The new Fritz10 User Interface to Playchess.com allows one to
optionally filter out opponents with slow connections. However, this
doesn't help much when you have an opponent with a fast ping response,
but lags of 7 or 8 seconds start appearing midway through a close
blitz or bullet game.

Sure, you can kill the game and put the opponent on your ignore-list.
But he still gets the point. I don't like that.

Here's a proposal that might provide some disincentive for this kind
of lag cheating.

When the game starts, have a grayed-out "Lag-abort" button. If the
opponent's actual lag exceeds his connection lag by some predetermined
amount, the Lag-abort button gets activated. You can click it to
abort the game with no penalty. But you don't have to. So, if you
think you can still win even against the lag-cheating, you have the
option of playing on and picking up the rating points or ducats.

This gives the lag cheat a "heads I lose, tails I break even" sort of
option when he fires up his lag process.

Comments? Have I overlooked something?

Mike Murray wrote:
When the game starts, have a grayed-out "Lag-abort" button. If the
opponent's actual lag exceeds his connection lag by some
predetermined amount, the Lag-abort button gets activated. You can
click it to abort the game with no penalty. But you don't have to.
So, if you think you can still win even against the lag-cheating,
you have the option of playing on and picking up the rating points
or ducats.

Sounds like about the best you can do. The only problem I can see is
that it gives people the incentive to start lagging if they look like
losing, in the hope that the opponent will abort the game instead of
winning it. But I don't see a way round that.


Dave.

--
David Richerby Psychotic Nuclear Drink (TM): it's
www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ like a refreshing juice beverage
that's made of atoms but it wants to
kill you!

"Mike Murray" wrote in message
...
The new Fritz10 User Interface to Playchess.com allows one to
optionally filter out opponents with slow connections. However, this
doesn't help much when you have an opponent with a fast ping response,
but lags of 7 or 8 seconds start appearing midway through a close
blitz or bullet game.

Sure, you can kill the game and put the opponent on your ignore-list.
But he still gets the point. I don't like that.

Here's a proposal that might provide some disincentive for this kind
of lag cheating.

Have you considered that he may not actually be cheating ??????????????
This often happens with the ISP.

Regards

On Mon, 21 May 2007 12:09:59 +0100, "Terry"
wrote:

Have you considered that he may not actually be cheating ??????????????
This often happens with the ISP.

Yes, that's why I advocated an abort without penalty, rather than
trying to claim a forfeit of some kind.

I had a game the other day where a big lag (about 8 seconds) suddently
appeared, and I sent a message, "nice lag" to my opponent. He
replied, "oops, can we abort ?", I agreed and we aborted the game. He
apologized and explained that he had another window open kibitizing
and this had caused the lag.

There's no fool-proof way to identify someone cheating, but when the
lag appears toward the middle or end of a close game where your
opponent is behind on time, one suspects.....strongly.

In article ,
Mike Murray wrote:

There's no fool-proof way to identify someone cheating, but when the
lag appears toward the middle or end of a close game where your
opponent is behind on time, one suspects.....strongly.

It might be reason for suspicion, but perhaps not strong suspicion.

I mean, in half the games where lag appears, through nobody's fault,
you'll be ahead on time - completely randomly. In half the games where
lag appears, through nobody's fault, randomly, you'll be winning on the
board.

Put those two together and 75% of the time, when lag appears midway
through a game, you'll have one of the two conditions which most people
would use as evidence of cheating.

I mentioned "confirmation bias" in another thread, and this is another
instance where you need to be careful of it. When you're ahead on the
clock, or have a winning position, you tend to REALLY notice when all of
a sudden your opponent's connection gets laggy.

If the position is even, or your opponent is better, or your opponent
has plenty of time ... you tend not to notice at all.

-Ron

On Mon, 21 May 2007 16:41:27 GMT, Ron
wrote:

In article ,
Mike Murray wrote:

There's no fool-proof way to identify someone cheating, but when the
lag appears toward the middle or end of a close game where your
opponent is behind on time, one suspects.....strongly.

It might be reason for suspicion, but perhaps not strong suspicion.

I mean, in half the games where lag appears, through nobody's fault,
you'll be ahead on time - completely randomly. In half the games where
lag appears, through nobody's fault, randomly, you'll be winning on the
board.

My impression is that lag doesn't tend to appear as often when one
side or the other is clearly winning on the board. There's little
point in cheating when one is winning without it, or when it's too
late to help.

Put those two together and 75% of the time, when lag appears midway
through a game, you'll have one of the two conditions which most people
would use as evidence of cheating.

I mentioned "confirmation bias" in another thread, and this is another
instance where you need to be careful of it. When you're ahead on the
clock, or have a winning position, you tend to REALLY notice when all of
a sudden your opponent's connection gets laggy.

If the position is even, or your opponent is better, or your opponent
has plenty of time ... you tend not to notice at all.

Your point about confirmation bias is well taken, but since I've
started to complain about lag cheating, I've tried to be alert for
this, and to notice lag *every* time it appears. As far as I can
tell, it tends *not* to appear as often when one side or the other is
overwhelmingly winning on the board. It tends *not* to appear as
often when my opponent is significantly ahead on time. It tends *not*
to appear as often at time controls of 3-2 or 5-2, or other TCs with a
reasonably generous blitz increment..

Of course, one tends to get distracted when playing blitz and bullet
and I'm not trying to sell this as a scientific experiment. It
wouldn't be that hard to play a couple hundred games with an observer
and try to gather some betters stats, however.