how often do you play cheaters here?

There are like no cheaters here, just a lot of people cranky about losing or tilted from being beat or at least most of the time that's the case.

i played 1 in my entire life

It is statistically impossible to tell if someone is cheating only occasionally.
But there is scientific research showing that:

• when there are no negative consequences, 40% of people will break the rules, if it benefits them. It is aligned with Google's latest report about >50% of people cheating in job interviews
• this number is affected by social acceptance, changing between 10% to 90% depending on whether the society thinks this behavior is acceptable or not.

Since cheating is not really socially accepted here, I'd say there are 10% of people that cheated at least once, but the odds you actually played with someone who cheated is much lower.

@lightln2 said ^

when there are no negative consequences

But there are negative consequences! And they greatly outweigh the positive ones, I would think, for almost everyone.

I've been hearing about "online cheaters" since before the average computer could beat anybody who wasn't pretty weak. Yeah, that used to be true.

And not just here (since I only just joined about six years ago) -- but at every site I've ever used.

But, in truth, cheating at blitz or faster seems pretty rare, especially here and at one other site I could name (but won't). I've been accused of cheating more than once over the years, after playing well and beating somebody rather easily.

They were all hot and bothered, and just SURE they were right! But they weren't right. And, indeed, analysis showed that my game was quite human -- not at all botlike, unfortunately. And, of course, I knew the truth first hand.

What's the excellent old Simon And Garfunkle song say? "...a man hears what he wants to hear / And disregards the rest."

I suspect the closer one gets to long time controls, the more likely some poor soul is tempted to use a comp on the side. But blitz? I think it's pretty rare. And would beating the average patzer even be worth the trouble?

Chess teaches all of us except one person at a time that he or she might actually NOT be the smartest person on Earth, after all (although skill at chess is not perfectly correlated with intelligence). And that's pretty hard for many relatively clever people to endure, especially when they are still young or middle aged.

Chess is not a small pond, and there are a lot of big fishes. Almost everybody must learn to be okay with that. Because that's the way it is.

Apparently it is 2%
https://lichess.org/@/Le-Grand/blog/how-many-cheaters-have-you-played-i-checked-6890-of-my-games/os1VogbF

@discoooooord said ^

There are like no cheaters here, just a lot of people cranky about losing or tilted from being beat or at least most of the time that's the case.

I just played against a player who is rated something like 900 in rapid games, and he/she plays like that also. Against me that player started out like 900, blundered early in the game, then suddenly switched over to play like 3200 the rest of the game and won. I looked at another game the player had played; accuracy 98%. Now, he/she is rated above 2000 in blitz, still with the strength of 900 in rapid games, blundering pieces all the time.

I meet players like that all the time. I'm not going to accuse any specific person for cheating here on the forum. In general, what makes you think that these players don't cheat?

I figured I'd use my own data on the blog post mentioned by tpr and I got this:

The conclusions I got were as follows:

1. I faced cheaters 1.2% of the time
2. Surprisingly I have a +1 score against cheaters over 52 games
3. Times I faced most cheaters was during tournaments like Spring Marathon. I think people cheat more in those events than in random lobby rated matches.
   

I think in general there's a narrative that cheating is a lot more rampant than it is and once you face a cheater you're guaranteed to lose. I was quite surprised to find I had a plus score against them although in many cases I did outgrade them.

This might be off-topic, but don’t try to cover up your own poor moves or badly played matches by claiming your opponent was cheating. You won’t be able to improve if you do that.

@KMcGeoch said ^

The conclusions I got were as follows:

1. I faced cheaters 1.2% of the time

Completely wrong.
1.2% of the time you met players later banned for cheating. These are players who don't even try to hide that they are cheating.