September-October 2017 Anti-Abuse Report

Report for September, October 2017

The last few months have seen us rather busy!

• We've instigated a new policy with improved tech to better handle repeat offenders, something many have called for in past months.
• You may have noticed our recent SCC match Nakamura vs Caruana has a new toy for Danny Rensch to play with - match prediction stats!
  Working with Matt Jensen @smarterchess. Full writeup from him here: https://www.chess.com/blog/smarterchess/inventing-metrics-for-the-speed-chess-championship
• The teams for the new Pro Chess League season are setting up and we're vetting the players as they sign on to play.
• We provided QA for the new live Stockfish analysis feature.

• Oversaw and deeply analyzed eight major live events, September Titled Tuesday, SCC Carlsen vs Gusseinov, Finegold vs Williams deathmatch, October Titled Tuesday, SCC MVL vs Grischuk, SCC Karjakin vs Nepomniatchi, Central and Eastern Divisons PCL qualifier, Atlantic and Pacific Divisions PCL qualifier.
• Analyzed ~585k games total, or 18.8 million total comparisons of Chess.com moves vs engine moves (~10k games per day).
  • From which we banned 7,062 accounts for cheating.
    • Of which 6,375 were for live chess.
    • Of which 687 were for correspondence chess.
• Handled 105 appeals, in which we performed a detailed review of the cheat cases of closed players post-mortem.
• Banned 3,758 IPs (IPs are banned of repeat offenders for both abuse and cheating).*
• Closed 36,480 accounts for registration abuse, spam, abusive behaviour, and also for cheating (~600 accounts per day).

* We're actually using slightly different technology, but I will tally it up in the form of IPs. The method itself remains private.

Professional Relations Update:
We also help verify new titled players who join Chess.com.

• Confirmed 145 new titled player accounts (26 GMs, 1 WGM, 41 IMs, 2 WIMs, 48 FMs, 1 WFM, 7 CMs, 3 WCMs, and 16 NMs)
• Banned 10 titled players for cheating.
• Upgraded and confirmed all Pro Chess League titled player accounts.

Upcoming:

• We are currently in the process of deeply analyzing the games of every correspondence player who has ever surpassed 2000 elo. This should result in a spike of daily closures!
• A series of admin improvements, expanding our list of tools and speeding up our current ones.
• Researching automated engine testing: https://github.com/glinscott/fishtest

You can read about our site rules here:

• https://support.chess.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1444879-fair-play-on-chess-com-what-you-need-to-know?b_id=12321
• Our official stance on fair play and cheat detection: https://www.chess.com/article/view/chess-com-fair-play-and-cheat-detection

Contacts if you have a problem:

• To contact customer support: https://support.chess.com/customer/portal/emails/new
• I'm available most days if you want to send me a private message: https://www.chess.com/member/monitor

Sincerely,

Gerard Le-Marechal
Cheat Detection, Data Analyst, and Statistics Research