Audio Helps Chess.com Checkmate Cheating

Audio Helps Chess.com Checkmate Cheating Matches are produced using REMI workflows By Dan Daley, Audio Editor

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 - 7:00 am

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The 2017 Houston Astros were a bunch of school kids tilting the pinball machine compared with the far more devious world of cheating at chess, and Chess.com deploys a variety of audio techniques to prevent it.

One of the first such instances in modern chess competition took place in 1980 when a Bell Laboratories technician snuck its newest prototype Belle calculation machine into a library near where German grandmaster Helmut Pfleger was conducting a simul, in which a top player competes against multiple opponents simultaneously. A co-worker relayed computer-generated moves to another accomplice, who, wearing a hidden earpiece, was playing in the simul and ended up beating Pfleger, a rare loss for the top-tier player. And in 2019, the International Chess Federation suspended a player at a tournament in France after he was caught red-handed using his phone during a game during a bathroom break.

Interestingly, as with the Astros, who sent their surreptitious signals by banging on a trash can, cheating at chess leans heavily on audio. But it's not just players furtively listening for audible tipoffs. In chess, even the audience can get involved, intentionally and otherwise. And, just like when a fan reaches out and nabs a fly ball from an outfielder's glove, a little over-enthusiasm can affect the outcome of a match.

Information as a Weapon Because chess is such a game of perfect information, if somebody in the audience shouts something and the players hear that, the game is no longer considered valid, notes Michael Buetsch, director. broadcast engineering and production, Chess.com, which streams global matches, such as last September's livestreamed final of the 2024 Speed Chess Championship from Paris. Somebody in the audience could be getting information through a computer or an evaluation engine and then shout something, and suddenly a player sees a move, and that might alter the course of a game.

For the Champions Chess Tour Finals in Oslo, Chess.com used wireless headphones distributed to the audience, instead of a PA system, to deliver announcer and play-by-play feeds.

Preventing that is surprisingly complicated. Players are often required to wear sound-blocking headphones, and match rooms are usually sound-dampened if there's an audience. Spectators can be seated behind one-way glass that's reflective on the player side, to avoid the potential for communicating visual cues. In some cases, instead of using a PA system, Chess.com will contract with a local AV vendor to supply a silent disco setup to the audience members, numbering several hundred at some matches, who'll wear wireless headphones that deliver the announcer and play-by-play feeds.

We have to make sure that the players can't see or hear a program feed of any kind anywhere in the venue, he says. We did about 500 people that way for a match in Oslo in December. And we're looking to continue to scale that up, trying to gauge the appetite for a live audience in the chess world.

There have been moments when players have been caught cheating, he continues, but it's more precautionary for us to not give the opportunity to cheat. We go through a number of other fair-play measures: we do RF scans [of the room] and scans of the players; we walk them through a detector; we have an entire security team when we do an event.

It's no small endeavor. Chess.com streams 300-plus matches a year in the annual Candidates Tournament and other international competitions to more than 100 million viewers and subscribers.

Sound Plays a Major Role in Many Ways The sonic security takes a page, says Buetsch, from that of esports competitions, in which players wear earbuds that play anything from heavy metal to white or pink noise and then sometimes wear earmuffs over those.

It can get intense and elaborate, he says, noting that some matches can have as many as two dozen cameras and microphones deployed for eight players in a hall. Sound is a big part of the game in a number of ways, including this one.

But just as audio is increasingly used to engage fans for conventional broadcast and streamed sports, chess is looking at sound to do the same for its aficionados, particularly for speed chess, a quick-time version of the game popularized by the Netflix film The Queen's Gambit and known by fans as rapids, bullets, or blitzes. The commentators will talk to each other and the audience and listen in to players through ambience microphones in the playing space. (Competition rules prohibit wiring contestants directly.)

Helping accomplish that is Chess.com's own REMI approach to production. It's IP-based and decentralized, in which each crewmember has an intercom panel in their home, connected over a browser and the internet. Usually, two announce talents interface using a mix-minus into the cloud and back. A Telos Infinity IP-based intercom system is deployed as the audio infrastructure to minimize latency through the cloud.

Chess.com is 100% remote production, says Chess.com Broadcast Tech Manager Bryan Downs. We have no headquarters, no plant.

Adds Buetsch, We have the same positions as any other sports in a control room - audio, tape replay - but all remote. Our use of intercom is more than just as a back channel. We use it to transport talent audio to streaming and IFB, so latency is a real issue. We can have full production capabilities without having a dedicated central physical location.

The production team uses a Waves Cloud MX cloud-based audio mixer as its primary console. Buetsch points out that the unit's support for complex bus routing allowed p

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