1. Feature: Smart cheating mode on Fair Play report
The Fair Play report has some new features to combat the basic ways that player will try to trick the Fair Play engines.
“Smart cheaters” will cheat in some, but not all games. Their own “normal” games obscure the assisted games and make it harder to see statistical evidence of cheating. Typically a player will cheat in 3 or 4 games in the event, usually the later rounds.
A second method of “Smart cheating” (let me just say, cheating is never smart, it’s a really dumb decision to make!) is where players will play part of their game on their own, and get assistance on just some of the moves. Again, their own natural moves are being played to obscure the cheating.
Here is a normal Fair Play report. No players cheating.
Fair Play report Tool 1: Best # rounds for player
You can now select the number of games that you want to display an assessment for. Perhaps you suspect someone cheated in just 4 games or 5 games. You can now select “Best 5 rounds” and the statistics for all players will display just for their “best” 5 games. Watch how some players magically appear at the top of the list, when they were much lower down when looking at all games.
Here is the same report with only the best 4 games for each player showing:
One player seemed to play well for 4 games, with 122 moves and a score of 21… but these were games against much lower rated opponents and nothing to be concerned about.
Fair Play report Tool 2: Game score algorithm
You can now select “Smart cheating” mode and you can get a different perspective on the players games.
With both of these modes you will notice that a smaller number of moves is being considered. You should still be looking for results with 100+ moves and completely ignoring results with fewer than 30 moves.
With fewer moves, you’ll also expect the scores to be higher as there is naturally more variation in a smaller sample size. So when you turn on Smart Cheating mode and see someone jump to a Sort Score of 60 over 18 moves, do not be concerned.
But if you turn on Smart Cheating and a player jumps to a Sort Score of 47 over 140 moves, then you can be fairly sure they were playing at SuperGM level for at least part of your event.
Here is the same report with Smart cheating mode turned on:
Again, not results of any concern, with only a couple of players with 100+ moves on the list and even so their scores are not of any concern.
And here is the same report with both working together:
As you can see – we now have a player rated 648 with a Score of 25 (typical of an IM). BUT this certainly does not indicate any unfair play. There are only 45 moves taken into consideration here, and you can see it’s not such an outlier compared to the rest of the event.
2. Feature: Blind mode on games
There are over 250 million people with vision impairment in the world, and over 1.1 billion with near-vision impairment. Chess players with low vision can find it difficult to play online chess.
A screen reader is a form of assistive technology that renders text or image as speech or braille output. Screen readers are essential to people who are blind, and are useful to people who are visually impaired, illiterate, or have a learning disability.
This feature makes Tornelo compatible with screen-reader technology, allowing visually impaired players to participate in your tournaments.
This feature is a set in the Account Settings or the Game Preferences.
And when it is turned on the game will look like this:
Blind mode can be turned on and off during a game if needed.
3. Improvement: External profiles, Federation ratings
We added the National Rating List for:
- South Africa
- Uruguay
- Czech Republic
In addition, we can now link a National ID to a FIDE ID … so when you use either, you get both!
WORKING ON
- Glicko2 rating system
- Promoting events to help organizers attract more entries
- New pairing program inside the Lobby
As always, we’re keen to hear your feedback, feature requests or bug reports.
Kind regards,
DAVID CORDOVER
Founder
As many major FIDE tournaments are taking place in Tornelo, I would like to suggest the moderators to add Dark Mode to Tornelo, as it is really taxing for someone like me who is optically a bit weak to concentrate in his/her own games. The after-effects are unusually high strain in the eye. So a Dark Mode like that available in all the other major websites is highly requested and people like me would be delighted if it is added to Tornelo.
Great feedback! We have this on our list of features “coming soon”…