Beta Testing for my Startup - Chess 4 Money

If there's money involved, how will you combat the use of engines?

My unsolicited thoughts: I like the idea, but I think it's impossible to effectively prevent cheating.

Even chess.com, which has the resources to put massive amounts of money into best-in-class anti-cheat, has issues catching blatant cheaters for a while. It's impossible to prevent someone from selectively/strategically using an engine in a way where it's difficult for the anti-cheat to catch it, especially when money is on the line.

I’m sure you guys have considered this but smurf accounts (good players creating new accounts with low ratings) are going to be a huge problem on this platform. Right now anyone can create a new account on chess.com and start from the bottom of the ratings. People don’t do this often now because their max rating is what they care about - there’s little incentive to deliberately pair yourself against weaker players, as there’s no money to be won.
 

In poker, by contrast, people don’t want to play against players of similar skill - they want to play against the worst players they can find. That’s because there’s money on the line. This platform would create the same effect for chess, with GM level players creating new accounts to make a quick buck off amateurs. Poker survives this effect because it is random enough in the short term that ‘fish’ (weak players) will still win hands a lot of the time even against pros, leaving them coming back for more. An 800 rated player against a GM pretending to be 800 will get blown off the $&@ing board - there will be no illusion they could have won. Between the demoralization and the money lost, new players will quickly leave the ecosystem if this happens to them more than a couple of times.

I know you mentioned verifying IDs, but I’m not sure how you expect to really catch people without state of the art duplicate account detection, as they could easily borrow an ID from a friend. That’s a tough problem for a small company to have to solve. Even then, a GM could create a new account and have a legitimate 800 rating in your ecosystem (unless you are requiring them to disclose existing ELO scores) and can make some quick money until they climb up to their actual rating level, without even breaking the rules.

One potential way to reduce this is to give some sort of financial incentive for higher rated players - maybe certain stakes are only available at certain ratings, or the rake taken by the house / membership fees decline. The parallel in poker is that pro players are usually willing to play higher stakes even though they have less of an edge because there is more for them to win per hour and less rake, even if they have a lower win %. But these incentives have to be really finely tuned for chess, and even then…high stakes poker still has some fishes, whereas GM level chess by definition has none. It would still be far easier for strong players to play weak players for guaranteed money in chess.

Another potential solution is to position yourself primarily as a platform for friends to wager against each other, and place less of a focus on matchmaking with strangers. I and others would welcome a platform where I can put money on a game against a friend, as I know who I am signing up to play against. Obviously this would decrease the scope of the platform significantly, though.

Hopefully this doesn’t come across as overly negative or critical - on the contrary, I think this is a really good idea, and have thought about it a lot before. It’s just that wagering is uncommon in games that have low variance, and chess has once of the lowest variances out of any game.