Cheating - how Lichess works and what users should think about it

Disclaimer: This blog was made on my sole initiative and not at the behalf or the urging of Lichess staff. They are welcome to read and assess it, and give corrections wherever necessary. I made this to finally have a uniform reference to all popular misconceptions and populist attitudes I need to deal with at the forums, Discord and Twitch. So in the future, I don’t need to explain the same things over and over in walls of text that are easily forgotten.

I’m not a Lichess mod/dev myself, and all information is drawn from months of reading and answering in the Feedback forum and the #support channel in Lichess‘ official Discord, noticing various statements given by the mods, and last but not least also the two videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmIFdrUVHXw (31:00 – 48:05) and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZgyVadkgmI (15:40 – 25:00). The latter may be five years old but nothing essential has changed.

(btw, ToS means "Terms of Service", you can read them here: https://lichess.org/terms-of-service)

A) How appealing works

The appeal system gives you a venue to contest any decision of the mods (ranging from a ToS ban to a mod just closing your forum thread) in a regulated way. Obviously enough, it’s not a free pass. But it ain't a farce either!

All important information on the appeal process can already be drawn from lichess.org/page/appeal, but I want to clarify a few points even more explicitely. Let me start by saying that if you know you’re guilty, then the only reasonable thing for you to do is admit and apologize. Do not expect to trick the mods when they already caught you. It generally applies that if you admit to an offense, you might get a new chance instantly or after some temporary duration of punishment, depending on the severity at the discretion of staff. Appeals are commonly dealt with faster than three days. All reasons for completely ignoring an appeal are listed in lichess.org/page/appeal.

Why is it guaranteed that your appeal is reviewed by a different moderator?

In fact, appeals are handled only by the most experienced and highest ranked moderators. Only a good 10% of moderators are doing appeals. In the staff team, there’s an elaborate division of task and a hierarchy both horizontally and vertically. Most of the mods are dedicated to cheat detection, others are responsible for chat and communication. And again, the best of moderators are taking care of appeals. Even when they make a first-instance action on their own, they can’t dispatch the appeal for it. This action would be visible to everyone else in the team.

Is there even a point in appealing?

I definitely stress that there is, provided you’re not making a pointless denial. I explicitely know cases of people successfully unbanned from a ToS mark issued for allegation of cheating. Someone I know from my early-day community tournaments was banned and then successfully appealed. The double marathon winner from 2021 (Kolian222) was banned in February for two weeks (longer than the first response to an appeal takes) and then was unbanned. I also remember someone being banned, then unbanned after a long back-and-forth discussion, then again banned, now permanently.

This means that Lichess tries to take defendants seriously and gives enough respect to the possibility of being wrong or not having enough evidence. The most essential purpose of the appeal system is to ensure double-checking.

I was banned innocently! How can I even show innocence when I don’t know at all why Lichess thinks I was cheating?

That’s a tough question, but maybe not even as important as you think. The "community friend" mentioned in the previous paragraph just asked the mods to reinvestigate and that was it. Maybe you have some basic ideas on cheat detection yourself, maybe you tried to analyze your own games and search for the crucial point. If you have any imaginations on why you were falsebanned, explain yourself and your play to the best of your ability. In any case, there’s no point in writing hollow words like „I play chess for fun“ or „I did this and this ... in chess“ or „I have a community that can vouch for my innocence“, added by „can you please unban me fast, I want to support my team in the Lichess League“ etc. Such phrases are of zero interest to the moderators, and they do not make you look innocent – see part D.

Additionally, as many appellants claim that another person took over their account and cheated, you are always fully responsible for your account to prevent this in the first place. Hacking of accounts is highly unlikely if you don’t have a cheap password and don‘t give it away carelessly. If you’re extra anxious about that, get 2FA.

My appeal was declined with a somewhat rude and pretentious response! I’m so upset! I hate you guys and I will warn everyone of this site from now on!

There is a standard response to declining a cheat appeal with a final decision. As lichess.org/page/appeal explains, this response comes from a human decision, not from anything automated. Why is it reprehensible that mods use a copy-pasted standard message when they have their hands full and when there’s nothing else to convey? Maybe its wording could be improved indeed, but in the first place, it just conveys that your appeal was declined after reinvestigating and your means of redress are exhausted (see ToS). It’s not a personal insult by any means – mods didn’t know you in any way, so why should they expel you for reasons of grudge or anything likewise immoral? The appeal still fulfilled the purpose of reinvestigation, even when it wasn’t your preferred outcome.

If you were truly innocent and declined even after reinvestigating (which, again being stressed, the mods do in a serious and unbiased manner), then I can only feel sorry, but that fundamental imperfection is characteristic for all aspects of human life. Lichess is fully aware of this, so there’s nothing wrong with them mentioning the existence of false-positives in the rejection message. They’re trying the best they can and if they were wrong on you, it’s not their moral guilt.

B) What punishments occur under what circumstances

People feel a lot of uncertainty when someone close to them gets banned. There are popular explanation attempts that the ban was not for cheating or something likewise reprobate. They think there might be somewhat random reasons like having one account too many. This is essentially wrong, so here’s a general overview of Lichess‘ sanctioning system.

• ToS mark: usually issued for cheating or rating manipulation (sandbagging or boosting). I hardly witnessed any other reasons, as they are commonly dealt with differently. By the way, cheating encompasses any way of unfair advantage over your opponent – not just engines / chessbots but also account sharing, lag-cheating in fast chess, and likewise.
• Chatban / mute: chat offenders have their communication privileges revoked, which means noone can see their messages anymore. Their profile text and blogs become invisible too. They can still play as anyone else though. It makes no sense for Lichess to give a ToS mark for chat offenses – why forbid them to play, when all you need to do is prevent them from talking?
• Playban: This measure, other than the previous two, is noticed straight away by the account holder. Bad sportsmanship infractions (stalling and aborting) can eventually lead to a playban. Upon further infractions, the playban is lengthened. There’s an automated system for that, and commonly no need for moderators to regulate it.
• Rankban: Removal from the official rating rankings is a minor punishment that is given to people over-inflating their rating by playing easy opponents only (farming), knowingly making use of a sandbagger, and similar. It may also be an act of reprieval after a boosting mark that you’re allowed back in the ranking list only when your boosted rating is normal again.
• Report ban: Another minor punishment that means mods will no longer receive your reports because you terribly abused the feature. So, being civil in your reports should be enough to prevent this from happening.
• Forced account closure: This is Lichess‘ preferred action for excessive sportsmanship violators, ban-evaders, excessive multi-accounters or any even more outrageous wrongdoings. Lichess updated their ToS to clarify on multiaccounting, as some paranoia are common here too („can I open a 2nd account or will I be banned??“) so just read that section. ToS marks are not issued for multiaccounting, to clear this common misconception.

As a bystander, you can also try and find extra evidence to decide whether a ToS ban occured for cheating or not.

• Cheaters lose their arena stats from the previous 30 days. If you check their tournament history and only arenas from at least a month ago are listed, while for a fact they played arenas in the past month, it means it was a ban for cheating.
• On the other end, if there are still recent arena results, you can conclude it was a ban for manipulation.
• If a cheater is banned in the middle of a tournament, their games are nulled and awarded to the opponents. Afaik this doesn’t apply for manipulators. Keep in mind that the nulled arena stays listed in their history.
• Points refunded to opponents – refunds are only given from cheaters, not for any other reason (not even trolly sandbaggers). So if you check the most recent rated opponents and find that at least one of them got their points back (need not be all of them, see https://lichess.org/faq#rating-refund), it means the ban reason was cheating.

I might also not be 100% happy with the overlap of „cheat“ and „manipulation“, but eh, that’s how it is.

At last, there's also the case when Lichess aborts a game with the reason of "Cheat detected". This is an automated action that only comes when someone analyzes the current game position with Lichess' analysis board in another tab. Contrary to popular belief, this doesn't happen when you just forget an analysis tab in the background with an opening sequence you happen to play again. To trigger it, you need to revisit the tab with engine activated. When you start a new game, engine deactivates in all other analysis tabs.
There are still cases in which this gets triggered without the actual intention to cheat, e.g. within coaching or alike. For this reason, accounts are not banned at first-time occurrence, the loss of the game is considered enough of a punishment. But for repeated offense, there will be almost surely an automatically awarded ToS mark.

C) Lichess mods don't just blindly follow the AI

The most popular misconception from the public „understanding“ on cheat detection is that the algorithm screwed up. They believe in the person close to them, so they just blame the algorithm and claim that it was shitty, and despise the mod team for its decision. It’s not as easy as that.

Mods are not just blindly running the algorithm and awaiting its result. Besides, the AI is way more informative than just giving an output in the way of „guilty“ or „not guilty“ (or a p-value or whatever simple output). It’s there to provide a lot of insights, which outside users can’t access. You can have a sneak peak impression in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZgyVadkgmI The team is devoted to cheat detection for years and continuously keeps trying to improve their methods. In the race against sneaky cheaters trying to find new ways of getting away, Lichess always tries to be one step ahead if not two.

As NoJoke stated in the podcast, there are automated bans but only in the most trivial of cases. These don’t even encompass what users commonly understand as trivial (perfect moves, same time for moves). In many of these cases, you still need to report. There’s an automatic supervision of rated games but it’s at a very ressource-sparing (thus very elementary) level. If mods really just blindly trusted the algorithm, they might make that process automatic too, huh? Easy contradiction by logic.

Reports are needed to raise attention of mods. They can run algorithms at different levels of complexity and resource intensity, and most importantly, they draw conclusions by their own thought and experience. Sometimes it’s even several moderators at once. During appeal, an even more experienced moderator gives it another look. This also explains why sometimes a person can cheat for several months unnoticed, especially when they’re a high-prestige person that everyone trusts.

As a side note, there’s also the popular myth that mass reports on a person might make them get banned. This is complete nonsense too, there aren’t any automatic triggers (would be great room for abuse, right?), Lichess is not impressed by the amount of reports issued on a person, and deals with each of them individually.

D) Everyone can cheat, for all reasons

This is probably the most important point in this blog. Noone is exempt from the possibility of becoming a cheater.

The emotions are natural when a friend or big name is banned – you can’t imagine in any way how they cheated and betrayed you and the ideals of chess. They are an ideal person to you, so you reject any feasibility of them being guilty. In response, you hate on the Lichess mods and accuse them of wrong and ruthless banning. It’s self-serving bias – you pretend to know better, and acknowledging the possibility of cheating (or even realizing it as a fact) means admission that your trust was wrong. You can still keep the possibility and hope of them being innocent for yourself – but don't make it taken-for-granted and don't sacre your friend.

I used to be like this too (and by writing this post, I want to make an apology for this past attitude), until there were several cases like this when some of my acquaintances got banned and their guilt was apparent. This, together with the initally mentioned video sections, finally gave me a dose of reality.

Friends / followers of a banned high-prestige player will scream out stuff like „there’s no way they ever cheated“ or „I know this person 100%, they're never a cheater“. Like what, do you constantly observe them playing or can you read their minds? Why do you think you know more than the mods who took the action? „They have way too much to lose from getting caught cheating“ is also no sufficient argument – there’s just so much over-estimation in thinking you could get away.

There are cheaters at all levels – even streamers, titled players, grandmasters. There’s no grounds to say „why in the world would a grandmaster need an engine“ when engines are still lightyears stronger than any human being. There are also plenty of mindsets that may make a person cheat eventually. They might just lack composure to rely on their own play. They might be too annoyed, e.g. when they used to be a strong OTB player and returned after years of inactivity, finding their past strength gone. Or they might start with the eyewash of „eh, asking the engine for just a few moves is not that bad“, and then it accumulates to more and more cheating. Or their ego suddenly got bruised in whatever way. Or they were drunk and stoned. Etc etc you can imagine plenty of explanatory approaches. It’s not just reckless imposters. It doesn't take that much criminal energy, as the following story from a german-language source explains:

"I know a club player who has been devoted to chess for over 50 years. Aged at least 70, without a noteworthy OTB rating, but always fair and pleasant to play against. Due to covid he came into touch with online chess for the first time. Just two weeks later he had a nice 2200 rating on Lichess and was banned. When I addressed this, he said he just couldn't resist the temptation."

Cheating can start at any time, regardless of how many games were played before, and regardless what you did in chess communities before. I clearly remember a person that I knew from community arenas and that was rated 1400 in rapid with about 3000 ranked games. Then eventually, I randomly spectated a U2000 rapid arena, saw them in third place and they were crudely cheating.

Nothing is so far-fetched that it's completely impossible. Please bear the following statement from a Lichess staff member in mind:

I've seen tons of blatant cheaters use all kinds of excuses and be completely unfazed lying towards people that trusted them so I wouldn't believe it just like that. Lots of people seem to think that cheating isn't such a big deal and that people are just overreacting which causes them to have no qualms denying it.

On the other end, „everyone can cheat“ nowhere implies „everyone cheats“. This popular agitation of „Lichess is plagued by cheaters everywhere and doesn’t care“ is complete nonsense too so don’t take it seriously at all. Most players are good.

Oh, extra note, cheats are possible at every time control, even bullet (autoplay scripts etc).

E) Why Lichess can’t give reasons and can’t discuss

There’s a good amount of dissatisfaction on Lichess not disclosing reasons for their bans and their ways of gathering evidence. This is often labeled as immoral or even illegal. The former may be a matter of opinion, but I will definitely contradict the latter and explain why things are this way.

Oh wait, maybe I don’t even need to explain it that much. All you need to do is go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmIFdrUVHXw Lichess already has a somewhat demanding task in cheat detection itself. Allowing room for debates would give unimaginably high frustration and waste of time to moderators, as there are so many dishonest protesters (evidence: every forum thread written in that tone and the person quickly shows guilty from their recent games).

To explain this further: Say someone cheated (maybe even visibly for users), gets banned, sends a denying appeal, and Lichess were obligated to give proof or at least show the games for which they issued the ban. They give some links, and then the appellant comes up with whatever excuses about these games (feigning how they found the moves etc). They blatantly refuse the proof and demand more proof. Like, where is this supposed to be going? This is what Lichess means by "unproductive debates".

Even worse, the cheat detection methods need to stay secret to not be abused by the smartest of cheaters, to not give hints on how to cheat better. So noone is privileged to receive evidence on their ban. As the video says: To keep Lichess‘ system working, they need to be quiet about it.

There are good reasons for the act of shadow-banning too. If they gave banned people a notification or showed the mark on their profile while logged in, it would extensively increase the amount of alt accounts and defiant complaints. Of course, experienced users will quickly find out that their account doesn’t work as normal. Therefore the ToS mark can’t be as good as chat-shadowbanning in that regard. But still, there are surprisingly many players spending months and years in the banned players‘ separate pool and only then noticing their ban, if ever at all. If you read this blog, you know the existence of lichess.org/appeal anyway, but you can easily find it in the ToS or from https://lichess.org/contact#help-root, so I think it’s sufficiently transparent.

By the way, people blaming Lichess of illegal practices are trying to raise an online service to the standards of real life jurisdiction. Come on, this kind of equalization is not feasible with other big online domains as well. They also have their staff and their domiciliary rights, and passages in their ToS stating you agree to respect it. So Lichess is no different in that.

On a final note, all of this said applies to other big chess sites like chess.com, for the same reasons.

F) Don’t be populistic, stay neutral at best

In conclusions, I hope you now learned how the Lichess mods are doing their job in a serious way and that you shouldn’t blindly trust the people you’re having connections with. The best (but still not perfect) sign that someone is honest is that their account is not banned.

Here’s a guideline of behavior that I try to follow myself. On Lichess itself (as well as its social media platforms), denouncing banned players is forbidden anyway (no public shaming). On other platforms, you should use your assessment as wisely as possible. If you can find clear reasons, then you can tell people that the person cheated and give the reasons. Speak out in case the person comes up with poor excuses that directly contradict the workings of Lichess on a factual level. If you can’t find proof by facts but the person gives you bad vibes just from their reaction to being banned, then you can say it’s your gut feeling and opinion that you don’t believe them innocent. And if you can’t find anything and the person doesn’t behave suspiciously either, then please leave them alone and hush (or when you’re asked by a third party, say that you have no way to decide).

I leave the final word to Magnus

Check out the beginning of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcbHmHHwlUQ until 2:30. Notice what the subtitle translation says.

There was a case when a blind chess player was caught cheating and got banned from playing, at first for two years and then for lifetime. But in the beginning, there was a lot of media coverage regarding his results, and I thought that was exciting, but then I had a look at some of his matches and I was like, wow. What you see are inhuman decisions and inhuman precision. It's easy to notice. And then there were surprisingly many people, even chess players, who defended him a lot. There was a lot of local support. And yes it was a really nice story. People called it a witch-hunt and blamed it on jealousy towards him. Saying that they refused to believe the experts, which makes me think - how often do you see such a thing? Well, one just doesn't want to believe what the experts are saying, we still like to believe good stories. But in this case people really let themselves be fooled to a high degree, and refused to listen to experts saying this is not right. This does not make sense at all. How often is it that we are fed pure nonsense.

I can only confirm, it's almost every time! Happy chessing and don’t be afraid of the Lichess mods, there’s no objective reason to.