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BGonline.org Forums
cheaters
Posted By: Daniel Murphy In Response To: cheaters (alain31)
Date: Tuesday, 10 August 2010, at 5:39 p.m.
Your sample is two games only? Lots of players can play many games with few if any errors. I can't draw any conclusions from the the data you cite, by itself. There are many good players. And some games play themselves. I think it will often be difficult to draw firm conclusions from even much more data than you have. Let me illustrate:
A year or so ago, a player sent me about 10 games (10 DMP matches), in all of which his opponent had an error rate of 0.0 or close to it. Like you, this player's question was also "what do you think."
Now, I never was a "world class" player, and I'm rusty; I haven't played live or online for a very long time. But my DMP error rate is still very low, and I imagine hundreds of players can play such games as well or better than I can.
With that in mind -- I played through all the matches. My impression was that all 10 games happened to be the kind of games that "play themselves." There were few if any difficult plays. As I played through the games, my play nearly always matched the play the opponent made. The few times our plays did not match were of two kinds. Most of the time, it was very easy for me to imagine that a player somewhat better than myself might easily have chosen that play instead of mine. For a few plays, the Opponent's play wasn't obviously better, but they weren't obviously "bot plays" either. Indeed, in a few positions where the choice of play made nearly no difference I identified a handful of plays that a bot most likely would not have made.
My "scientific" conclusion was that this 10 game set (1) was not evidence that the Opponent was using a bot, and (2) was not inconsistent with the level of play I would expect from a very good player in 10 games like these.
My "practical" conclusion was more of a question for my correspondent: if you are playing for money online for profit, why on earth would you spend your time playing opponents with world class error rates, whether they are cheating or not? For you, with a two game sample, I think that question is premature. For my correspondent, I would have advised him to move on; there are bigger fish in the pond.
Let me add that in longer matches more than money game sessions, and in money game sessions more than DMP matches, you should find it easier to identify both (1) players who have weak spots and (2) players who may be cheating. I think it's very unfortunate that the online servers' rake structure, which generally takes a higher rake for longer matche, thereby discourages money players from playing anything but one-point DMP matches.
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