Eriks true identity!!!

The love/hate relationship between Erik and cheater_1 has sadly been forgotten. For those who may not know Erik is the CEO of this site, to be honest I don't know what a CEO does other than feed it's employees families. On the other hand, cheater_1 is one of chess.com's greatest trolls. In the site's beginnings he was the most hated user since humor wasn't a thing back in 2008. However he is now mostly forgotten because of the waves of Forum word games, imaginary matches between Morphy and Fischer, and "vote for the best chess.com member." The feud between erik and cheater_1 has become an important event in Chess.com's lore. However, this "feud" was not real because I believe cheater_1 and erik are the same person.

Cheater_1 opened his account in November of 2007, a few months after chess.com was created. He joined the site purely for the forums. His first thread was about his history with chess cheating. Erik locked the thread a week later. Erik's reasoning for this unnecessary censorship was because he thought it was "lame." This went on for a while cheater_1 would make a post, "Erik" (if that's even his real name) would respond to it and later say cheater_1 just wants attention. This is just too hypocritical, why would Erik whine about cheater_1's need for attention when Erik is feeding him attention? One of cheater_1's most well known stunts was when he played chess.com in a vote match game. Cheater_1 could have easily won if he had used a chess engine but he lost! It's obvious that ERIK was the one playing chess.com. After cheater_1's defeat, Erik gave him an ultimatum: admit defeat or have your account closed. Cheater_1 chose the latter. Not only that cheater_1 would often talk about cheating but he would also say he is not an advocate of cheating. Was this erik's way of promoting anti-cheating habits? One of cheater_1's last post was about a cheating poll. This is obviously Erik's plan to get users to admit to their chess cheating history. Obviously users would most likely confess to a fellow user than to the site owner. Cheater_1 had posted about a cheating detection strategy. This is Erik's way to stop cheaters on the site.

Erik had the site fooled for a decade now. In the early days of chess.com he used his cheater_1 character to draw attention to the forums, who wouldn't want to see a flame war between a troll and the site owner himself? He also used the cheater_1 to advocate anti-cheating habits and educate users on how to detect a cheater. Finally once erik had the used the cheater_1 account to it's fullest potential, he used the vote chess game to have the cheater_1 account purposely lose so then erik can close the account.

GG Erik