Chess.com Needs To Crack Down On Cheaters

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Dchessguy124

I've been struck by the number of cheaters on chess.com, especially in the longer time controls. When someone plays above 95% accuracy, spending only a few seconds per move, on an account that was only created a few days ago, they can play 20 games or more before chess.com bans them. Even then, I suspect chess.com does not pick up on more illicit ways of cheating, such as using an engine sparingly in critical positions or using an opening database. Furthermore, the cheaters can just start a new account with a new email address every time they get banned. This is very frustrating at the ~2100 level in rapid, where there are a lot fewer genuine players.

As I pay chess.com £15 per month for a diamond subscription, I am annoyed on their lax stance towards cheaters. I suspect the reason it takes them so long to ban a cheater is because running a check on someone uses a lot of computing power, which they have to pay for, so they do so very sparingly. 

To fix this problem, I propose the following steps.

1) Crack down on alt accounts by forcing all new players to link their profile with a real-life chess profile. This could be a FIDE account, or a regional account such as USCF or ECF membership. Therefore, if you cheated, it would be both very embarassing (since everyone would know who you are) and you wouldn't be able to play online chess again, at least not for a long time.

2) Run a cheating check on every new player once they have played 10 games. This would a) give sufficient grounding for banning if they had cheated in these games, and b) would stop cheaters before they reached the higher ratings, where cheating is more of a problem.

3) Use more rigorous methods of tracking cheaters. For example chess.com could use IP banning on known cheaters. Also, if a username is a variant of another username which has been found to be cheating (for example, if Cheater6 was found to be a cheater, then someone made an account called Cheater7) run a cheating check on them immediately. 

ripley12345

Try posting this in https://www.chess.com/club/cheating-forum

theycallmewow
I have faced too many players who intentionally make terrible moves for like 10 moves and then use an engine to win the game in rapid time control. That needs to stop.
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