First of all, can someone answer this question: What is the status quo? In other words, what did the WL directors originally agree to do regarding games with cheaters in them?

And, I am curious as to what the opinions of WL Forum-dwellers are, so I want to do a quick poll:

Vote for all recalculation methods that you like or agree with.

a) No recalculation.

b) Forfeit the points of the cheaters but do NOT give them to the other team.

c) Forfeit the points of the cheaters AND give them to the other team.

d) Forfeit the points of the cheaters, give them to the other team, and have a penalty that takes into account the number of boards that are played

e) Other (please specify)

Thanks.

EDIT: Through Post #21

A) 1 vote

B) 1 vote

C) 3 votes

D) 0 votes

E) "Do not count the score of that pairing at all" - 1 vote

I made this post over in the WLHQ last year

http://www.chess.com/groups/forumview/to-all-world-league-team-admins

For those of you that are not in the WLHQ this is the content of the post:

5th October 2011, 09:47pm

#1

by blackfirestorm666
Manchester England

Member Since: May 2008
Member Points: 117901

After chess.com closed 700+ accounts at the end of August, we received a request that we recalculate the results of World League matches that were close. 

After much debate amongst the Directors, we have decided to perform these recalculations once only and not on an ongoing basis for WL2011.

Ah, thanks. I vaguely remember reading that post. :)

But has the exact recalculation method been decided on or is that to be decided later?

There has been a lot of discussion surrounding the recalculations within season 2011 due to the mass bannings from chess.com.

It was felt that a one off recalculation was fair enough but that we should not continue to do so in each round that followed.

I myself have not done any of the recalculations so am not sure what method was actually used.

So are you saying that the recalculations have already been done? And by "one off" recalculation, do you mean doing it all at one time for all of the affected rounds (which would be like Rounds 1 to 4 or something)?

I am saying that I don't know.

My personal opinion (not an official director one) is that when chess.com closed down those 700+ accounts for cheating it affected EVERYONE and therefore should not have interfered with recalculating of matches.

But in the name of fair play it was decided to do it as a 1 off. Whether that has been done already I don't know, as I said I am not involved with the recalculating of matches, but I will say that its not fair on all teams if just a handful of teams get their matches recalculated and nobody else.

All right, thanks. :)

It would save everyone a lot of trouble if the cheaters hadn't cheated in the first place... :/

Yes no doubt it would but this life nothing is perfect and where you have "competition" you will always have cheaters that want more more more always

Yeah, too bad. :(

Indeed. This is why I vote for option (A) no recalculations because cheating affects ALL teams not just 1 or 2

True. But at the same time, it doesn't necessarily affect them all equally. It's pretty obvious from looking at the matches of each team, that some teams just have more cheaters than others. I'd say there's almost a direct correlation between team size and number of cheaters, but it does vary from team to team.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just blindly idealistic and all, but it doesn't seem right to me that a team with more cheaters should be allowed to win a close match and the team with fewer cheaters should be allowed to lose. I realize that 90-95% of match results will be unaffected because they aren't that close, but the close matches would be hard to swallow.

I respect the decision of the WL directors either way though. I understand it's a lot of work, and this problem really doesn't have a perfect solution. So it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of thing. So I've basically just voiced my preference, is all.

And I am glad that you are voicing your opinion in a rational and calm manner. We are all entitled to our opinions, but yes it would be a lot harder to do "all close match recalculations"

If it WAS just 1 or 2 members per team that really wouldn't be an issue but in fairness chess.com are working very hard on detecting and closing the accounts of people that do cheat. If someones account is closed before the end of the match then the opposing team gets the points anyway and while it is unfortunate that we do have cheaters on the site we DO urge people that if they believe their opponent is cheating then report them immediately.

Chess.com will thoroughly check each player that is reported and if found to be cheating they do get banned.

For WL 2011, as Donna already said, it was decided that the recalculation will be a one time job. The truth is that we never decided when it will happened this "one time" ...  so in some cases it was done for several times before each round (for accurate pairing purposes), in some cases was done at the end of the matches.

For WL 2012, I am not decided. I always considered ilmago's method (the C one) to be the closest to what I am thinking and feeling, but knl59 pinpointed some situations were this method is not working OK. I will closely look at any arguments from this thread and any other in order to help me decide.

I vote for (B) - just forfeit the points of the cheaters

(A) We do not know the true picture, we see only a small part (2300+) of the BIG Problem. Chess.com knows more than we do and works very carefully.

E)  Do not count the score of that pairing at all.

other words you vote for (C) Mago, right? 

sometimes it's better to say just YES or NO than walking around... anyway you gave us a very good explanation, appreciated