50% accounts closed in this Tournament

This is the tournament I am playing of 18 players and suddenly in few days around 9 accounts have been closed. 

Click on Pairings and check it out. This looks crazy.

Here is the link to the tournament -

https://www.chess.com/tournament/mother-flower

 7 are closed for abuse!!! And only 1 for violating fair play rules and 1 closed himself

Strange

Told to @MGleason also , we felt that this could be the one person with many accounts.

I think one person had several accounts in that tournament.

Yes we discussed that at Cheating Forum. I think the one that closed his account must have realized the mistake and closed the remaining one himself before the staff closed that one as well.

I don't see any reason to think the self-closed one is the same person.

I think it's the same person, if you see the joining dates of all accounts closed and the one that closed himself  all are close and many are same dates.

@MGleason, how about checking their passwords if they match? Or you are not allowed to do that?

I don't have access to passwords.

So we can infer that among the low rated players, cheating is already rife, or is a learned bad habit?

It's never a vacation playing a cheater

This was more a case of massive multi-accounting and rating manipulation than engine use.

One of our more popular members a few weeks seemed to be hinting that ratings manipulation by multiple accounts was rife.

I myself believe this may well be the case, especially, but notably not confined to 1 day or even  3 day or longer tourneys.

The sandbagging issue has been going on for years, but is getting more sophisticated and rife.

Standard cheating, meaning engine use, is to a certain extent being addressed, so other methods of cheating are being devised. I even suspect sleeper accounts have been lurking around for years, ready for rating manipulation.

i once heard of a person whose account was closed unnecessarily by a chesscom bot. And they were noot cheating, just improved a lot in chess, then played with their inactive(not closed) account.

Yes it could be

I think for what I have seen is that, they do sandbagging for easy tournament wins and for the trophies.

My experience has shown that a lot of players will close their account if they get a FVP warning ... 

some of this is beyond me, i admit. 

an nm recognizing players closing their own account, in my view, shows that the detection system here may only work sporadically. it also shows that cc's cheating group does no service to the site.

it is odd, though, that so many accounts were closed in this particular tournament. and, many of them are around my rating! i've regularly heard of high rated players that are suspicious, but, 1500's cheating?!? 

i know this is a serious subject, but, 1500 rated players cheating makes me laugh!

back to the tournament. while many accounts were closed for abuse, keep in mind that cc staff is not forthright with account closings. we regularly see an "account closed: inactive" when the person was online just an hour before. mutings and bans are never discussed. so, take the official word with a grain of salt.

They weren't closed for cheating.  Most of them were closed for abuse.

When you see an "account closed: inactive", that means they closed their own account.