Impatience, Narcissism and Cheating in Chess

Opening

Just a few weeks ago, I was fielding conversations from web developers who might be able to help me out with an idea. I got in touch with this guy who was nice enough, if not eager to talk marketplaces, chess, and offer some early thoughts on what working together might look like. Towards the end of our conversation, he asked to play a friendly correspondence game (no rating, no stakes). Why not? He mentioned he was "very serious about chess" and " had played over 20,000 games online". While that's largely irrelevant information to most chess players, I didn't think too much about his taking pride in a thing like that.

No matter the life stage, personal or professional, important or trivial, we all find ourselves running into people who seem to fixate on some goal or source of pride. We all have our own to some degree. What I'm hoping is that this breakdown of a very interesting game, and an even more interesting look into the human being behind the game, might allow us all to take a minute to check our own egos and reflect on who in our lives has the right motivations.

Middlegame

As it turns out, Mr. 20,000 games was rated around 1500-1600 online. Sitting at around 2300, I didn't think feel any profound need to brush up on theory before we played. According to 318chess's ELO Probability Table , his odds of beating me are somewhere around 1.0-1.5%. Coming off a nice win against an NM earlier that day and feeling good about my play of late, I thought I'd be in for a more comfortable game.

Boy was I wrong. After just 20 moves a side, I played Nb3 and could tell my position was all but collapsing. While I thought I'd played well the first 10-12 moves of the game, something had gone deeply wrong in how I was assessing the position's overall structure. I was up technically up a pawn, but my own f-pawn was falling, the dark squares around my king were dangerously weak, and his knight somehow dominated my rook on the queenside:

Without getting too much into the specifics of the game, I was clearly in trouble. Being a 1500 or so, I was hoping he might miss a relatively advanced idea after he snatched up the pawn on f4.

Not today! My guy here saw the very precise plan to trade the queens on e3 with check, all but forcing me to open up his dark-squared bishop perched on g7. It should be said at this point that he was playing at around 30 seconds to 1 minute per move, while I sat for several minutes struggling to find any way to hold on:

Then something funny happened. After my last move (27. Ra2), a little sound went off and an icon popped up on the left-hand sign on my screen! :

"Cheat detected - White is victorious." I took the moment to write an eminently profound, "Dude." in the chat before texting him directly. He countered, "Wait what?" in feigned amazement, and I knew only a beautiful conversation could follow. But first I had to test his mettle in blitz, where I didn't think he'd even have time to use whatever nonsense he was using to feed him moves. Predictably, it felt like playing a complete beginner, someone with near-zero positional understanding and the tactical awareness of a goldfish. The first game is hilarious because I played a nearly identical setup as the game above, and he seemed to have forgotten all the deep theoretical knowledge he'd used in our first matchup:

I don't like saying anyone's bad at chess because it's an incredibly humbling game. Let's instead say that the disparity was similar to someone who'd just ridden the Tour de France needing to use training wheels again. He unfortunately played with the panic characteristic of a complete beginner, gave away multiple pieces, then topped it off by handing me his queen in one move.

In another game — my personal favorite — I actually mouseslipped earlier on and lost my queen for a knight, leading to a completely winning position for him. Unfortunately for him, he still has absolutely no clue how to play chess, and proceeded to play one of the most painful 10-move sequences ever to grace the 64 squares:

I mean seriously. Giving me a bishop, exposing his king for no reason — then losing his own queen, trading his rook, then dropping his second rook in the simplest way possible. If there was ever a game that would fall into the "1% of the time he should win", it was this one. He wasn't under any kind of time pressure, and his position was so winning my only hope was that he'd play not like a 1500, but like a 500. He kindly obliged! And a most wonderful conversation was set in motion:

In our first game that ended with "cheat detected", he claimed he was just using a "chess chrome extension and it got flagged", while he was effortlessly outplaying me. Of course. What a normal thing to do during a chess game! I can't believe I hadn't thought of it!

While he was obviously full of it, I debated with myself if I wanted to push the envelope. I knew he'd feel uncomfortable and I didn't necessarily want to make him feel that way. Then again, he cheated in our first game together — after asking to work together. It was too good. And I love opening envelopes. I just had to know (a) how much he'd admit to, and (b) what was generally going on inside his head.

I found the interchange relatively revealing of the type of problems that plague the ego-fragile in any domain. Keep your eye out for what I'd call "asking for forgiveness while not fully owning up to what you did":

I'm pulling no punches at this point. He clearly is trying to hold onto something resembling "I only cheated for one move" (which is still extremely unethical), but it's obvious to me (given his horrendous play in simple blitz chess and the literal call-out from lichess' cheat detection tool) that he was cheating for a large portion of the game after the opening. Here's his explanation for why he played so poorly at blitz (where he was unable to cheat):

The final kicker here is that even in game one, he shows he didn't even understand the moves he was playing. He's claiming he "blundered" in the final position, which he didn't. His knight could circle back and attack my bishop and he's still completely winning. That aside, the admission to "impulsivity" and what he's calling "ambition" is at least a start. I pushed him anyway, given his refusal to accept the lion's share of blame:

At this point, it's a lost cause. He proceeded to text me for a week or so afterwards his unsolicited thoughts on how to start up a business, his "battle scars", and the rest. Turns out the original startup "he founded", and from which he got all those scars, doesn't list him as a founder. Count me surprised. I casually asked him why he wasn't on the company's website. He offered a pretty scathing review of his alleged co-founders after that, not really taking the time to reflect on the fact that I might not want to work with an overly aggressive individual who speaks so lowly of the startup he was previously bragging about.

Endgame

There really is a huge range of takeaways here. The most obvious: don't cheat. In something like chess, you obstruct your own improvement, undermine the trust beneath a beautiful game, and you immortally suck. Chess cheating had a public moment last year, and it's something everyone in the game needs to take seriously. At Marshall Chess Club, you just lose if your phone goes off. That's how it should be.

More deeply, I think someone who cheats at chess offers a psychological window into a persona that can't prioritize what matters. They exchange the repeated failure, creative strategy needed for improvement, and raw dedication to overcome sometimes long plateaus all for an immediate-term ego boost. It's just backwards. In comparison, I played seven friendly blitz games at Washington Square over the past three days. I won the first six, and lost the last one. Played against one of the best hustlers in NYC, he and I are still texting about how awesome and layered the positition was. We've played dozens of games over the last couple years, and the relationship is one of mutual respect and genuine enjoyment. Without question, I can say the game I lost was my favorite. The position was so rich, it could've gone either way at multiple points, and the commentary was top-notch. Not without a touch of irony, we played the same King's Indian Attacking setup that our computer-using friend found so simple in game one.

One layer further, I think our friendly neighborhood cheater's lack of total admission is the most disturbing part of all this. Granted, I'm going to make some assumptions here, but I think the type of person that (a) cheats blatantly, (b) gets objectively caught doing it, (c) gets called out by the person they cheated against, and (d) still can't own up to it, is disturbingly detached from the world and their place in it. He can't accept that he's still learning the basics of chess, but he also can't accept that he's cheated in any meaningful way at all. He can't see how painfully obvious it is to me that he cheated for the majority of our first game together, and doesn't understand that it's doubly insulting to tell someone, "I didn't really cheat". He can't fathom that I wouldn't want to work with a person who cheats in a zero-stakes game because he rarely thinks far enough ahead to understand that his behavior can only get worse when the chips are down. And he's totally oblivious to the moral calculus which lays bare how he's disrespecting a millienial game by trying to claim some sort of temporary mastery he's nowhere near earned.

The best explanation is a simple equation: "Impulsivity x Narcissism = Cheating". Narcissists believe themselves exceptional, and rules naturally don't apply to exceptions. Impulsive people can't wait to get what they want. Put those two together, and you see someone so bent on getting what they want — now — and because they deserve it — they don't think twice about removing any rules or obstacles that get in their way.

The tragicomedy of all this is that, if anything, he'll just get worse at chess. He may improve marginally if he throws in another 20,000 games, sure, but nothing will substantially change. And given he still couldn't bring his mid-30s self to identify as a "cheater", my guess is he'll keep on doing it.

No matter the field or walk of life, people like this are worth keeping an eye on at all times. They may never end up in jail or do anything explicitly illegal, but it's worth thinking twice about what'll happen if you find yourself in their crosshairs.