On March 2, Levy Rozman, in a pink sweater and round glasses, was streaming his Chess.com matches to 12,000 viewers over Twitch. “All right, this looks like a cheater,” he said without pause, as he clicked on the pigeon icon of his opponent, Dewa_Kipas. Rozman, an international chess master, scrolled through the profile, disbelieving. His opponent had climbed nearly a thousand points in the span of a month, ranking 2,300 to Rozman’s 2,431. And his profile didn’t include the sort of title—“FIDE master,” “national master”—that the ranking implied. In fact, Rozman would later discover, Dewa_Kipas, or “fan god,” was a bird-feed seller in Indonesia.
Chat echoed back: “LMAOOOO,” “CHEATER.” “Let’s see if we can get some content here,” said Rozman.
Rozman has been playing in chess tournaments since he was seven. In 2011, he attained National Master status, and in 2018, International Master. Now 25, he’s known not only on the chess circuit; like other top players, he has developed a large following on Twitch, on YouTube, and on Twitter. High-level chess has experienced an unprecedented online boom due to the pandemic. An average of 895 people watched chess streamers on Twitch on March 1, 2020; a year later that cumulative audience expanded to 21,491.
In this majority-digital world for the 1,500-year-old game, it’s tempting to trust that every truly high-level player would by now be a known quantity—whether through International Chess Federation ratings or social media. Nobody could just come out of nowhere and dethrone a chess king, right?
Rozman knew that if his opponent was cheating it would be a strange game; algorithms often make choices that most humans simply wouldn’t. Still, small things baffled him. At Rozman’s l ..
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