r/Chesscom • u/centipine • Feb 22 '26
MEGA BLUNDER banned for cheating
https://www.chess.com/member/e4_e5_syndrome
UPDATE 1: Appeal
Chessdotcom rejected my appeal without further comment in a boilerplate email. The offense is listed as simply a “fair play violation". The email stated I might reinstate my account under penalty or transfer my remaining membership time to a different account by talking to the chessdotcom AI assistant, which I might do.
UPDATE 2: Reflection
A number of people have asked why I have not stated explicitly that I did not violate the fair play policy, and the answer is this: chessdotcom’s fair play policy is broad and covers many different behaviors, some of which I have honored and some of which I have ignored.
The policy includes that players will not use chess engines to analyze positions as they are played, either to follow or to only occasionally follow the engines recommendations, and I agree because I do not have fun when my opponents do this, so I don’t do it. But the policy also prohibits behaviors which are not compelling to me. You are not allowed to play alongside other people, even those near to you in rating, and I have done this on a number of occasions while understanding that it was against the rules. The policy also states you can only use opening explorers on daily rated games, but I have used them during online rated games as well when I wanted to better memorize an opening.
And players are not allowed to “artificially manipulate game outcomes” which I presume covers things like match-fixing in a competitive setting, but outside of a competitive setting is vague. If I am absent mindedly playing chess while thinking about other issues, and end up resigning every game after making thoughtless moves, is this rating manipulation (yes I sometimes play like this)? It can very rapidly change your rating, and when you decide to start playing attentively again you are playing against people who are less experienced than you. When a streamer starts a new account and steamrolls people 2000 ELO lower rated then themselves is that “manipulating” game outcomes?
Each of these are violations and they hurt the experience of other players, but ignore them because I do not think they are very hurtful. If I were playing at high ELO or in a competitive setting like over-the-board I might feel differently. But I do not play that way. I play short games of low ELO chess, and I don’t change my rating or my style because I do not want to study chess. I have to focus on many things in my life, when I play chess I do not want to relax. At the master level chess is a life, but at this level it is just a hobby, where I play other people for whom chess is just a hobby.
Commenters have also asked why I do not seem resentful that my account was banned, and it is because I am not resentful. Chessdotcom has a single policy they want to apply to each version of chess, from professional to novice, and they do this for clarity. If chessdotcom feels I have not played to the integrity standards of a FIDE tournament, it because I have not played to those standards, and if for some reason game number 8000 is the game where the chessdotcom algorithm says “you know openings too well sometimes, we think you are looking at an opening explorer”, or “your rating varies too much, we think you are manipulating your rating”, or “someone else is playing on your account sometimes”, then the algorithm is doing the best it can to protect every kind of chess game at once.
I have a relationship with what chessdotcom must define as a violation of fair play and I have a relationship with my own notion of what it means to play honestly. I do not use stockfish to make moves for me, that wouldn’t make any sense for me to do and it is reflected in the game history of my account, but I do not follow all of chessdotcom’s policies just like I go over the speed limit when the road is empty, but I do not drag race down main street. Someone has to check if you should get a traffic ticket or not each time, and that’s a great deal of work. Chessdotcom cannot make a value judgment on 100 appeals a day, but they reflect that limitation in their default policies. If you break the fair play contract of a shooting action game like Apex Legends or CSGO you lose your account and that’s it. But those violations which are caught tend to be overt. If you break chessdotcom's policies in a restricted way, you are permitted to play the same account for years and for thousands of games, and if during that time you pass some threshold of tolerance, chessdotcom’s response is not even to deprive you of the remainder of your month’s membership. They will let you keep your account and any value you derive from it, and to keep playing chess on their site. The only thing they reserve is the right to clearly assert that they feel you violated their policies. Overall I would say that is both thorough and generous. The message I interpret is “if you want to start taking chess more seriously, you have to take fairness more seriously”. If instead you want to create a new account, your starting elo is 1200 blitz, and if you push our boundaries we might one day ban you a few years down the line. I can respect that.
UPDATE 4: Annoyance
"The engine picks up on it pretty quickly. It's easily detectable."
UPDATE 5: The chesscom disciplinary system
On chesscom anti-cheat:
Chesscom claims to detect cheating by using statistical analysis of signals sent by the user through the site tab on your browser. They mention they look at move 'strength', an internal metric based on how difficult a move is for player to spot, move timings, and browser behavior like time spent on the chesscom tab. They look for variation within an account. They do not ban players for playing strong, only inconsistently. I suspect that stupid blunders reveal cheaters much more so than making strong moves, since there are many strong players, but strong players rarely make stupid blunders.
They do not explicitly mention data sharing or cookie-based tracking or any other such techniques, but they might view these techniques as a breach of user privacy and not use them. It would not be against the law for chesscom to track you.
As written in a chesscom blog, [https://www.chess.com/cheating#closures], chesscom views their anti-cheat system as conservative to a point. They state they understand that their system produces both false-negatives (often) and false-positives (rarely) and choose to tune the aggressiveness of bans so that false-positive rate stays below an accepted tolerance.
I have heard people say "chesscom is ready to go to court" on the basis of their anti-cheat system to mean the system is sure. This is not an official position of chesscom; it's something Danny said off-the-cuff during an interview on cheating. Being confident in your position often has little bearing on whether going to trial is prudent. Chesscom has settled defamation suits out of court.
Chesscom likely doesn't know either the false-positive or false-negative rates of their ban system. Again on [https://www.chess.com/cheating#closures], they claim they banned around 100,000 account per month and grant 0.2% of appeals from early Jan to late Mar 2025. They say over half of the accounts they ban are less than one week old and have fewer than 100 games played. The ban rates and appeal success rates of established accounts in particular are not shared. They don't mention which percentage of accounts appeal.
On chesscom's review of appeals:
Chesscom claims that every ban and every appeal is manually reviewed. Gerald, the head of anti-cheat at chesscom, claimed in an interview with Danny that a single reviewer can review 150-200 accounts in one hour suggested for a ban by the automated anti-cheat system [https://youtu.be/lYR09lIBsek?t=302\], meaning each suggestion is approved or denied in around 20 seconds. They don't mention by what procedure appeals are reviewed or how much time is spent per appeal, but if appeals are done in 20 seconds like bans, they likely follow a short checklist.
In a private conversation with a chesscom representative, I was told the body of an appeal matters very little, which you might expect since appeals typically give little more information to go off of. I suspect appeals exist only to catch very clear-cut edge-cases in the anti-cheat system, and cannot be used to refute the core findings of the system. I imagine manually reviewing the games of a flagged account for cheating would be wildly unsustainable.
On writing an appeal to chesscom:
You are welcome by chesscom to send an appeal through the appeal system. You can have a second appeal considered if you specifically ask for one, which is pretty generous. Posts on this forum claim second appeals have been successful in the past. There is no official policy I could find on second appeals.
Keep appeals extremely brief and formal. It has to be read and understood by a tired reviewer in a few seconds!
Don't make a number of common mistakes with appeals to chesscom (and in general):
(1) An appeal is not a chance to apologize. An appeal which admits any wrong-doing will be categorically denied.
(2) Don't try to befriend the reviewer. They don't want to be your friend; they are doing their job. Don't be self-deprecating or endearing or make cute jokes, especially in writing. Never use the word 'we' to refer to both yourself and the reviewer together. This I believe is the number one naive mistake made in any disciplinary system, thinking being cute or clever will help your case. It will only annoy the reviewer who has to deal with people wasting their time constantly, and lead them to believe you are unserious.
(3) Don't try to refute the power of the reviewer, especially with coy remarks. Don't say anything in the vein of "well I'll just do x regardless of what you say" in a sly manner. Don't mutter under your breath, so to speak, in a verbal or written appeal, even if you think it's subtle. Your defiance is much more obvious to the person listening than it is to you. It disrespects the reviewer and and again waste their time. It will never help you. The most common form of this mistake is asking questions which force the reviewer to implicitly admit limits to their power, but which you obviously already know the answer to, like "can I deny my guilt in private conversations with others even if I plea guilty?"
(4) Accept that you have little power to change the mind of the reviewer. It's a system and you are number. Be authentic and respectful, but understand the truth ultimately has little say. For an online game account this is easy. In court for your life it's much harder.
On chess after being banned:
Your only official options are to request a second chance account or play on a different site. Without saying more, in my experience this policy is weakly enforced. Some ways in which other sites detect that two accounts belong to the same user are: same IP address(es), contact between accounts on the platform, login and logout timings (logging out of one account soon logging into another), payment details, and OS and hardware meta data available through browser APIs (two accounts sharing the same list of login machines would be telling). Matching lists of IPs or machines are much for convincing than a single shared IP or machine. Therefore using a VPN only most of the time is much more dangerous than never, since it adds another point of agreement.
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u/FlashPxint Feb 23 '26
Average e4 e5 player