The game of chess is dead and no longer holds any value.

Whether its on lichess.com or some other platform like chess.com, the guarantees no longer exist for there to be any value playing the game.

Specifically there is no longer a guarantee you are actually playing against another human, and cheating is largely not punished.

The vast majority of the time, and this depends entirely on whether its a weekend or not because its typically worse then (90-100% of the games), You won't be playing a human, you will be matched up against a bot, which may or may not have a human moving the pieces.

The platforms of course say they combat cheating, but in reality their efforts are ineffective, and that communication is entirely disingenuous if not intentionally deceitful or fabricated.

As of last weekend on average, a solid 70-80% of the sampled games were people using an engine to play for them.

Background, I'm rated around 1900-2000, have studied for decades, and my opening repertoire has been designed so there is a high deviation between engine supplied moves and known theory and strategy.

In most cases by move 17 there have been enough cumulative and unique moves to have shown whether they are using an engine. Specifically, there is no strategic plan for them but they choose engine supplied moves at various depths.

There are a number of branches where if it appears they are using an engine I may induce certain lines that are not obvious but may ultimately result in a loss to evaluate their responses.

Typically heavily technical and complex positions with no strategic theme for their side but multiple possible trees and tempo to account for with a winning advantage of 0.8-1 with perfect conversion, and when they ultimately convert perfectly (usually in seconds) around move 30 its pretty damn obvious to anyone what happened.

When there is no credibility between people that they will follow the rules. There is no point in playing the game.

You can only improve when playing against another person, if you are playing against a computer, there's no point, it is just a giant lookup table that's deep enough and accurate enough to memorize all possible moves, even down lines which haven't been documented. Winning is not making mistakes, and minor mistakes are what computers with perfect iterative evaluation capitalize on.

In these current circumstances there is no point, all a game of that nature provides is the person cheating is stealing your time, psychologically abusing you (and generally being deceitful), often because they themselves have a significant mental illness.

The ease of new anonymous accounts makes the pool of potential victims...games highly likely that if you follow the rules you are volunteering to be a victim for the sake of their illness. The only solution to such an environment is not to play.

The failure of the platforms and also the two main chess organizations to address this, only make this game defunct whether they want to admit it or not publicly (due to vested interests).

There is value in teaching certain problem solving patterns to developing minds, and as soon as that's done, chess can provide no further value.

Ultimately, the Computer scientists that developed and continue to develop chess engines have killed the game by making it meaningless and their actions have damaged the livelihood of those that choose that as a profession.

Why would anyone invest the time and resources today in becoming a GM when you can play better than a GM with an engine at your side with no prior experience.

Why would anyone buy products for chess that teach you how to play better to win (the right way) when an engine can win for do it for you and the majority of your opponents are just engines.

Lichess and Chess.com both like to say they do a lot to remove cheaters, and that's only a small part of the problem.

It comes down to time to detection, and time to re-entry.

If the first is large, and the second is small, water will fill the boat faster than you can bail it out and this has been a problem for decades.

AI won't magically solve the problem either, lichess already knows their siamese network can be thwarted with a minor tweak in inputs that are necessarily generated on the client. They chose to censor the discussion about it instead of correction, like that kind of discussion can't take place off their service by malicious actors, its just being an ostrich and burying the head in the sand.

Every security person knows not to trusts the client.