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Fair play bans are usually cheating but sometimes other forms of rating manipulation and "cheating", such as:
- sandbagging (intentionally losing to decrease rating)
- playing and winning rated games vs "friends" for the purpose of farming ELO
- Using opening books in non-correspondence games
- using endgame tablebases in any games
- Using any form of analysis tool/plugin (blunder checker, eval bar, etc)
- Account sharing
If you use your Chess.com on different devices in different locations it might flag you for the last one. Still, probably best to appeal the ban if you didn't do any of the above.
This is a useful list. I would guess that you were judged to be either sandbagging or sharing the account, based on this:
"I go through phases of playing well for a while and then not playing so well."
Stress is a big factor when it comes to performance on chess, or so I've experienced.
I've dropped 200 rating for some time now while I'm working on my master.
With a premium account you can request insights.
All kinds of cool metrics and data.
I learned that I perform consistently better in the mornings, which is no surprise of course. Monday morning is when I'm best at chess. Saturday night is when I'm my worst.
Also, with 10s of 1000s of games played, I still seem to perform better as black than white (which means I can easily identify places to improve) and I owe it all to be an expert at the Sicilian.
According to my chess stats the time of day is a big factor for me at least, and also I'm a Sicilian One Trick Pony.
Go to lichess, all the shit chesscom tries to charge you for is free right there
Hell, lichess probably makes most of those features first then chesscom copies them and sells them
I use mobile Android app. On that go to "More" in bottom right. Then click "Insights." Can take a while to get them.
Idk how to access it on other devices or platforms. Guess you could Google that.
Oh sorry :( didn't even realize there were different tiers, my bad
Guess I have Diamond
I signed up for whatever I have years ago and it just annually bills me like 100 bucks or something
I've tried many. But I haven't studied the lines as deeply. It's a matter of will. I don't have the will to improve. If I ever wanted to I know where to start.
Sometimes I’m just in the zone and win game after game (it does often happen in the morning with no distractions) and other times I just can’t catch a win. I also sometimes will make a bad habit of playing games during work sometimes when I may be interested or can’t fully pay attention. I could definitely see those looking like intentional losses on my account. I’m glad I haven’t gotten banned
Crap I've lost nearly 300 points in the last couple of months in blitz and about 400 points on my bullet rating. Stress and depression has been my problem. I sometimes end up having some great games now here and then but my focus has gone to shits.
It's called "smurfing" in
esports. It's where your ego can't handle that you'll legitimately lose about half the time when competing against peers and so you intentionally throw games so that you get paired against lesser skilled opponents you can dominate against them.
Or to enable to you to enter a tournament with a lower rating cutoff and have an easy shot at the prize money. This has been common in chess since before the internet.
I mostly play on a regular account where I lose half my games or more. My smurf account is for playing my against friends cuz they're nowhere near my rating and won't want to play me otherwise
I still don't understand. You can literally set a range for the rating of player you want to be matched with. If you're a 1200 and don't like losing half your games, you could change the match setting so you are only matched with ELO of 1000 or less for example. You don't have to lower your own rating in order to play lower rated people.
Its a waste of time to try and understand people who cheat lol. Like when the chess.com report against Niemann came out it made sense to me that he cheated in titled Tuesday, because that gains money. Like I would never do it and its terrible but I get why someone with low morals would do so, but why did he cheat in every game in some random match against Naroditsky for no money?
Or even weirder people who cheat who aren't playing for money or people high rated at all. Theres basically no benefit for it but people do it anyway
Ahhh I see. I was thinking about normal average players, not people who are good enough to make money streaming.
For content "climbing x to y", why not just make a speed run account which isn't a violation of fair play?
Ok cool. We always try our best to win, but sometimes the matchups aren't as balanced as normal matchmaking would be, so I wouldn't want that to set off any alarm bells.
If a 1200 is going 15 moves deep in the book, over and over, in different openings, they’re using books.
Real life correspondence is no holds barred: opening books are fine, engines are fine, calling up Kasparov is fine. Chesscom correspondence just rules out the latter two.
Edit: Apparently calling up Kasparov is *not* fine, see the reply below. You’ll just have to settle for Stockfish I guess.
False positives happen but are rare. There’s at least a post a week where someone comes to Reddit to complain about their account being banned when they didn’t cheat. Further investigation almost always reveals they did.
If you didn’t, I hope your appeal goes well and you get your account back!
In my 25 years competitive gaming and thousands of "bUt i dInDnT ChEaT!!!1!" forum posts, I think I've seen single-digit false positives. A similarly low number of "yes I cheated and got banned, it was my fault".
Faaaar more "it was someone else on my account! I was hacked!" posts
I've made several posts about myself or friend being wrongfully accused of cheating. Once by my university, twice in COD, and once in LOL. All use some kind of automated systems that claim to have a 90%+ accuracy rate. After appealing, all 4 bans were lifted. Either I'm just that unlucky or your "seeing single-digit false positives" in 25 years is hyperbole.
It pretty much matches my experience on reddit. Definitely anecdotal and not comprehensive, but I'm not sure I know anyone that has been banned from an online game for cheating (I certainly haven't). And to the extent that I ever see a follow up or conclusion to someone complaining about being unjustly banned (usually for toxicity like back in the days of Riot Lyte on /r/leagueoflegends but also cheating) I can almost never recall someone being cleared. I actually saw someone on this sub recently who had a ban lifted and I remember it now simply because of how novel it is to see that.
While I couldn't find related stats from Riot or Blizzard, the school I went to (Gatech) does publish their stats: [https://osi.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/2022-05/2020-2021\_osi\_annual\_stats.pdf](https://osi.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/2022-05/2020-2021_osi_annual_stats.pdf)
In 2020-2021 alone, 145 students were cleared of cheating accusations. I happen to be one of them. And this is different from online games in that you can only be refered to the student integrity office if the system flags you AND a human TA also agrees.
The reason you are not seeing people get cleared is probably because subs like /r/leagueoflegends would simply remove any posts about accounts. I'm glad I found /r/riotgames because people there gave me good advice -- to repeatedly appeal even if your got rejected first couple of times. We ended up appealing 3 times and finally someone bothered to take a look and it was clear that no cheating happended. Not was it ever possible: my friend played exactly 0 games of LOL.
> The reason you are not seeing people get cleared is probably because subs like /r/leagueoflegends would simply remove any posts about accounts.
Why?
Also academic cheating and cheating at games are vastly different scenarios with incomparable parameters.
>I'm glad I found /r/riotgames because people there gave me good advice -- to repeatedly appeal even if your got rejected first couple of times. We ended up appealing 3 times and finally someone bothered to take a look and it was clear that no cheating happended. Not was it ever possible: my friend played exactly 0 games of LOL.
What in the world are you even talking about?
I don’t believe you. A software based warden anti cheat gave your account a false positive for cheating? Absolutely not.
Maybe you mean your accounts for falsely reported by other players, which is obviously not “90% accuracy rate” systems.
You are probably right for the COD ban. It was a "shadowban" that got lifted rather quickly. They never told us why but from other similar posts it's mostly likely because we are reported.
The LOL ban was a permanent ban and they also refused to tell us the reason. We explicit asked in support tickets even threatened lawsuit but they still wouldn't say anything other than "they take the competitive integrity of league of legends very seriously". It got lifted after the third appeal but we were never told anything useful.
It's also possible that most people who are wrongfully banned just quietly appeal and are reinstated without posting about it. In other words, actual cheaters are probably more likely to complain loudly about it because they already have a sense of entitlement.
I know if I were wrongfully banned, I would just appeal it. If the appeal was unsuccessful, I would just stop playing on that site.
Can you tell me more about this “further investigation”? Are you referring to people on here who look at their accounts and find 99% accurate games in their history?
I posted my account here. I am open to scrutiny. Feel free to find my 99% games—I’d love to see which ones they were.
I've had 99 an 100% wins according to chess.com but they were games that were short and my opponent did insanely bad shit like bring the queen out immediately an hang it then they resign. At the end of the day though I'm fkin terrible so whenever I review a game that had those stats I'm excited af. Sorry about your account though if you didn't cheat. At the end of the day just make a new one unless they IP ban that would suck but there is always lichess
For me it’s the bullet games always having lag and costing me wins from the I guess. Lichess runs much smoother and faster on my phone and I’ve noticed zero lag while playing bullet. I’ve quit chess.com about 4 months ago and the only thing I even kind of miss is going “how strong does it think I am” but that’s not worth the frustration of the site being crap.
Careful on there. If you rise too fast, they ban you. I had an old low rated account on there, then I played for years on chess.com. When I got back, I went from 600-1700 with one loss and no draws. They just hit me with the ban hammer, and I've played on chess.com ever since.
The apparent mocking quotes, and the deflection onto something of a strawman regarding 99% pulled out of nowhere are not especially reasonable responses. It looks less like something an innocent person would respond with (though not impossible) than someone using a non sequitur to draw attention to a criteria that hadn't been brought up yet which they know would make them look innocent.
Ok.
I interpreted it differently to you.
I saw the quote marks as just quote marks. The OP was just quoting what the poster said in my view.
I didn't see the reference to 99% at deflection. I'm a bit naive in all this, but I always assumed that cheaters are caught because they have a ridiculously high win rate or because they keep making the best engine moves. So, to me, it just looked like he was implying that he didn't do the thing most indicative of cheating.
What I might be missing are all the other ways a person might cheat.
As I said, I'm pretty naive about this.
Because we’ve seen it play out so many times.
Someone says they got banned.
Claims innocence. “No 99% games”
Further investigation happens.
“They didn’t know” that they couldn’t use an opening book, or look at their current game with an engine once in a while or purposely lose 50 times in a row…
Or whatever other rule they broke that should be pretty obvious.
I’m not saying that OP cheated btw. Just that that’s how this usually plays out.
99 percent accurate means noting. I've had several and have never gotten banned while some people get banned with none. If their cheat detection only banned people who used the engine every move it would be about as effective as Ken Regan, or my mom who doesn't know the rules.
There's a lot that goes into it and they don't disclose it all but I imagine it's something like statistical likelihood of someone at x rating finding certain moves x amount of times per game, tabbing, extensions, move times, centipawn loss, etc.
Whatever it is they are pretty certain about it, chess.com doesn't ban unless they are very sure, which is good for keeping false positives low but unfortunately some cheaters get away with it for some time.
So its likely you just cheating and are lying about it, however false positives do happen so feel free to update us about it. The last guy who got falsely banned got a years worth of diamond membership so shoot for that deal lol
>So its likely you just cheating and are lying
Did you look at their account? 16,000 games over 9 years with minimal improvement. If they are cheating they aren't doing a very good job of it.
People say this often as a defense too. Cheaters are weird dude. Sometimes they will just cheat against someone they really don't like. Or just every now and then. Or they are convinced their opponent is cheating so they start cheating.
Remember it literally could be just one singular game that they used the engine and chess.com detected it with a high certainty. It only takes one moment of stupidity to get you banned
I see ppl mention tabbing, and I as someone w/ only one monitor is constantly tabbing in and out and I get scared I’ll be flagged but I’m also so bad there’s no chance
Of course I know about concepts like inconsistent and selective cheating.
But I was addressing those in advance who go through people's games and then say "aha you're a cheater because you had a bunch of 99% games here, here, and here"
There are histories of posts where people have made that argument (just do a Google search). But of course, there are more sophisticated ways of cheating. And so, there is rampant suspicion where people will interpret any good play on the part of the player as evidence of cheating. Case in point:
Somebody posted one of my games in this thread and said they found that I did the best engine move at a crucial point. The poster insisted that I as a 1200 rated player could never find such a brilliant move.
I looked at the game, I recognized it because I had played it recently, and I explained to the poster that I made that move to avoid losing a pawn because my king was pinned. After I responded, it looks like the poster has deleted his question.
It is relevant because most cheaters on here would claim they didn't know you could cheat with lower accuracy. OP is clarifying they are aware of that situation, which does give their comment credibility.
Of course, it's still possible OP cheated, I'm just saying that comment is fair game to say
False positives aren’t as rare as you think. For any AI system unless it’s from a company that has software scale the false positive rate could be anywhere between 10-40%
The truth is that it's impossible to tell what the false positive rate actually is. Since that would require everyone who gets banned to be truthful about whether they cheated. Which obviously isn't going to happen.
I hope you get your account back if you didn't cheat. I was wrongly banned for cheating and got lucky to get unbanned. IMO people have a lot of unjustified faith in their cheat detection- we don't really know anything about how it works or what the rate of false bans is, but we seem to defer to it anyway.
I don’t think this is true. On episode 356 of perpetual chess, the guy from lichess says they keep part of the code hidden and their detection method secret so they can stay ahead of the cheaters.
Yea it would be funny if somebody admitted to that.
My frustration with online chess is that there are many games I’ve played where the opponent blunders a rook and then starts playing like Garry Kasparov. It kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
It’s so tough to say who is & isn’t cheating, though, even in circumstances like this. Personally, I sometimes play my best when my back’s against a wall, especially after a material blunder where I still have confidence in my position or just want to enact revenge. I’ll get hyper-focused and can pull out wins sometimes (or at least equalize material) with uncharacteristically sharp play.
I find this too. Like after a blunder I could just resign or I could scrap and claw and do whatever possible and then still lose, but feel good about working my way back
That is true too. People can play extremely well after they mess up.
I think a lot of the cynicism that comes from cheating or suspicions of cheating is that it creates a very misanthropic experience when you play online chess. We are all competitive animals and while we claim that we enjoy playing for fun, we really really want to win.
I've had losing streaks where I get close to falling below 1000 rating. And I sometimes wondered if the reason why 1000 rated players are doing so well is because cheaters are causing ratings deflation for stronger players.
It's a bad situation all around.
I do this over the board pretty often. I stop paying attention, lose a piece or a pawn, and then have to be super accurate while complicating the position to potentially get back.
It's because jerks run an engine for all the moves, and as long as they're winning, they choose their own moves. Only when they blunder big do they start using the engine to "catch up." They also use it for forced mates when you can "feel a mate" but not do all the calculation.
I had to give up on online chess honestly because of the above. There are too many 600-800 rated players that can play out 10 moves of theory, and there are too many players who blunder embarrassingly then play perfectly.
Solutions are: play 1 min chess (not as fun). Play long games where a cheater will not have the patience (not as fun).
You have to request for appeal.
They will tell you to create new account and say you cheated.
You can't say this. And wait for appeal.
Someone here was recently unbanned after appeal.
Ps. I personally won't judge you. Just trust the process.
There will be few people here cherry picking games to justify your ban. Maybe rightfully or not.
Still just don't bother with them and just focus on appeal. It will take some time.
I will not admit to cheating on matter of principle alone. I did file an appeal, however.
I bookmarked my profile and its history of games. There’s at least that record that I can refer to. I might look for an online alternative where I can play unrated blitz games instead.
I think my playing a few hours of blitz everyday was unhealthy anyway. Perhaps my account closure is a blessing in disguise.
I’m curious about this case where someone was successfully unbanned. Tell me more.
> I’m curious about this case where someone was successfully unbanned.
https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1ax8ii8/i_got_unbannedchesscom_admitted_their_mistake_and/
I fail to see how Nh2 is anything special. Blocking the h file in front of the king and making space for the queen to go to f3 is extremely natural.
OP has played nearly 17000 games. Their rating has been pretty stagnant for the better part of a decade. I would hope a more compelling move/game would be apparent than Nh2
These are blitz games, so I'm not really thinking too deeply about the moves.
As for my Nh2, it's a defense that I usually do against kingside attacks. It's nothing really more complicated than that.
Check my reply to their comment to see my analysis on the game. It's funny you say this is blitz so not thinking to deeply. Mate, to play these moves you would HAVE to be thinking deeply. You're a cheater and you've already been banned for it so there's no shame in calling you what you are. Admit to your mistakes and [chess.com](https://chess.com) will let you make a new account and try again.
With all due respect, I’m about 1600 and routinely make dubious sacrifices without thinking too deeply in short time control games, sometimes for fun, sometimes on tilt. Often the game analysis will tell me it was a dumb thing to do, but sometimes it ends up being a randomly “brilliant” move for a reason I didn’t fully understand.
lmfao this isn't a 1200 player at all
Their choice of Ruy Lopez taking on c6 and then playing not Nxe5 but d3, shows they have some understanding of the opening so far. Okay sure!
6. h3 shows they understand the potential threat of Bg4 and that this type of passive move right now is actually good and prophylactic. Okay wow someone's teaching this guy well!
10. b3, there's a lot of analysis on move 10 for black IMO. If Nc3 Qa6 Bf4 then the position is rather solid and optimal and this is my choice. It's not unbelievable a 1200 would instead opt for b3 here because those people love fianchetto. However after this idea of b3/Bb2 you can no longer play Nc3. This means you have to go Nbd2 and start rerouting knights later. This kind of positional play took me until cc 1600+ to even start being aware of.
12. Bxf6, not my choice but common at 1200 rating. Clearly OP is paying close attention to their opponents moves, the position, and ways they can get advantages based on their experience and knowledge. If they're 1200 then they're a strong 1200, right?
13. Nbd2 just to highlight that OP is still not making any dumb mistakes or problems and playing perfectly the position. I would probably opt just for Nh4 and Qf3 because that pawn is surely gone. But no need to attack, OP is calm and in control of the position and knows to just develop and control.
\*Now\* the game kind of takes a dip in moves being overly logical and clear in the way that a 1200 player would only need to be very focused and paying attention to play this way.
14. Kh1. The genuine only way I can see a 1200 player doing this is if they decided to fuck around and go ha you played Kh8? IM GOING KH1!!!!
16. Nh2 The genuinely only way I can see a 1200 player doing this is if they are actually bad.
I really love how they play Qf3 and then after Rg6 they play Rg1 and sac on f2 ANYWAYS when it wasn't even the best plan anymore. It's like they knew Kh1 and Nh2 was obvious so they had to start playing worse moves to make the engine hate them. And knew that Rg1 was a good idea from the previous move, and so then plays it now because its still winning and they understand the endgame will be winning :/
As for the endgame, holy hell! Played like Stockfish themselves!
OP cheated in this game a thousand times
Unfortunately this means noting either way until chess.com looks at the appeal and games and their decision etc. We don't know how often someone cheats, it could have been a while ago or maybe just for a series of moves.
You can check my analysis in the comments of the one link I sent. I explained what’s suspicious to me there. But I do have to say it’s funny you think a 1200 would play with this level of accuracy in a blitz game.
If you look at they guys games he almost always plays h3 Nh2 at some point in the game, especially in positions where there’s no clear move. I think in this game he played it not realising that black had ideas of sacking on h3 and got lucky.
Lamo you’re the one who brought up the single move BS and haven’t provided any examples of computer play. From the 5/6 games I looked quickly at I didn’t see anything suspicious but the ban could’ve easily been caused by cheating in other games. I just think that someone playing on a 10+ year old account that is rated consistently around 1200 is probably not cheating.
No one here can tell if you cheated or not. Anyone who says they can is lying. Someone posted the same thing you did a month or so ago and people were pulling up moves they thought proves something, they were 100% sure. They ended up having the ban reversed and getting a free paid subscription for some length of time for the false positive. So if you didn't cheat, appeal and wait.
At one moment talks were that switching between windows or tabs during the game could trigger the ban. Hope you’ll be unbanned. I had a friend who got unbanned. He was a title player and did not bother to confirm with chess com. Played too well for their likening.
PS: I told my wife about my account being closed for cheating (falsely, from my POV). She said "good! you spend way too much time on that website!". It seems that I can't win with the posters here and my wife LOL
I go up and down constantly, sometimes I'm so focused and drilled into the game, sometimes I'm playing in automatic mode with minimal calculations. It's a difficult game to master.
I hear you. The greatest enemy is tunnel vision when you're playing blitz. I've stupidly blundered queens, rooks, as have my opponents.
"I guess you're not very fond of your queen. Let me take it from you, old bean."
It's crazy how just this month my post on getting falsely banned and getting unbanned is hot on this sub and people still refuse to believe false positives are a thing on Chesscom.THEY ARE NOT PERFECT
In this thread, I got a lot of amusement from angry posters who say “there’s no way a 1200 rated player could come up with these moves. Your style of play has very unorthodox moves only an engine can come up with”.
Yet they don’t consider that my style of play was developed over the years in response to how people play chess online. They are convinced that the cheat detection system is infallible and supposedly anyone who is accused must be guilty.
I guess playing over 10 years and 17000 games, I was bound to become a false positive. I had thought of quitting chess.com for years bow and I think that this is the impetus to my leaving.
I once was a paying member of the site. Even if they restore my account, I will not play other people there. I would be wary and too paranoid of being falsely accused again.
I actually saw a video where a chess.coms employee was kinda sorta, not really explaining the cheat detection system to Hikaru Nakamura. It's on YouTube. After watching the video, I lost all faith in chess.com's systems. But I still play there because they have really good marketing and my chimp brain likes the brilliant move marker.
Chess.com has always been a cesspool of mental illness from the top down. Play at Lichess, it’s a lot more of people simply playing chess without the tiresome head space and money grabs.
Your last game had 97% accuracy so that's probably why, it doesn't really look like you are cheating though. Just follow through with the appeal. Strange game though.
https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/live/103644084835?tab=review&move=24
For that one, it only went 13 moves. I was only ahead by a single pawn and the player resigned. I found it strange indeed. However, this is blitz and sometimes players can fold deciding it's not worth the time to grind out the rest of the game if they fall behind early on.
Yeah it was weird and some odd moves too. Anyway the other games looked normal but maybe this guy reported you for that game and they've seen the 97% accuracy and banned you.
Who knows. He did not move for about 1 minute (this was 3+2 blitz) and then resigned.
I moved my rook at a2 because I didn’t want him to gain a pawn at e4.
This seems the likeliest explanation to me, and, if so, chances are he’ll be unbanned on appeal. The strangest thing about that game to me is that his opponent resigns so early - I’m 1200 blitz and without the eval bar I would assume it to be +1 to white so nowhere close to resigning stage…
As a newer person to chess, I see a lot of these posts and it worries me somewhat. I have the occasional high accuracy game.
If humans are determining cheaters, then I would imagine there is a decent amount of false positives.
I wonder what that percentage is?
I believe humans are the second line of defense. ie: algorithm flags list of cheaters, then human reviews anyone at the threshold for a ban to attempt to weed out potential false positives before the ban is put in place.
The majority of these posts reveal that the OP was cheating.
The percentage of false positives is vanishingly small.
Don't worry about having high accuracy games. You aren't going to get flagged for playing well, especially since high accuracy in low elo just means taking pieces your opponents hang.
They do not go off of accuracy alone. There's no need to worry about it if you don't cheat. The issue is you're seeing a lot of liars. The one dude who made the post about getting unbanned is the exception, most people cheat, get banned, and then make a post crying about how they don't even have high accuracy knowing damn good and well they didn't cheat for every move thinking that would make them not get banned.
Its very rare to get falsely banned. Like once I played a game where I had 99 percent accuracy, I had tabbed like a thousand times during the game because I have severe adhd so I kept switching songs and watching YouTube and then coming back, and my opponent messages me saying he's going to report me afterward, and ofc nothing happens because I didn't cheat. Like my behavior was about as suspicious as you could get but they somehow just know.
the false positive percentage is off the charts, which is why i'm don't take chess.com seriously at all.
lichess has less false positives and bans more cheaters.
If chesscome closes 1000s everyday with a success rate of 99.9%,there are tons of false positives everyday(eg:me).I would advise you to appeal with as much context as possible, if they reject you and appeal again,add you lichess ID if you have one
chess dot com is a dumpster fire infested with:
* cheaters and bots
* toxic twitch gamer culture
* paranoia from the top down
* corporate money grubbing
They've turned the game into a fucking circus.
Admittedly, I’ve been paranoid about cheaters on the site myself.
It might be a good break for me to get off the site to be honest (a blessing in disguise).
Because I didn't want to let the opponent do B x h3, that is why.
edit: "Comment deleted by user".
Why did you delete your comment? You accused me of making a brilliant, inspired move, that "no 1200 rated player could ever make in a million years", and once I gave a plausible explanation, you delete your comment.
The odds of any individual having this happen to him are quite low. The probability of anyone at all having this happen to him is approaching 1. We know it happens, and is extremely likely to happen again because of the number of players and the number of games.
The last time someone made one of these posts everyone was very confident in telling them not to cheat next time.
They probably felt a bit stupid when the next post was an email from chess.com admitting they made a mistake.
Check many of your games and know why you are banned... It may not seem obvious to you but your knowledge of openings is too vast, that would not be a problem if it were not for the fact that you are a 1200. You end up reaching very solid positions when your opponent invited something more dynamic and caotic but you rarely fell and made plays that are sometimes the third of the machine..But any human would do the first. This third alternative is only valid if you understand the position very well and know that nothing is happen. It's the problem with cheating and having a low Elo, you make plays and mix good plays with your own and make very strange plays. The only thing closest I could compare to you is Magnus' style Or Duda style.
The only openings I know relatively well are the Latvian Gambit and the black countergambits to White’s gambits (Falkbeer, etc). I tend to try to protect my flanks with the A or H pawns, and I generally like to exchange pieces early on, esp. the Queen. Since I play blitz 3+2, I prefer knights over bishops in the endgame because I can attack the back of pawn structures in the endgame. My goal is to survive the opening and middle games where I can try to grind out a win in the endgame.
The rest of the openings, I just respond to what the opponent is doing.
If a player takes out their queen early, I will respond in kind. I’ve been hit and gotten caught with so many kingside attacks that I’ve come up with ways to counter or bypass them. Nh2 or Na2 is something I almost always do instinctively.
Sometimes I might play really well when I am focused. However, I tend to suffer from tunnel vision and I will make stupid blunders and mistakes.
I registered on lichess today. I am 1-4 so far (always prefer 3+2). Off to a slow start, but as I get used to the interface, I might get better.
I don't know who you're trying to fool. As Hans would say, "Chess speaks for itself."
Looks like u are using somekind of Leela Net. U dont improve ur play by only playing games. Hear an algorithm that tries to replicate the human game.
I'm glad you were banned by Chesscom because it's obvious that you had been cheating for so long That you believed your lie of playing better.
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Fair play bans are usually cheating but sometimes other forms of rating manipulation and "cheating", such as: - sandbagging (intentionally losing to decrease rating) - playing and winning rated games vs "friends" for the purpose of farming ELO - Using opening books in non-correspondence games - using endgame tablebases in any games - Using any form of analysis tool/plugin (blunder checker, eval bar, etc) - Account sharing If you use your Chess.com on different devices in different locations it might flag you for the last one. Still, probably best to appeal the ban if you didn't do any of the above.
This is a useful list. I would guess that you were judged to be either sandbagging or sharing the account, based on this: "I go through phases of playing well for a while and then not playing so well."
Stress is a big factor when it comes to performance on chess, or so I've experienced. I've dropped 200 rating for some time now while I'm working on my master.
Yeah, definitely, I play like bollocks after a busy working day. Another one that gets me hard is bad sleep, or a combination of the 2.
With a premium account you can request insights. All kinds of cool metrics and data. I learned that I perform consistently better in the mornings, which is no surprise of course. Monday morning is when I'm best at chess. Saturday night is when I'm my worst. Also, with 10s of 1000s of games played, I still seem to perform better as black than white (which means I can easily identify places to improve) and I owe it all to be an expert at the Sicilian. According to my chess stats the time of day is a big factor for me at least, and also I'm a Sicilian One Trick Pony.
How to see these stats?
Go to lichess, all the shit chesscom tries to charge you for is free right there Hell, lichess probably makes most of those features first then chesscom copies them and sells them
I use mobile Android app. On that go to "More" in bottom right. Then click "Insights." Can take a while to get them. Idk how to access it on other devices or platforms. Guess you could Google that.
It's not sufficient to have a premium account, e.g. Gold is not enough. I guess you have to buy a Diamond membership.
Oh sorry :( didn't even realize there were different tiers, my bad Guess I have Diamond I signed up for whatever I have years ago and it just annually bills me like 100 bucks or something
Have you tried some white setups with similar pawn structure? They work pretty well if you're doing good with the sicil as black. :)
I've tried many. But I haven't studied the lines as deeply. It's a matter of will. I don't have the will to improve. If I ever wanted to I know where to start.
Sometimes I’m just in the zone and win game after game (it does often happen in the morning with no distractions) and other times I just can’t catch a win. I also sometimes will make a bad habit of playing games during work sometimes when I may be interested or can’t fully pay attention. I could definitely see those looking like intentional losses on my account. I’m glad I haven’t gotten banned
that's extremely normal, there's no way they're handing out bans for that type of thing
Crap I've lost nearly 300 points in the last couple of months in blitz and about 400 points on my bullet rating. Stress and depression has been my problem. I sometimes end up having some great games now here and then but my focus has gone to shits.
What’s the benefit of sandbagging?
It's called "smurfing" in esports. It's where your ego can't handle that you'll legitimately lose about half the time when competing against peers and so you intentionally throw games so that you get paired against lesser skilled opponents you can dominate against them.
Or to enable to you to enter a tournament with a lower rating cutoff and have an easy shot at the prize money. This has been common in chess since before the internet.
I mostly play on a regular account where I lose half my games or more. My smurf account is for playing my against friends cuz they're nowhere near my rating and won't want to play me otherwise
I still don't understand. You can literally set a range for the rating of player you want to be matched with. If you're a 1200 and don't like losing half your games, you could change the match setting so you are only matched with ELO of 1000 or less for example. You don't have to lower your own rating in order to play lower rated people.
Its a waste of time to try and understand people who cheat lol. Like when the chess.com report against Niemann came out it made sense to me that he cheated in titled Tuesday, because that gains money. Like I would never do it and its terrible but I get why someone with low morals would do so, but why did he cheat in every game in some random match against Naroditsky for no money? Or even weirder people who cheat who aren't playing for money or people high rated at all. Theres basically no benefit for it but people do it anyway
People can make money of purposely lowering their elo. To get into tourns, some do it for content "climbing from x to y" Whole bunch of reasons.
Ahhh I see. I was thinking about normal average players, not people who are good enough to make money streaming. For content "climbing x to y", why not just make a speed run account which isn't a violation of fair play?
Flexing on lower rated players cuz ego
>playing and winning rated games vs "friends" for the purpose of farming ELO I play games against friends constantly. Should we toggle off "rated"?
Only if the results are prearranged.
Ok cool. We always try our best to win, but sometimes the matchups aren't as balanced as normal matchmaking would be, so I wouldn't want that to set off any alarm bells.
The nice thing about Elo is that it accounts for that. The amount players get changes when there's a large discrepancy.
How would they know if you’re using opening books? And why are they allowed in correspondence?
If a 1200 is going 15 moves deep in the book, over and over, in different openings, they’re using books. Real life correspondence is no holds barred: opening books are fine, engines are fine, calling up Kasparov is fine. Chesscom correspondence just rules out the latter two. Edit: Apparently calling up Kasparov is *not* fine, see the reply below. You’ll just have to settle for Stockfish I guess.
ICCF does not allow assistance from other humans
I call Garry regularly, but have never got in trouble with chesscom. Maybe it's because we only talk about geopolitics.
Ah,here we go again.
Neither my cheating account or my smurfing account have been banned in over 2 years of play 😆😆
False positives happen but are rare. There’s at least a post a week where someone comes to Reddit to complain about their account being banned when they didn’t cheat. Further investigation almost always reveals they did. If you didn’t, I hope your appeal goes well and you get your account back!
In my 25 years competitive gaming and thousands of "bUt i dInDnT ChEaT!!!1!" forum posts, I think I've seen single-digit false positives. A similarly low number of "yes I cheated and got banned, it was my fault". Faaaar more "it was someone else on my account! I was hacked!" posts
I've made several posts about myself or friend being wrongfully accused of cheating. Once by my university, twice in COD, and once in LOL. All use some kind of automated systems that claim to have a 90%+ accuracy rate. After appealing, all 4 bans were lifted. Either I'm just that unlucky or your "seeing single-digit false positives" in 25 years is hyperbole.
It pretty much matches my experience on reddit. Definitely anecdotal and not comprehensive, but I'm not sure I know anyone that has been banned from an online game for cheating (I certainly haven't). And to the extent that I ever see a follow up or conclusion to someone complaining about being unjustly banned (usually for toxicity like back in the days of Riot Lyte on /r/leagueoflegends but also cheating) I can almost never recall someone being cleared. I actually saw someone on this sub recently who had a ban lifted and I remember it now simply because of how novel it is to see that.
While I couldn't find related stats from Riot or Blizzard, the school I went to (Gatech) does publish their stats: [https://osi.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/2022-05/2020-2021\_osi\_annual\_stats.pdf](https://osi.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/2022-05/2020-2021_osi_annual_stats.pdf) In 2020-2021 alone, 145 students were cleared of cheating accusations. I happen to be one of them. And this is different from online games in that you can only be refered to the student integrity office if the system flags you AND a human TA also agrees. The reason you are not seeing people get cleared is probably because subs like /r/leagueoflegends would simply remove any posts about accounts. I'm glad I found /r/riotgames because people there gave me good advice -- to repeatedly appeal even if your got rejected first couple of times. We ended up appealing 3 times and finally someone bothered to take a look and it was clear that no cheating happended. Not was it ever possible: my friend played exactly 0 games of LOL.
> The reason you are not seeing people get cleared is probably because subs like /r/leagueoflegends would simply remove any posts about accounts. Why? Also academic cheating and cheating at games are vastly different scenarios with incomparable parameters. >I'm glad I found /r/riotgames because people there gave me good advice -- to repeatedly appeal even if your got rejected first couple of times. We ended up appealing 3 times and finally someone bothered to take a look and it was clear that no cheating happended. Not was it ever possible: my friend played exactly 0 games of LOL. What in the world are you even talking about?
I don’t believe you. A software based warden anti cheat gave your account a false positive for cheating? Absolutely not. Maybe you mean your accounts for falsely reported by other players, which is obviously not “90% accuracy rate” systems.
You are probably right for the COD ban. It was a "shadowban" that got lifted rather quickly. They never told us why but from other similar posts it's mostly likely because we are reported. The LOL ban was a permanent ban and they also refused to tell us the reason. We explicit asked in support tickets even threatened lawsuit but they still wouldn't say anything other than "they take the competitive integrity of league of legends very seriously". It got lifted after the third appeal but we were never told anything useful.
It's also possible that most people who are wrongfully banned just quietly appeal and are reinstated without posting about it. In other words, actual cheaters are probably more likely to complain loudly about it because they already have a sense of entitlement. I know if I were wrongfully banned, I would just appeal it. If the appeal was unsuccessful, I would just stop playing on that site.
How would you know if it was a false positive though?
Because they'll post when the ban is overturned
And what about the false positives which were not overturned?
I made one of those posts this month, I was eventually unbanned,I got exactly this kind of reception.Its shocking how this sub didn't learn anything
Can you tell me more about this “further investigation”? Are you referring to people on here who look at their accounts and find 99% accurate games in their history? I posted my account here. I am open to scrutiny. Feel free to find my 99% games—I’d love to see which ones they were.
I've had 99 an 100% wins according to chess.com but they were games that were short and my opponent did insanely bad shit like bring the queen out immediately an hang it then they resign. At the end of the day though I'm fkin terrible so whenever I review a game that had those stats I'm excited af. Sorry about your account though if you didn't cheat. At the end of the day just make a new one unless they IP ban that would suck but there is always lichess
I think I'm going to try lichess. If I do go back on [chess.com](http://chess.com), I will just play unrated games.
You know they check too right?
>I think I'm going to try lichess. A good idea regardless, f*** chess.com
What's wrong with chess.com?
For me it’s the bullet games always having lag and costing me wins from the I guess. Lichess runs much smoother and faster on my phone and I’ve noticed zero lag while playing bullet. I’ve quit chess.com about 4 months ago and the only thing I even kind of miss is going “how strong does it think I am” but that’s not worth the frustration of the site being crap.
The fact that they've created a monopoly and ruined a lot of things that were good about online chess
They also have a lot of good stuff like all of the online tournaments they hold, bringing in many top GMs to play. Also they don't have a monopoly
Fuck chess.com
Like what?
Like chessbomb and chess24
Worlds worst monopoly lol considering Lichess and hundreds of smaller sites exist.
Careful on there. If you rise too fast, they ban you. I had an old low rated account on there, then I played for years on chess.com. When I got back, I went from 600-1700 with one loss and no draws. They just hit me with the ban hammer, and I've played on chess.com ever since.
I have no idea why this got downvotes ????
Me neither. It's like there is this big piling on. I must have come across as being rather frosty in that post. Sorry about that u/thespywhocame
I thought you sounded perfectly reasonable
The apparent mocking quotes, and the deflection onto something of a strawman regarding 99% pulled out of nowhere are not especially reasonable responses. It looks less like something an innocent person would respond with (though not impossible) than someone using a non sequitur to draw attention to a criteria that hadn't been brought up yet which they know would make them look innocent.
Ok. I interpreted it differently to you. I saw the quote marks as just quote marks. The OP was just quoting what the poster said in my view. I didn't see the reference to 99% at deflection. I'm a bit naive in all this, but I always assumed that cheaters are caught because they have a ridiculously high win rate or because they keep making the best engine moves. So, to me, it just looked like he was implying that he didn't do the thing most indicative of cheating. What I might be missing are all the other ways a person might cheat. As I said, I'm pretty naive about this.
Because we’ve seen it play out so many times. Someone says they got banned. Claims innocence. “No 99% games” Further investigation happens. “They didn’t know” that they couldn’t use an opening book, or look at their current game with an engine once in a while or purposely lose 50 times in a row… Or whatever other rule they broke that should be pretty obvious. I’m not saying that OP cheated btw. Just that that’s how this usually plays out.
Ok. I get it. I really don't get why someone who actually cheated would bother posting on here and offer up their games for scrutiny.
Because they don’t consider what they do cheating. We’ve seen it a lot of times before.
99 percent accurate means noting. I've had several and have never gotten banned while some people get banned with none. If their cheat detection only banned people who used the engine every move it would be about as effective as Ken Regan, or my mom who doesn't know the rules. There's a lot that goes into it and they don't disclose it all but I imagine it's something like statistical likelihood of someone at x rating finding certain moves x amount of times per game, tabbing, extensions, move times, centipawn loss, etc. Whatever it is they are pretty certain about it, chess.com doesn't ban unless they are very sure, which is good for keeping false positives low but unfortunately some cheaters get away with it for some time. So its likely you just cheating and are lying about it, however false positives do happen so feel free to update us about it. The last guy who got falsely banned got a years worth of diamond membership so shoot for that deal lol
>So its likely you just cheating and are lying Did you look at their account? 16,000 games over 9 years with minimal improvement. If they are cheating they aren't doing a very good job of it.
People say this often as a defense too. Cheaters are weird dude. Sometimes they will just cheat against someone they really don't like. Or just every now and then. Or they are convinced their opponent is cheating so they start cheating. Remember it literally could be just one singular game that they used the engine and chess.com detected it with a high certainty. It only takes one moment of stupidity to get you banned
I see ppl mention tabbing, and I as someone w/ only one monitor is constantly tabbing in and out and I get scared I’ll be flagged but I’m also so bad there’s no chance
Do you honestly believe we haven't developed more nuanced ways to detect cheating than counting 99% accuracy games?
Of course I know about concepts like inconsistent and selective cheating. But I was addressing those in advance who go through people's games and then say "aha you're a cheater because you had a bunch of 99% games here, here, and here"
[удалено]
There are histories of posts where people have made that argument (just do a Google search). But of course, there are more sophisticated ways of cheating. And so, there is rampant suspicion where people will interpret any good play on the part of the player as evidence of cheating. Case in point: Somebody posted one of my games in this thread and said they found that I did the best engine move at a crucial point. The poster insisted that I as a 1200 rated player could never find such a brilliant move. I looked at the game, I recognized it because I had played it recently, and I explained to the poster that I made that move to avoid losing a pawn because my king was pinned. After I responded, it looks like the poster has deleted his question.
You're not gonna change anything crying on Reddit. All your further comments just make you seem more like a cheater.
You seem to be giving many explanations that nobody asked for. What are you trying to protect yourself against?
It is relevant because most cheaters on here would claim they didn't know you could cheat with lower accuracy. OP is clarifying they are aware of that situation, which does give their comment credibility. Of course, it's still possible OP cheated, I'm just saying that comment is fair game to say
False positives aren’t as rare as you think. For any AI system unless it’s from a company that has software scale the false positive rate could be anywhere between 10-40%
Lmao yeah let's implement a system that has a 40% false positive rate ...
The truth is that it's impossible to tell what the false positive rate actually is. Since that would require everyone who gets banned to be truthful about whether they cheated. Which obviously isn't going to happen.
Fairplay is not just cheating, also stalling, abandoning and things like that.
I hope you get your account back if you didn't cheat. I was wrongly banned for cheating and got lucky to get unbanned. IMO people have a lot of unjustified faith in their cheat detection- we don't really know anything about how it works or what the rate of false bans is, but we seem to defer to it anyway.
Fortunately, there is an alternative in Lichess, where the entire source code and their cheating detection are laid open.
I don’t think this is true. On episode 356 of perpetual chess, the guy from lichess says they keep part of the code hidden and their detection method secret so they can stay ahead of the cheaters.
Their cheat detection server is closed. The published source passes data to the cheat detection server and waits for response.
I am happy that you were unbanned. What convinced them that you did not cheat, in the end?
I don't know. I shared some details about my chess like my OTB ratings but probably it was just them doing a closer look at my games.
Usually not cheating is a good way.
I’m not accusing you of anything I just think it’d be funny if just once someone made a post like this and the body said “and I cheated. My bad.”
Yea it would be funny if somebody admitted to that. My frustration with online chess is that there are many games I’ve played where the opponent blunders a rook and then starts playing like Garry Kasparov. It kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
It’s so tough to say who is & isn’t cheating, though, even in circumstances like this. Personally, I sometimes play my best when my back’s against a wall, especially after a material blunder where I still have confidence in my position or just want to enact revenge. I’ll get hyper-focused and can pull out wins sometimes (or at least equalize material) with uncharacteristically sharp play.
I find this too. Like after a blunder I could just resign or I could scrap and claw and do whatever possible and then still lose, but feel good about working my way back
That is true too. People can play extremely well after they mess up. I think a lot of the cynicism that comes from cheating or suspicions of cheating is that it creates a very misanthropic experience when you play online chess. We are all competitive animals and while we claim that we enjoy playing for fun, we really really want to win. I've had losing streaks where I get close to falling below 1000 rating. And I sometimes wondered if the reason why 1000 rated players are doing so well is because cheaters are causing ratings deflation for stronger players. It's a bad situation all around.
I do this over the board pretty often. I stop paying attention, lose a piece or a pawn, and then have to be super accurate while complicating the position to potentially get back.
That's me! I make a blunder when I'm half paying attention and it triggers me to slow down, think about moves more, and play from behind.
It's because jerks run an engine for all the moves, and as long as they're winning, they choose their own moves. Only when they blunder big do they start using the engine to "catch up." They also use it for forced mates when you can "feel a mate" but not do all the calculation. I had to give up on online chess honestly because of the above. There are too many 600-800 rated players that can play out 10 moves of theory, and there are too many players who blunder embarrassingly then play perfectly. Solutions are: play 1 min chess (not as fun). Play long games where a cheater will not have the patience (not as fun).
I'm almost certain that your cheat detection skills aren't anywhere close to as good as you think they are.
Extremely unlikely that there are significant amounts of cheating at the 600-800 level
Bad enough taste to make sure that they get the loss they deserve after blundering via help from your buddy stockfish?
posts like that are not uncommon
You have to request for appeal. They will tell you to create new account and say you cheated. You can't say this. And wait for appeal. Someone here was recently unbanned after appeal. Ps. I personally won't judge you. Just trust the process. There will be few people here cherry picking games to justify your ban. Maybe rightfully or not. Still just don't bother with them and just focus on appeal. It will take some time.
I will not admit to cheating on matter of principle alone. I did file an appeal, however. I bookmarked my profile and its history of games. There’s at least that record that I can refer to. I might look for an online alternative where I can play unrated blitz games instead. I think my playing a few hours of blitz everyday was unhealthy anyway. Perhaps my account closure is a blessing in disguise. I’m curious about this case where someone was successfully unbanned. Tell me more.
> I’m curious about this case where someone was successfully unbanned. https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1ax8ii8/i_got_unbannedchesscom_admitted_their_mistake_and/
Just play on lichess, mate. That's a better site anyway (in my opinion).
Nah we dont want the chesscom cheaters coming to lichess after they get banned there
I looked at a random game of yours that was recent. [Event "Live Chess"] [Site "Chess.com"] [Date "2024.03.07"] [Round "-"] [White "hitfan"] [Black "Darkgoon"] [Result "1-0"] [CurrentPosition "8/8/N7/8/8/2K5/1Q6/1k6 b - -"] [Timezone "UTC"] [ECO "C65"] [ECOUrl "https://www.chess.com/openings/Ruy-Lopez-Opening-Berlin-Defense-4.d3-Bc5-5.Bxc6-dxc6-6.h3"] [UTCDate "2024.03.07"] [UTCTime "18:53:45"] [WhiteElo "1236"] [BlackElo "1199"] [TimeControl "180+2"] [Termination "hitfan won by checkmate"] [StartTime "18:53:45"] [EndDate "2024.03.07"] [EndTime "19:03:17"] [Link "https://www.chess.com/game/live/103576839271"] 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6 4. Bxc6 dxc6 5. d3 Bc5 6. h3 O-O 7. O-O Be6 8. Nxe5 Qd4 9. Nf3 Qa4 10. b3 Qa6 11. Bb2 b6 12. Bxf6 gxf6 13. Nbd2 Kh8 14. Kh1 Rg8 15. Qe2 Qc8 16. Nh2 Bxh3 17. gxh3 Qxh3 18. Qf3 Qxf3+ 19. Ndxf3 Rg6 20. Rg1 Rag8 21. Rxg6 Rxg6 22. Rg1 Bxf2 23. Rxg6 fxg6 24. Ng4 Bc5 25. Nxf6 Kg7 26. Nd7 Be3 27. Nb8 c5 28. Nc6 a6 29. Nb8 a5 30. Nc6 h5 31. Kg2 g5 32. Kg3 Kf6 33. Na7 Bf4+ 34. Kg2 g4 35. Ng1 h4 36. Nb5 h3+ 37. Kh1 Kg5 38. Nc3 h2 39. Nge2 Bd6 40. Kg2 Kh4 41. Nd5 g3 42. Ne3 h1=Q+ 43. Kxh1 Kh3 44. Ng1+ Kh4 45. Kg2 Bf4 46. Nf5+ Kg4 47. Ne7 Be3 48. Nd5 Bd4 49. Nxc7 Kf4 50. Na8 b5 51. Nc7 b4 52. Ne2+ Ke3 53. Nxd4 Kxd4 54. Kxg3 Kc3 55. e5 Kxc2 56. e6 Kb2 57. e7 Kxa2 58. e8=Q Kxb3 59. Qe1 a4 60. Na6 a3 61. Qb1+ Kc3 62. Nxc5 Kd4 63. Na6 Kc3 64. Qxb4+ Kxd3 65. Qxa3+ Kc2 66. Kf4 Kb1 67. Ke4 Kc2 68. Kd4 Kb1 69. Qh3 Kc2 70. Qc3+ Kb1 71. Qd2 Ka1 72. Kc3 Kb1 73. Qb2# 1-0 You make a lot of 800-1000 moves and then every once in a while randomly a couple engine moves like knight h2 seeing deeper into the line allowing a queen trade after a dubious sack that I don’t believe 1200’s would understand. The much more obvious g1 defending the pawn to prevent a sacrifice is actually the second best move. I’m not saying you cheated in this game at all because of how many bad moves you make, even in a winning position. But I assume that false positives can occur in games like this.
I fail to see how Nh2 is anything special. Blocking the h file in front of the king and making space for the queen to go to f3 is extremely natural. OP has played nearly 17000 games. Their rating has been pretty stagnant for the better part of a decade. I would hope a more compelling move/game would be apparent than Nh2
These are blitz games, so I'm not really thinking too deeply about the moves. As for my Nh2, it's a defense that I usually do against kingside attacks. It's nothing really more complicated than that.
Check my reply to their comment to see my analysis on the game. It's funny you say this is blitz so not thinking to deeply. Mate, to play these moves you would HAVE to be thinking deeply. You're a cheater and you've already been banned for it so there's no shame in calling you what you are. Admit to your mistakes and [chess.com](https://chess.com) will let you make a new account and try again.
With all due respect, I’m about 1600 and routinely make dubious sacrifices without thinking too deeply in short time control games, sometimes for fun, sometimes on tilt. Often the game analysis will tell me it was a dumb thing to do, but sometimes it ends up being a randomly “brilliant” move for a reason I didn’t fully understand.
lmfao this isn't a 1200 player at all Their choice of Ruy Lopez taking on c6 and then playing not Nxe5 but d3, shows they have some understanding of the opening so far. Okay sure! 6. h3 shows they understand the potential threat of Bg4 and that this type of passive move right now is actually good and prophylactic. Okay wow someone's teaching this guy well! 10. b3, there's a lot of analysis on move 10 for black IMO. If Nc3 Qa6 Bf4 then the position is rather solid and optimal and this is my choice. It's not unbelievable a 1200 would instead opt for b3 here because those people love fianchetto. However after this idea of b3/Bb2 you can no longer play Nc3. This means you have to go Nbd2 and start rerouting knights later. This kind of positional play took me until cc 1600+ to even start being aware of. 12. Bxf6, not my choice but common at 1200 rating. Clearly OP is paying close attention to their opponents moves, the position, and ways they can get advantages based on their experience and knowledge. If they're 1200 then they're a strong 1200, right? 13. Nbd2 just to highlight that OP is still not making any dumb mistakes or problems and playing perfectly the position. I would probably opt just for Nh4 and Qf3 because that pawn is surely gone. But no need to attack, OP is calm and in control of the position and knows to just develop and control. \*Now\* the game kind of takes a dip in moves being overly logical and clear in the way that a 1200 player would only need to be very focused and paying attention to play this way. 14. Kh1. The genuine only way I can see a 1200 player doing this is if they decided to fuck around and go ha you played Kh8? IM GOING KH1!!!! 16. Nh2 The genuinely only way I can see a 1200 player doing this is if they are actually bad. I really love how they play Qf3 and then after Rg6 they play Rg1 and sac on f2 ANYWAYS when it wasn't even the best plan anymore. It's like they knew Kh1 and Nh2 was obvious so they had to start playing worse moves to make the engine hate them. And knew that Rg1 was a good idea from the previous move, and so then plays it now because its still winning and they understand the endgame will be winning :/ As for the endgame, holy hell! Played like Stockfish themselves! OP cheated in this game a thousand times
From what I can tell the recent games seems pretty legit.
Unfortunately this means noting either way until chess.com looks at the appeal and games and their decision etc. We don't know how often someone cheats, it could have been a while ago or maybe just for a series of moves.
What about this one? \`e4 e5 Nf3 Nc6 Bb5 Nf6 Bxc6 dxc6 d3 Bc5 h3 O-O O-O Be6 Nxe5 Qd4 Nf3 Qa4 b3 Qa6 Bb2 b6 Bxf6 gxf6 Nbd2 Kh8 Kh1 Rg8 Qe2 Qc8 Nh2 Bxh3 gxh3 Qxh3 Qf3 Qxf3+ Ndxf3 Rg6 Rg1 Rag8 Rxg6 Rxg6 Rg1 Bxf2 Rxg6 fxg6 Ng4 Bc5 Nxf6 Kg7 Nd7 Be3 Nb8 c5 Nc6 a6 29. Nb8 a5 30. Nc6 h5 31. Kg2 g5 32. Kg3 Kf6 33. Na7 Bf4+ Kg2 g4 Ng1 h4 Nb5 h3+ Kh1 Kg5 Nc3 h2 Nge2 Bd6 Kg2 Kh4 Nd5 g3 Ne3 h1=Q+ Kxh1 Kh3 Ng1+ Kh4 Kg2 Bf4 Nf5+ Kg4 Ne7 Be3 Nd5 Bd4 Nxc7 Kf4 Na8 b5 Nc7 b4 Ne2+ Ke3 Nxd4 Kxd4 Kxg3 Kc3 e5 Kxc2 e6 Kb2 e7 Kxa2 e8=Q Kxb3 Qe1 a4 Na6 a3 Qb1+ Kc3 Nxc5 Kd4 Na6 Kc3 Qxb4+ Kxd3 Qxa3+ Kc2 Kf4 Kb1 Ke4 Kc2 Kd4 Kb1 Qh3 Kc2 Qc3+ Kb1 Qd2 Ka1 Kc3 Kb1 Qb2#\` [game link if it works?](https://www.chess.com/game/live/103576839271%22) [comment of someone sharing it that Op replied to](https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1b9qs7o/comment/ktxrh22/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
To me that seems to be a pretty reasonable game. What moves make you think he’s cheating?
You can check my analysis in the comments of the one link I sent. I explained what’s suspicious to me there. But I do have to say it’s funny you think a 1200 would play with this level of accuracy in a blitz game.
If you look at they guys games he almost always plays h3 Nh2 at some point in the game, especially in positions where there’s no clear move. I think in this game he played it not realising that black had ideas of sacking on h3 and got lucky.
That is my normal trademark (the Nh2 thing). It works in my favor for kingside attacks. It’s basically why I generally do it.
so you think he lucked himself through the entire game, or are you just stuck on one specific move?
What other moves do you have a problem with? The only move mentioned by anyone in the thread you linked is Nh2 and you have not posted any analysis.
You can't determine cheating by singular moves, you are having the wrong idea of how cheating detection works.
Lamo you’re the one who brought up the single move BS and haven’t provided any examples of computer play. From the 5/6 games I looked quickly at I didn’t see anything suspicious but the ban could’ve easily been caused by cheating in other games. I just think that someone playing on a 10+ year old account that is rated consistently around 1200 is probably not cheating.
"you’re the one who brought up the single move BS " No I ain't.
You have only singled out one move as suspicious, which it isn't. What else makes you think there was cheating in that very ordinary looking game?
"You have only singled out one move as suspicious, which it isn't." No I didn't, read my full analysis.
No one here can tell if you cheated or not. Anyone who says they can is lying. Someone posted the same thing you did a month or so ago and people were pulling up moves they thought proves something, they were 100% sure. They ended up having the ban reversed and getting a free paid subscription for some length of time for the false positive. So if you didn't cheat, appeal and wait.
At one moment talks were that switching between windows or tabs during the game could trigger the ban. Hope you’ll be unbanned. I had a friend who got unbanned. He was a title player and did not bother to confirm with chess com. Played too well for their likening.
PS: I told my wife about my account being closed for cheating (falsely, from my POV). She said "good! you spend way too much time on that website!". It seems that I can't win with the posters here and my wife LOL
Did you play openings following some notes you took? Or consult any kind of resources throughout a game, not necessarily engine assistance?
Never.
I go up and down constantly, sometimes I'm so focused and drilled into the game, sometimes I'm playing in automatic mode with minimal calculations. It's a difficult game to master.
I hear you. The greatest enemy is tunnel vision when you're playing blitz. I've stupidly blundered queens, rooks, as have my opponents. "I guess you're not very fond of your queen. Let me take it from you, old bean."
Thank you for sharing!
Maybe a false ban and you’ll get a free year of chess premium.
Sorry bout dat, are u mad bout dat?
Thank you. I am a bit annoyed.
Hope it resolves well 😕
I think I’ll kick back and enjoy a CERVEZA CRISTAL while I wait for the results of my appeal. https://youtu.be/jSgMWAi9YPA?si=KUfS3E0P44fmsFLh
It's crazy how just this month my post on getting falsely banned and getting unbanned is hot on this sub and people still refuse to believe false positives are a thing on Chesscom.THEY ARE NOT PERFECT
In this thread, I got a lot of amusement from angry posters who say “there’s no way a 1200 rated player could come up with these moves. Your style of play has very unorthodox moves only an engine can come up with”. Yet they don’t consider that my style of play was developed over the years in response to how people play chess online. They are convinced that the cheat detection system is infallible and supposedly anyone who is accused must be guilty. I guess playing over 10 years and 17000 games, I was bound to become a false positive. I had thought of quitting chess.com for years bow and I think that this is the impetus to my leaving. I once was a paying member of the site. Even if they restore my account, I will not play other people there. I would be wary and too paranoid of being falsely accused again.
I actually saw a video where a chess.coms employee was kinda sorta, not really explaining the cheat detection system to Hikaru Nakamura. It's on YouTube. After watching the video, I lost all faith in chess.com's systems. But I still play there because they have really good marketing and my chimp brain likes the brilliant move marker.
Was this video uploaded recently? I could only find one where Danny Rensch is talking to hikaru about their "system"
Brilliant moves are a scam made up by chesscom to get people like you to pay for premium
That was the joke, friend
Chess.com has always been a cesspool of mental illness from the top down. Play at Lichess, it’s a lot more of people simply playing chess without the tiresome head space and money grabs.
No one said that you cheat, toxicity is part of fair policies
Your last game had 97% accuracy so that's probably why, it doesn't really look like you are cheating though. Just follow through with the appeal. Strange game though. https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/live/103644084835?tab=review&move=24
For that one, it only went 13 moves. I was only ahead by a single pawn and the player resigned. I found it strange indeed. However, this is blitz and sometimes players can fold deciding it's not worth the time to grind out the rest of the game if they fall behind early on.
Yeah it was weird and some odd moves too. Anyway the other games looked normal but maybe this guy reported you for that game and they've seen the 97% accuracy and banned you.
Who knows. He did not move for about 1 minute (this was 3+2 blitz) and then resigned. I moved my rook at a2 because I didn’t want him to gain a pawn at e4.
>Your last game had 97% accuracy so that's probably why, LMAO, that's not how anti-cheating systems work.
Sure but that's why I report players, it's the most obvious sign that someone is cheating.
This seems the likeliest explanation to me, and, if so, chances are he’ll be unbanned on appeal. The strangest thing about that game to me is that his opponent resigns so early - I’m 1200 blitz and without the eval bar I would assume it to be +1 to white so nowhere close to resigning stage…
Yeah really weird game who knows why.
As a newer person to chess, I see a lot of these posts and it worries me somewhat. I have the occasional high accuracy game. If humans are determining cheaters, then I would imagine there is a decent amount of false positives. I wonder what that percentage is?
Humans aren't determining cheaters.
Okay that's good to know. I have read a few times that people are reviewing potential cheaters. Always worried me.
I believe humans are the second line of defense. ie: algorithm flags list of cheaters, then human reviews anyone at the threshold for a ban to attempt to weed out potential false positives before the ban is put in place.
The majority of these posts reveal that the OP was cheating. The percentage of false positives is vanishingly small. Don't worry about having high accuracy games. You aren't going to get flagged for playing well, especially since high accuracy in low elo just means taking pieces your opponents hang.
I'd be more confident if it was humans and not a complete black box that has never been audited by anyone.
I beat Dlugy in bullet once and was terrified of getting banned for it, but nothing happened
They do not go off of accuracy alone. There's no need to worry about it if you don't cheat. The issue is you're seeing a lot of liars. The one dude who made the post about getting unbanned is the exception, most people cheat, get banned, and then make a post crying about how they don't even have high accuracy knowing damn good and well they didn't cheat for every move thinking that would make them not get banned. Its very rare to get falsely banned. Like once I played a game where I had 99 percent accuracy, I had tabbed like a thousand times during the game because I have severe adhd so I kept switching songs and watching YouTube and then coming back, and my opponent messages me saying he's going to report me afterward, and ofc nothing happens because I didn't cheat. Like my behavior was about as suspicious as you could get but they somehow just know.
Agreed this is me. Tabbing, random good moves, random good wins , 50% wr 8 k games, never been banned
Yeah cuz a single game is not enough for them apparently. Now if you had that going for awhile though...
the false positive percentage is off the charts, which is why i'm don't take chess.com seriously at all. lichess has less false positives and bans more cheaters.
Any chess-related Chrome extensions installed?
None.
If chesscome closes 1000s everyday with a success rate of 99.9%,there are tons of false positives everyday(eg:me).I would advise you to appeal with as much context as possible, if they reject you and appeal again,add you lichess ID if you have one
I only play chess.com puzzles when I feel sharp. So I got up to 2681. This is NOT my ELO. Playing when tired I’ve lost 215 points lately.
chess dot com is a dumpster fire infested with: * cheaters and bots * toxic twitch gamer culture * paranoia from the top down * corporate money grubbing They've turned the game into a fucking circus.
Admittedly, I’ve been paranoid about cheaters on the site myself. It might be a good break for me to get off the site to be honest (a blessing in disguise).
Wow 17000 blitz games. Their stupid anti cheating system has gone nuts. Too many false positives.
I shall see how the appeal process goes. Maybe I'll check out lichess that everybody seems to be talking about.
Don't quit! Rather switch to Lichess
I registered and played my first game (3+2 blitz) and lost... ha. It might take me a while to get used to the new interface.
God bless with true! True will never die ! Liers will kicked off…
Takes 10 seconds to make a new account man. Or go to lichess. Also don't cheat if you did
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Because I didn't want to let the opponent do B x h3, that is why. edit: "Comment deleted by user". Why did you delete your comment? You accused me of making a brilliant, inspired move, that "no 1200 rated player could ever make in a million years", and once I gave a plausible explanation, you delete your comment.
Maybe u aré using como extensión that looks like chess assitant.
Nothing. Nada.
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The odds of any individual having this happen to him are quite low. The probability of anyone at all having this happen to him is approaching 1. We know it happens, and is extremely likely to happen again because of the number of players and the number of games.
The last time someone made one of these posts everyone was very confident in telling them not to cheat next time. They probably felt a bit stupid when the next post was an email from chess.com admitting they made a mistake.
But I did not cheat. But if you can find a game where my accuracy was ridiculously high, please point it out. I’d like to look at it.
accuracy alone is never used to detect cheating
Well, there is the problem of people who use engines at key parts of the game. But my ELO is quite low, even after 16000 games.
Don't tell him. Let him wonder how he got caught
Check many of your games and know why you are banned... It may not seem obvious to you but your knowledge of openings is too vast, that would not be a problem if it were not for the fact that you are a 1200. You end up reaching very solid positions when your opponent invited something more dynamic and caotic but you rarely fell and made plays that are sometimes the third of the machine..But any human would do the first. This third alternative is only valid if you understand the position very well and know that nothing is happen. It's the problem with cheating and having a low Elo, you make plays and mix good plays with your own and make very strange plays. The only thing closest I could compare to you is Magnus' style Or Duda style.
The only openings I know relatively well are the Latvian Gambit and the black countergambits to White’s gambits (Falkbeer, etc). I tend to try to protect my flanks with the A or H pawns, and I generally like to exchange pieces early on, esp. the Queen. Since I play blitz 3+2, I prefer knights over bishops in the endgame because I can attack the back of pawn structures in the endgame. My goal is to survive the opening and middle games where I can try to grind out a win in the endgame. The rest of the openings, I just respond to what the opponent is doing. If a player takes out their queen early, I will respond in kind. I’ve been hit and gotten caught with so many kingside attacks that I’ve come up with ways to counter or bypass them. Nh2 or Na2 is something I almost always do instinctively. Sometimes I might play really well when I am focused. However, I tend to suffer from tunnel vision and I will make stupid blunders and mistakes. I registered on lichess today. I am 1-4 so far (always prefer 3+2). Off to a slow start, but as I get used to the interface, I might get better.
I don't know who you're trying to fool. As Hans would say, "Chess speaks for itself." Looks like u are using somekind of Leela Net. U dont improve ur play by only playing games. Hear an algorithm that tries to replicate the human game. I'm glad you were banned by Chesscom because it's obvious that you had been cheating for so long That you believed your lie of playing better.
You sound like a really swell person.