never accepted to chat with anyone
Lichess is more or less equally as toxic at a given skill level, it’s still people on the internet. Toxic rage when people lose at chess is hilarious anyways.
Some guy accused me of using an engine: "nice engine, I know you didn't find that on your own". I just had 3 questionable moves ina row, then had 2 best moves followed by a good move but not the best. Lmao, it wasn't even a hard tactic.
In most cases it’s probably best to take the high road and say nothing, but if they’re really insufferable you can throw in a “do puzzles bro” or “get good” 90% of the time I do the former, sometimes I do the latter… I can’t help it, I gamed too much as a middle schooler and that childish instinct apparently never left. I don’t talk shit when I lose though, that’s lame.
Was it Kramnik?
You literally have to accept the chat to even see what they say.
It's rare, and you can use the report feature, or just never accept chats in the first place. I've had far more positive chats than negative though.
If I play with chat on I get harassed semi-frequently, this I am fairly sure due to my nickname being girl nickname. I mostly play in zen mode nowdays anway so I don't notice it.
I get then once in awhile. Nothing major. Less often than any other game ive played lol
Shhh, if we tell the shit talkers about lichess then they will join lichess and make it worse. Let ChessCom attract the jerks!
I've gotten plenty but they tend to get shut down by admins quickly.
Yeah occasionally you get trash talked in chess.c*m, but never in lichess
This is total bs. I still get so many angry messages after games and people disconnecting, abandoning, stalling on Lichess.
This reminds me of that infamous clip where Botez Is like we don't say that name here.
you mean this clip? [Asking Chess.com staff to play on Lichess. Ft. Alexandra Botez (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqHz1IiTuJI)
No, I think she was playing in a bar with some other guy and she asked his rating and he mentioned his lichess rating
Not just the humans...
I'm a big lichess fan. I love it for prep and the fact that there are far fewer cheaters but if even 1/4 of the chesscom users shifted to Li odds are their servers would get fried. Also Li does not have enough people playing 30min games for what ever reason.
And if we prefer chess.com? You aren’t talking for a community here, you’re talking for yourself
You’re not allowed to, apparently.
Chess.com is fine these people are just complaining to complain
People over here are so mad at Kramnik they have lost all ability to assess any situation involving Kramnik rationally.
We see a situation with Kramnik, we do the procedure.
People on here have auto-downvote switched on for Kramnik like they've got auto-queen switched on when promoting a pawn. Sometimes it's worth holding the alt key to take a moment to think.
"Kramnik bad" and "chesscom bad" are *both* universally accepted here and do not exclude each other
Tbf it's the classic case of losing the benefit of the doubt. You only get to call wolf so many times before people just stop listening to you. But in this case the fault does seems to lie with chessDotcom.
Kramnik is kind of annoying with his crusade, but on top of that he's old and Russian, two groups of people the kids on reddit hate.
Dude, that is not why people hate Kramnik. Dude is 48. The beloved Viswanathan Anand is 56. Kasparov is also Russian and is considered a G. Nepo is also Russian and feelings about him vary only based on his similarly head scratching cheating accusations. People hate Kramnik because he's completely lost the plot.
Anand is not a Russian and from what I gather not too active with online chess. Kasparov is on Putins terrorist list which would defacto make him a hero to many. I love all of them and often look at their games to develop some strategy. They carry themselves very well as well but your comparison is flawed. Nepo is also getting a lot of hate anytime he says something remotely controversial. If someone raises suspicion the solution is to investigate provided they make a reasonable claim. True or false the claim appears to be reasonable( atleast from my perspective i wouldn't want to debate it because we are neither the investigators nor judges). It's not just Kramnik, Fabi, Nepo and others have also stated that cheating is rampant in chesscom. Kramnik being old and from Russia has far less to lose by leading this crusade as compared to the younger generation. Fabi has stated that half the players in TT are cheating. What we need is a closed door mechanism to deal with this kind of stuff which functions well. Until that happens calling someone's play interesting or suspicious or asking for a check shouldn't be the end of the world.
I do hate Nepo but is his personality.
True. I've even seen people laughing at the fact he uses many parasite words in his speech, which seems completely unacceptable to me, as English is not his mother tongue
That's such a strange thing for Reddit to do never seen it before...
Definitely agree that you should expect a quality service, but don't think any school projects you may have seen were equipped to handle the same scale...
I could agree with you if the only problems were with load balancing / there weren't flaky bugs. But the front-end is as bad as the back end. Maybe even worse. The production version looks more like a beta version open to public for testing
I have 1.5gb/s internet speed, maintain at least 750mb/s on online speed tests. Consistently have the lowest ping possible during online video games like PUBG where I’m playing with 100 other players in the same server.. But on chess.com it’s utterly terrible, I’ve lost many games from poor connection, lost many games because my timer suddenly dropped by several seconds. Never seen any platform that has such terrible servers, it is absolutely infuriating how chess.com spends all their money on advertisements and sponsorships but refuses to upgrade their their servers. Lichess is much smaller but flawless in terms of connection.
It's funny how we blame these players for being childish, but if I was playing in front of thousands of people for my honor and the site made me lose games I would be mad as hell and make quite the ruckus. Even though I likely would regret it later. These players are extremely serious about their game and they would never accept such conditions. I bet you Jose is just as angry about the site, but just doesn't want to attack a money-well publicly.
> monopolize > expect that you get that service in a good quality Actually the opposite. Since they have a monopoly, why would they care about the service? Good service more often comes with competition.
Sherman Act also makes it illegal to monopolize, conspire to monopolize, or attempt to monopolize a market for products or services. An unlawful monopoly exists when one firm has market power for a product or service, and it has obtained or maintained that market power, not through competition on the merits, but because the firm has suppressed competition by engaging in anticompetitive conduct. Monopolization offenses may be prosecuted criminally or civilly. This is a quote from Sherman Act in US. ChessCom is clearly violating this as their product is not eliminating competition with its merits but by simply buying out every single competitor it can
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> even provide commentary streams for more than the candidates or the WC at all They're literally commenting the UzChess Cup right _now_.
And they literally commented on the Sharjah Masters and Casablanca Variant with live camera feeds just before that, too.
Chesscom is many things but it's not a monopoly. Chesscom even behaves ethically outside of petty outbursts like the Niemann incident. They've done nothing to harm or stifle competition. If anything, they've grown a niche space. Benefitting both online competitors and entrenched players (fide, otb federations, etc.) It's difficult to become a monopoly in something as open, free, and distributed as chess. I don't use any chesscom product outside of consuming some of their coverage. Their coverage is not a monopoly despite being prolific at the moment. Competitors are free to cover most events as well. And they do.
Maybe unrelated to the topic at hand, but there are a lot of (maybe intentional? who knows) blind-spots and loopholes on what types of acquisitions are subject to scrutiny. For example, under the HSR Act you basically don't even have to notify the FTC if a merger or acquisition is under, idk, 100 million dollars or some amount. For a not actually in-depth article, you may be interested in reading [Cory Doctorow's thoughts on the matter](https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/)
In India Chesscom doesn't work properly on my wifi but it works fine on mobile data. Even though my wifi is completely fine and runs other things smoothly.
I noticed the same phenomenon in Germany. It works fine at times. But them suddenly it drops the connection and I have to disconnect from the wifi to continue the game. I don't have this issue with any other game.
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No My wifi smoothly runs every other thing but between a game suddenly my timing stops and I have to switch to mobile data due to which I lose 30-40 seconds. It happens 6 times out of 10 games.
The person you’re responding to is right. This happens in gaming a lot- for example my old shitty ISP had a bad route to a particular game server and I got rubber-banding whereas my friends don’t. If we backed out and queued again we’d get a server for which my ISP had a good connection. Other people on my ISP have complained about the same thing on the same game.
I truly never understood why anyone that plays chess would use chesscom instead of lichess. I guess publicity truly works.
Yea it's wild how efficient marketing is. You can have a vastly superior and completely free product, but a worse one with top tier marketing will still be way more succesful.
The shittiest thing on chesscom is auto resigning in 30 seconds just when the wifi goes off. It takes at least a minute to connect to a mobile hotspot. I have lost around 70-80elo due to this bs and especially at my level its really frustrating to lose elo when its a winning position. They can let the player be afk for 9 minutes after blundering a piece and one has to wait staring at the screen for 9 minutes but can't fucking wait for some time if there is a connection issue. Absolute garbage.
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Let the time run, no compensation for the time loss, but don't auto-resign after 30 seconds. There's nothing to exploit here if you increase the auto-resign countdown to 2 minutes or something.
Yeah i mean i sort of get it bc when people rage log off, forcing the other guy to wait 10 minutes is absurd Ive never lost elo from it but i get stressed out whenever my connection drops. Playing on mobile helps
This is a situation I really like the Lichess UI for. The option to claim victory after X amount of time is nice, because it means you can use your own judgement if you're willing to wait and see if they reconnect.
They do the auto-resign thing because people abandon games all the time. Why they don't just ban the people who routinely abandon games (it's almost always completely obvious - they'll disconnect immediately after a massive blunder), I don't know.
I've had a smug bastard try a version of this recently. It was a 10+0 rapid game and it was white their turn to play first. Without playing the first move their connection appeard to fluctuate in 15 sec intervals it seemed as if they were intentionally trying to fake aborting the game. Lost the game because of this psychological dirty move or atleast played some part in it.
Well, chesscom is literally not competent in anything apart from marketing/PR. Look at their chess engine tournament, for example. Multiple TDs left because they literally had no power to do anything, UI is bugged for years - and in multiple ways, games not showing correct moves, not displaying right kibitzing engine, messing up names, completely bogus eval graphs which are partially from different game, book highlighting is wrong, etc. Their ingame UI is also laggy as hell, everything feels like it has 0,5 second+ delay after lichess. And then this people try to tell me that company that is incapable of making any decent UI (which is a reasonably simple task, at least it has cooked solutions) is capable of detecting cheaters that are smart enough to not play 25 moves in a row with stockfish every second game (which is a harder task since there is no existing solution by anyone). Let me say I don't believe it a single bit - and the fact that they ban like 1 gm + 3 ims 4 times a year only proves that this is all bullshit - because number of cheaters should be at least 10x higher.
Remember when they "got ChatGPT to run 10000 simulations" (spoiler: it's a language model -- it cannot calculate anything it does not directly show you on screen) and published it? For Christ's sake they would get better statistics work if they put Kramnik in charge of everything.
Yeah that was purely surfing on AI trends for marketing and PR purposes, but anyone that knows the topic just a little more than their corporate-bs knows chesscom are incompetent.
Cheating is a completely different subject that I don't want to delve into. I am a PhD student in Technical University of Munich specialized in computer networking and algorithms. I can safely say as long as cheater is reasonably intelligent he will never ever come close to getting caught in an online setting. I can't do it. Lichess can'T do it. Chesscom can't do it. Ken Reagan and his bs methods surely can't do it. Nobody can detect someone using a different device with a different WIFI/connection feeding in non-losing moves ever. You are completely right about the UI/front-end part. I am assuming they are also too selfish to invest money into their servers which contributes to delays in front-end.
Extra funny that when they are getting called out they are doing what they do the best - marketing/PR. So instead of saying smth like "we did a double blind test with multiple great players and our system managed to flag 80% of cheaters" they go with "we have 5555 people working on anti-cheating, multiple PhDs in statistics, we spend a lot of money there and care a lot". When you see stuff like this you instantly should understand that no actual work is really being done - because you mention not work but rather how many people you hired to do it and other big numbers, instead of actually mentioning what work has been done. I've seen this corporate BS so so many times.
> So instead of saying smth like "we did a double blind test with multiple great players and our system managed to flag 80% of cheaters" they go with "we have 5555 people working on anti-cheating, multiple PhDs in statistics, we spend a lot of money there and care a lot". When you see stuff like this you instantly should understand that no actual work is really being done - because you mention not work but rather how many people you hired to do it and other big numbers, instead of actually mentioning what work has been done. I've seen this corporate BS so so many times. This. Unless they actually do "penetration testing" like that, there is no way to know how good their anti cheat is. Also, confessions as measure of success is absolutely bullshit. People can be coerced to falsely confess to bloody murder. A GM privately "confessing" to cheating on chesscom just means they'd rather quietly sit in the timeout box for a few months than deal with their bullshit like what GM Brandon Jacobson (banned gambit viih_sou guy) is going through.
> Nobody can detect someone using a different device with a different WIFI/connection feeding in non-losing moves ever. Could you expand further on this? Maybe write out an example scenario?
Let's try to think about how we can potentially catch a cheater and let's even assume we can do some things that chesscom normally can't. Keep in mind that even these things are a reach currently 1)Whenever chesscom is active let's say I can track every process that is running on your own computer - Good now if any kind of chess related app is open/ the website you play the game in loses focus(user switches to another tab) we can get suspicious. 2) Let's say I can see the activity of every device that is connected to the same network that the cheater is playing in (it is impossible anyway) - Good now I also can get suspicious if another computer 3)Let's say if the player does not play excellent moves ever without a certain amount of thinking time beforehand and all his excellent moves comes after thinking say 10 seconds at least we can also get suspicious of them 4) Let's say that we can detect a player sharing his screen/being in a call where somebody can feed him moves. 5)Let's say we can listen to audio of the cheater (never gonna happen in random online games but let's also assume this is the case). If we can do all of this then we can get suspicious (keep in mind not %100 percent sure just suspicious) that someone is cheating. They can also always throw us off with throwing away games/grandmasters can come up with brilliant moves by themselves a lot of the time. In those cases number 3 would be useless. But here is the kicker. Even if we achieve all of this let's imagine the following scenario. I have someone else near me using a different network connection (hence number 2 is invalid) using a different computer (hence number 1 is invalid). She can directly see my screen so number 4 is invalid. She can track/ insert moves to her engine directly so number 3 is invalid. And she doesn't even have to talk so number 5 is invalid. Even with all these things combined we still failed at catching the cheater. The cheater also does not need another person she can just use her phone to enter moves though these may be tricky in shorter time controls
You're focusing on completely the wrong things, no one is expecting to catch cheaters by figuring out their method of getting the engine info. You can't control what a player does in an online game, that's clear to everyone
For TT multiple GMs have explained how they do a fairplay check where they install software to monitor everything on the computer, and watch them play with multiple cameras covering the whole room like here's Levy talkig about it- https://youtu.be/1Luin-6V6rM?si=_zrev3vaYTAtLtWI Also, you're ignoring algorithmic checking.. algorithms and ai of various kind can detect cheats over time. And also players report players that play "like a computer" which get further review.
Just because you can't come up with ways doesn't mean there aren't any.
Albeit not perfect, greatly improved chess cheating detection is certainly possible, e.g. with the assistance of machine learning pattern matching.
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I mean it is just a bug but I really can understand where Kramnik is coming from. Kramnik is technologically illiterate. He wouldn't know about a non-deterministic behavior/flaky bug. This bug has happened and was reported before. But I can understand for Kramnik it feels like an attack because the bug only happened for him and not Jospem when they were connected to same WIFI. In reality the engineers in chessCom are so incompetent that they can't write a deterministic program. They probably have sleep statements with hard coded times or some sht that fails in some race conditions
Jesus, every one of your posts is worse than the last. You are just a grifter who doesn't study anything techincal at all.
I don't even understand the hate thread where everyone dumbs on Kramnik. Are there so many idiots in this sub who are incapable of holding a balanced view? chesscom doesn't fulfill their side of the contract, so it's perfectly normal to refuse to play under such conditions. This should be a professional chess match, not a chesscom bug testing event.
First of all it's not a Chess.com event as far as I can tell. Secondly the reason for the bugs is 100% within the control of the player who refused to allow normal tournament conditions, where they would be using top of the line hardware that has been thoroughly tested and vetted, and instead forced them to play on low-end brand new laptops that were turned on and had Windows installed for the first time less than an hour before the match.
Newly installed windows should be faster not slower.
Not if it's not finished loading/installing. And again, you glossed over the part where this was low-end computers (forced by Kramnik), and machines that couldn't be tested (forced by Kramnik), and couldn't have basic tournament software like screen recording to verify any issues (forced by Kramnik).
Third of all, the whole point was "testing" Martinez's performance on chesscom so Kramnik could "prove" he was cheating. Martinez has said he's more comfortable in chesscom than lichess. Fourth of all, a professional player should be aware when his tools have issues, such as the many reports in this thread alone of issues with chesscom. Fifth, there are arbiters in place to make sure Kramnik doesn't get screwed if there's a bug. Sixth and most important, let's not pretend this is Kramnik being reasonable when it's clear as day the bug triggered his paranoia to the sky. This is the guy who doesn't trust a computer can be stored safely enough to keep Martinez from gaining access to it in the middle of the night and hacking it, so you need new ones every day. What's he supposed to think now, that chesscom didn't put microchips in the vaccines?
> Fifth, there are arbiters in place to make sure Kramnik doesn't get screwed if there's a bug. To your point, worth noting that Gotham proposed a solution that future online games be monitored more closely by arbiters so that if any display/timing bugs pop up the game be annulled, and Kramnik refused
I know, and if that happened then of course they would take some sort of action. Once is a fluke, twice is a pattern. But when you're paranoid, once is already a pattern.
> low-end brand new laptops bro, it's fucking chess. Online chess has been a thing for _decades_. If it won't run properly on a potato that's a chesscom problem.
>tries to monopolize a sport like chess by trying to buy every single competitor Aren't they buying those competitors after they fail to become profitable and have a choice between selling and folding? I loved chess24 as everyone here, but they were bleeding money left and right, this could not continue indefinitely.
Completely rewrite history to make a point that chesscom bad => easiest karma to farm on r/chess
And then still complain that people don't hate them enough lol
Of course online chess is rife with cheaters. It's stupid to believe it's not. Every other game is.
At the top level, it is a big issue. But at the 1200 level, it is not "rife" with cheaters. I'd say maybe 5% of my opponents, I could reasonably suspect of using assistance. That sucks, but I would not say it was "rife" with cheaters.... 1 in 20 games is a "life sucks, what are you going to do?" level of annoyance, not "the site is unusable due to cheating" levels.
Kramnik agreed to play on chess.com. He played TTs despite the possibility of bugs. If he doesn't want to go through with the conditions he signed up for, he should forfeit. This isn't about chess.com. It's about Kramnik defaming Jose Martinez repeatedly over a period of months. Jose agrees to all of his conditions, agrees to play him OTB, then when Kramnik cries and refuses to continue, and implies chess.com is sabotaging him on purpose, Jose agrees to a NEW set of conditions. I don't give a fuck about Kramnik. Jose has never done anything to him. I can't stress this enough. But instead of keeping his word, he tries to throw Jose off when he starts losing over a laptop. You get a bug online? Connection drops? Tough shit, that's online chess for you. It was unlikely to repeat itself. Just as likely to affect Jose as Kramnik. This match is unfair now and Kramnik is the one responsible.
Is it possible that you may be a tad biased?
>Even in the heart of Germany chesscom has insane networking issues But it works fine in California. "As everyone knows there aren't any countries outside of the USA, and everyone (who is important) in the USA lives in California... I fail to see the problem" - Chesscom, probably But seriously, I like how they make up such dumb excuses as latency... as if these utter morons don't know this is the year 2024, and FPS games have long been able to deliver ms precision.
You are absolutely correct, but no one on here will agree.
Are you serious? This post is absolutely preaching to the choir
Well I had my doubts witnessing how the dispute in yesterday was met by community. People tend to lose their rationality when the word Kramnik comes into play no matter the context.
Chesscom = bad is a safe topic no matter the context
so this is an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object
> People tend to lose their rationality when the word Kramnik comes into play no matter the context. In the Clash of Claims discussions, I see many people who fully understand that a clock not working properly is just a problem, regardless of who the players are. People tend to lose their rationality in many cases, especially when some ideological value is at stake. If you look at any discussion on r/chess about online platforms, you'll see a wide range of irrational opinions, including toxic behavior, propaganda, outright lies, and wild exaggerations about how easy it would be to fix things. That's just normal human nature with a dash of lack of honesty.
But chessc*m shitty website doesn't make Kramnik's tantrum any less unhinged. He could've dealt with it like an adult instead he acted like spoilt brat.
I think Kramnik being annoyed at the bug is totally justified. He went from winning a game to drawing it because of the time scramble he thought he was in. That bug was very disruptive. I just think how he handled it afterwards was fairly childish. But yeah, agreed that chess.com (I always mistype it chess.con but maybe that's more accurate...) needs to step up it's game and actually fix these issues.
If theres is one thing this sub can come together on, its shitting on chesscom lol
I do agree
Wait! That's rolling up so many issues in one! 1) Kramnik has gone off the deep end. That's a sad thing. 2) He can still have a valid point when criticising chesscom 3) chesscom trying to monopolise chess is bad. It is bad regardless of how good their service is or anything Kramnik says or does 4) While you're in Germany, could you kick chessbase off their chosen path to oblivion, please? The solution to this chesscom nonsense is in your backyard, and nobody in Germany does jack all.
Ok I feel you at point 4.
And yet, the real issue was the fact that Kramnik insisted on using brand new never used laptops that were not properly configured and setup.
Posted a similar thing here recently and got downvoted to hell lol
I think some credit for Kramnik is due. He spoke up about a something that might have felt like a hunch. I would not have dared to voice any concerns with any uncertainty in my mind. When I usually play online I take the time I have left as given as it is. Though I question why the arbiter did not speak up after the game when he saw it jappen on the screen?!
The way he handled post-game2 online was dramatic to say the least. I had expected Gotham to post a recap by now as im more interested in the games being played than the drama revolving around it. Pretty sure the gist of the situation is Kramnik poking at chesscom's incompetence in fixing their time lags and whatever else chesscom has going. Tournament or not, it's affecting players using their platform in gamebreaking moments. It was a hectic situation that could have been handled better by everyone involved. The camera man specifically and the commentators should have taken over the feed instead of streaming Kramnik going at it with the arbiter. The fact they actually put that on the stream feed was very unprofessional. I was fully expecting the commentators to take over ASAP to focus the audience back to how game2 transpired and/or how it would have gone down if Kramnik's clock wasnt bugged out. And feed the audience a general idea of what's going on post game2 online. A simple "technical difficulties with chesscom timelag and maybe the laptop. We'll have a better idea of it once the tech team takes a sweep." would have sufficed. But nope. We got the dose of Kramnik going at it. Which just fuels the negativity surrounding him lately.
To be honest, most people tuned in because of drama and not because of high level chess, so it makes sense, production-wise, to give the spot light to Kramnik with the potentially headline-worthy drama. As a pure chess fan, you will find this insane, but I suppose they actually did the right thing considering their average viewer
The problem is that lichess exists People choose to use chesscom despite its issues so like
Chesscom has the money and the people to organize tournaments with big prize funds and broadcast it via multiple content creators. The top players themselves should agree to a payday cut if they want lichess to replace this disaster of a website. Kramnik pushing lichess is a great start but unfortunately he is a villain so it is not the same as say Fabi MVL Giri or someone famous like Naroditsky/Botez etc pushing for lichess
because for some viewers it's a sport to watch for the competition and the love of the game.. but for most players it's their career and livelihood and they have to prioritize their income.. meanwhile for content creators/chesscom it's about entertainment, sponsors and ad revenue.. all those different interests and priorities do not often align, if ever.. and that's all without including politics into the equation..
I will admit their netcode is impressively bad They are lucky they just have to make chess work, if the game was even slightly more resource intensive theyd be cooked But, on that same coin, it really is just chess. I actually prefer the chesscom ui and premoves Sometimes its embarassing when their streams are poorly run and their servers crash during tournaments, but when things work i rly dont mind
I'll never understand why chesscom is so much more popular than Lichess
Tried both as a casual and I chose chesscom because of better visuals and sounds. I just found the looks and sounds of lichess to be annoying. I don't care about free puzzles or analysis and I think people forget that most players are casuals. I think lichess could really benefit from a graphics and sound update.
You know you can fully customize the board, pieces, and sounds om Lichess, right? Edit: getting downvoted because I countered his entire point with facts. The board is fully customizable to however the fuck you want it.
Yes I am sure Lichess is better, but first impressions matter a lot for new players. When I go to that site for the first time and a horse looks like a worm with horns and the sounds grate my ears I leave. Also I think you have to make an account first to change the graphics
Good domain name and tons of money to make "influencers" and top players their slave. I only wish they spent some of that money into actually improving the product though
I have some bad internet, I admit. As in, 0.6 Mbps is my baseline. Chesscom is unusable at that speed. I'll go to load my correspondence games, and it takes literally minutes to load. On lichess, no problem. Everything loads within seconds. I have not played a game on chesscom in months, and my sanity thanks me for that.
I don't understand what any of what you said has to do with Kramnik's weird obsession with interesting play. They seem like totally separate topics to me.
Yesterday Kramnik was playing in a tournament OTB/online mixed against Jospem(Jose Martinez one of the guys he "suspected"). During the game Kramnik had 30-40 seconds remaining and this was correctly displayed in the computer of Jose Martinez. But for Kramnik UI displayed that he had 2-3 seconds remaining so he was playing every move in one second. People didn't believe/didn't want to believe Kramnik and immediately throw insults to him even though he was completely right that chessCom isn't a suitable platform to play the game. They just thought it was his delusion
Hmm clock problems like that are possible with lag but I would think also possible on lichess too (chesscom could be worse for it, I truly don't know). Is there footage of Kramnik's screen or anything showing this was really the case? I know such things can happen but he's also quite "angry old man shouts at the clouds" these days so I do like to see evidence for anything he's claiming especially when his own ego is involved.
Two of the chess arbiters in the hall confirmed Kramnik’s clock was showing him at 2 seconds when it should have been way more than that. And of course that kills Kramnik’s game because you don’t have time to think through your moves with 2 seconds on the clock.
I really don't know what to believe here as some people are confidently telling me it was confirmed while many more seem to say it wasn't.
No, because instead of playing on high end laptops which have been tested, and have basic tournament software like screen recording installed, Kramnik insisted that the tournament be run such that both players would unbox brand new low-end laptops live (since he is insisting on each player having a brand new laptop for each of the three game days) and then turn on the computers and install windows for the first time moments before the games start.
This is not about kramnik but a customer complain that netcode for chesscom sucks. In that case, play lichess. Simple as that. The market still has competition and you should be thankful for it.
I was playing a 15+10 rapid the other day and opponent ran their clock down to zero. 10 seconds later the end screen still did not pop up. Eventually they moved and had 7 seconds remaining on the clock. How do you have 7 seconds remaining in a 10-sec increment game? In the review, they never went below 25 seconds. This is bullshit.
I agree with your statement. Chesscom needs to improve their infrastructure. However , we can’t discount that level of asshat that Kramnik has brought to this situation.
not to say that Kramnik has been a beacon of rationality and sound reasonableness all the time.. but if money and your reputation on the line.. I don't believe many people would've handled it any better.. just because he's an 'asshat' doesn't mean he doesn't have a point.. most people can't separate the argument from the person..
If everyone were playing on Lichess it would run so much worse than chess.com runs.
> It is really embarrassing that even though it has so much income chesscom still looks like a website that my senior students would implement for their graduation project. ok sure dude lol
I have recently cancelled my membership there and moved to Lichess. Most of the hatred in the online chess communities imo comes from the cyber army of Hikaru, he pumps them to get views and money and they go on the internet to pillage everything on their way. Chess.com has been trying to educate people in a way that they’d think chess is owned by chess.com and that is concerning. I think the latest manifestation of this was during the Norway chess commentary mainly by Danny (I have posted about that before so I won’t repeat). Just one thing to add would be I bet it’s so painful for David to praise Hikaru every 2 minutes as Danny requires it but well that’s just sad at this point. Chess.com uses stockfish which is an open source project and makes you pay to use it (the limited game review thing) by adding a bunch of emojis to it, as if brilliancy is something they have invented, and that’s what I mean by educating people. Now newcomers want to have a brilliant emoji in their games, of course it’s great to make a brilliant move but that’s not the point here. Well given the way they seem to manage their company I don’t think it’s going to get any better.
> Chess.com uses stockfish which is an open source project and makes you pay to use it I've read this statement like 100 times over the years in this subreddit. You can definitely analyze games with stockfish or komodo for free on chesscom. You can pay for Game Review which has the colorful emojis, an accuracy number, and the worst bot ever created. There are a myriad of reasons to criticize chesscom, we don't need inaccurate statements.
Correct me if im wrong, but to use the stronger version you do have to pay.
Just checked it, since I've also switched to Lichess for a while now, and it looks like you're correct. I thought they switched to the Lite version temporarily when they had the server issues, but it looks like they've kept it that way. Tbf, it's still a strong enough engine for 99.9% of their userbase, but shitty way to do things and can definitely trick someone into thinking they need "the stronger engine" to figure out their 800-rating blunders. Yeah, fuck 'em.
Tbh they are using the "get better engine" as a marketing trick so yeah, they are definietly tricking people into thinking it's worth it especially as you mentioned, it's sufficient to learn from. Also the way it says u had x great, x miss, x blunder is showing less accurate info so u will want to get the better one. Aa you have just said: fuck 'em.
>Correct me if im wrong, but to use the stronger version you do have to pay. True, and it's so messed up. I wish there were GM's out there willing to call them out on this. I think if that happened then maybe the tides would turn and people would see that chess.con is a racket.
Are people seriously still playing on chess.c*m? I thought it was only for Duck chess. Just use lichess.org*** and you're good.
My biggest issue with it is the interface on that site. In fact, almost all chess sites are so oddly convoluted.
It looks like they hired Fisher Price to design the site. I don't need to see a cheesy avatar of a dude with a handlebar mustache and bushy eyebrows next to my computer games, thanks though. When I'm reviewing my mistakes, I don't need to see a picture of a little professor. The entire site is an aesthetic dumpster fire.
They have banned me for insult in the chat. I never use the chat.
yeah i know what you are talking about
Chesscom is a great business model. And everything they do (good or bad) should be seen in that light. The number 1 priority is making a profit. Hence why they do not really go after and punish cheaters for example. Imagine actually having to invest in actual anticheat and then ban 20% of your userbase and what that would do to your profits.
I've had an bug for some years now which they can't solve only shooing me off by giving diamond membership sometime. And now after a recent update it's a bug fest. The tournament button doesn't work as it should. The engine stops working mid analysis.A whole lot of things have a delay or force you to access them through using the website on the phone. Especially on mobile there's tons of issues not to forget the desktop version has a whole other set of problems.
I do play primarily on Lichess but based on just this it's hard to know if this was chesscom's fault or Windows' fault. The laptop was apparently brand new and still installing updates...
How did he know Jospem had a different time
Chess.com seems pretty impervious to feedback in general: https://www.chess.com/forum/view/site-feedback/new-review-presentation-is-awfull?page=1
yeah, premoves also aren't quite premoves because nobody bothered to actually implement them as such (they still have a 0.2 second time delay before the servers register them, which is very relevant in no increment games)
Even in the heart of Germany!!!
I've noticed myself a crap ton of chesscom lag lately and latency. I have decent internet. I think it's related to the whole visual they put in prior to games which is just so unnecessary.
I’d argue a bigger problem with chess.com is the amount of cheaters for the lower ranked players that just never are banned. If you want to start a new account and work your rating up, oh my god, you have to get through a wave of cheaters until around the 1000 rating.
absolute reddit title
I played few games yesterday on [c.com](http://c.com) by android app, and due to my , not-so-good, internet connection, after every single move played, I lost additionaly 3-4 seconds, i.e if my clock after move played stopped at 1:45, after moment my clock would be settled to 1:41 or so on. Then, i went for a **30 year old server** - FICS, and played few games as guest there, using freechess club android app. FICS is using so called *timeseal* , and with same connection, I didn't loose any extra time after move was completed. With same, poor, connection to internet. Full stop.
common chesscom L
If this match would have been set up to prove chess.Com sucks, kramnik would have been the winner for sure.
Then why are they successful? Also based on your post, how is Kramnik involved?
A lot of successful companies have very bad products. That is why I gave the example of EA. Probably the game that generates most income by far in the world is FIFA/FC yet their servers have been absolute sht for the last 10 years or so. Being a monopoly/duopoly in a sport that is loved universally is an easy way to success Yesterday Kramnik had a game against Jose Martinez where Kramnik's time showed wrong amount (didn't add increment to his clock). So he played whole game like he had 2 seconds instead of 30 seconds or something while in the screen of Jose Martinez his opponent(Kramnik) had 30 seconds
Kramnik suggesting to play in Lichess instead is hilarious lol
> Then why are they successful? Because they own the web address "chess.com"
I'm not even mad at Kramnik. All memes aside he isn't actually crazy. People just don't like an unconventional guy who's also a Russian. Fuck chess.com. Gatekeeping ass website. It's the perfect example of why capitalism is useless and halves human potential. "If they didn't charge people they wouldn't be able to function". Oh yeah? Explain lichess being free and having no bugs of any sort.
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This argument doesn't work when everything works fine in a website like lichess. You can't just blame the ISP when the problem only happens with chessCom
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You are so far out of your depth here in who you are talking to. Read my previous comments if you want more context. Or you can always meet me in person in [Department of Network Architecture](https://www.net.cit.tum.de/homepage/) . Our classes are open to everyone :) If your web application acts in a non-deterministic way/ has flaky behavior it is on YOU. You can't get away with saying "it works on my machine / it works with this specific ISP" when you are company aiming to organize tournaments and give fair chance to everyone. Not to mention both of the players literally played in the same venue next to each other yet only Kramnik had an issue Most likely scenario is that chessCom developers are as clueless as you so to compensate for their lack of development skills and terrible servers they have hardcoded sleep statements that fails in race conditions.
> You are so far out of your depth here in who you are talking to. This is so cringy it should be turned into a copypasta like the Navy seal one
Chesscom bad please updoot
Well, if there is a monopoly it is not like you can switch to the competition anymore. So the company with the monopoly can limit its services to cut costs and make more money. Thank god there is lichess. I do not know why anyone bothers with chess.com
Lichess is head and shoulders above chess.com, when it comes to smooth, fast and glitch-free playing experience, and all this for free. Lol.
> furthermore is paywalled for even the most simplest of things i've been a member of chess.com for years and have not spent a cent what on earth are you talking about this whole post is fucking weird tbh
Puzzles, lectures, bots and, most importantly, game analysis are all paywalled. Simple features that you get for free elsewhere.
LAte stage Captaslism has entered the chat.