How to reveal the identity of an anonymous master

More and more players are aware of how destructive online games can be for the succes in on the board tournaments. When choosing a new account, people no longer make the mistake of choosing their own name or a variant of it. Many Titled-Tuesday participants play a different repertoire online than in their classical otb-games, so you can't do much with the trick I recently mentioned in the chess.com article. Strong players do a lot of efforts nowadays to remain anonymous online. However, some still do not realize that there is no anonymity on lichess.

My opponent from the 5th round in Cap d'Agde : the Indian international master Dhulipalla Bala Chandra Prasad was a recent victim of my detective work. After the game he was flabbergasted when I told him that I had discovered 5 of his online accounts during the game preparation . The first 3 were easy: 1375 games with Swarnapuri on chess.com , 345 games with swarnapuri on lichess and 3126 games with Vijayanagara on lichess because both Swarnapuri (chess.com) and Vijayanagara (lichess) can be linked to games in the Chessbase database where my opponent's full name is listed. Moreover, many players use the same username on various platforms.

However, my detective work does not stop there when I notice that a player plays a different repertoire with the online account compared to classical chess. I know that most serious players also practice their repertoire online with secret accounts. Moreover, the approach I described last year in Anonymous part 2 rarely works. Classical chess in on the board games, even with the same repertoire, have little overlap compared to quick online games, so the filter produces often no or useless results.

So a few months ago I developed a new method that is a mix of some methods previously discussed on my blog. I no longer filter 1 specific position from a classical game in the elite database , with only a few hits as a result, but I now filter several positions from classical games, each with sometimes a hundred or more hits as a result. You have to persevere, but it is perfectly doable manually because after half an hour it was clear to me that 1 name kept popping up.

So I got very interested into the lichess account Svallap , but it was not made easy for me because initially everything indicated that I was looking at the wrong account. The profile said he was French. He has an elo of 2508 and is also subscribed to 2 French channels.

So nothing was right, but since my article Papua New Guinea I know that players dare to publish incorrect information on their profiles to mislead curious people. The more overlaps I found in the repertoires, the less I believed the profile description until I was convinced that I had the right one despite the conflicting signals. Only I was still annoyed with the username. Svallap clearly doesn't sound French and rather Indian, but if you Google this name then you won't find anything. Fortunately I got help from another detective: my daughter Evelien as she came up with the brilliant idea to reverse the letters of the username. Does Pallavs have a meaning? Yes, that exists because you easily find information on wikipedia about the Pallava dynasty, not coincidentally also the region where my opponent comes from (afterwards he admitted that he had a soft spot for history).

After the game I spoke to my opponent Dhulipalla in French but he couldn't speak a word of French despite "C'est toujours le bon moment" on his profile. He was clearly ashamed when he had to admit this after I told him about my research. I suspect that he learned his lesson and won't practice anymore his repertoire on lichess.

Some people think it was stupid from me that I told my discoveries to my opponent (he is a chess professional so he has the advantage of time anyway). Maybe I can benefit again later, but I don't look at it that way. First of all, there is very little chance that I will ever have to play against Dhulipalla again in my chess career. Moreover, for the same reason I switched from lichess to chess.com a few months ago, see also Prey becomes hunter . I think that's a shame because I have a clear preference for the online chess platform lichess over chess.com if there would be no lichess-database.

My intention with this article is, in addition to telling another fun story, to increase the pressure on lichess to close their database or at least make it 100% anonymous (i.e. by omitting user-names). In one year, the number of top games has already decreased by 50%, see the elite database, so I suspect that I am not the only one with the same concerns.

If many top-players drop out of lichess, this will undoubtedly also have an impact on the activity of the lower rated players. Any active +2300 fide player who trains his repertoire on lichess today and thinks this can be done anonymously is mistaken.

mvhk

PS. Same article was published on my blog see https://schaken-brabo.blogspot.com/2023/11/lichess-deel-2.html