Is chess.com cleaning house?

One can always tell an apologist for a lost cause.  Their main weapon is misdirection and personal attack.

And I don't care who the programmer is.  If someone has taken statistical analysis, and writes code, then they know that it is not impossible to implement stop-gap measures.  The devil is in the details, depending on what "animal" you are working with.

Back in the day, the actuaries looked at everthing in order to set insurance rates (death, life, home, auto, etc.).  Now-a-days, with computers, and data mining, they can get statistics on anything, including odds and percentages.  Just look at the sports betting that takes place in Vegas.  How do you suppose they come up with those odds for every bit of minutae that exists?

So, applying all of the vast historical data, as well as modern technology, statistical analysis, actuarial "science", etc., it shouldn't be too hard to determine if someone is cheating at on-line chess.

Just using Mean Deviations, I'd say that 95% of the people booted for cheating were actually cheating.  If 5% were booted incorrectly, then they can take up their case with the Site Admins.  It'd be interesting to see how many of those kicked for cheating actually appeal their case and possibly get re-instated.

If I'm on staff at the #1 chess site in the world, then I'd want to be pretty sure that if I'm booting someone for cheating, they are actually doing so.  If not, then I'm going to get a bad rap, and my revenue stream will dry up.  People would flock from this site like rats from a sinking ship.

Oh well, what is one to do?  I guess joining the USCF, playing in several tournaments, and having a real-life rating, would resolve a lot of side issues here.  I agree with several folks' posting about ratings differences between real-world and on-line.  It stands to reason, that if I have 2-3 days to move, I can pour over a move for an hour, or more, and study a bunch of potential outcomes, especially with the Analysis Board, and my play will be much better than in an actual OTB tourney, timed in minutes/hours rather than days.

Jimebau, they certainly wouldn't ban somebody if there was 'only' a 95% chance that they're a cheater. I'd imagine the cutoff is at least 99.9%.

@Fleishkoph: You have yet to offer one iota of evidence for your pessimistic claims. You said it's impossible for 100% of these closed accounts to have belonged to cheaters, but you haven't explained why you believe this. You claimed that Chess.com's methods are suspect, but you haven't explained why. You said that Chess.com's new methods are far from bulletproof, but you haven't explained why. You said that Chess.com's staff and/or analysts lack brainpower, but you haven't offered any evidence.

I mean no disrespect to you, but your accusations, as we read them, are pessimistic and lack any foundation whatsoever. To be blunt, this is highly disrespectful to the staff members and administrators of the website you frequent. Can you support any of your claims?

Well, according to the link provided in post #17, they have closed many accounts in the Z's. They apparently went in alphabetical order; so since they seem to be through the Z's, does this mean that the deluge of account closures will now subside?

I would bet that's the case. Maybe one out of a thousand of banned members are actually playing by the rules.

No real surprises here.  I found 3 past opponents listed in today's purge.  Each of the 3 had won my group in 3 different chess.com official tournaments.  In my game notes at the time I had originally labeled each of the 3 people as a sandbagger, because once the tournaments started they very quickly shot up to ratings far above the 1600-1800 tier I always compete in.  Looks like there was more than just sandbagging going on!  

It occurs to me that the real mess may be the next few weeks.  Most of those purged today had high ratings, and so would only interact with similarly high ratings in tiered tournaments.  But many of the purged are simply going to open up new accounts with different names, and for the next little while they will be entering tournaments and ripping up lower-level tiers until they once again cheat their way back up to higher ratings.

Good riddance to all cheaters!

 Yes this will be need to be look at somehow.

@Cystem_Phailure: Yes, but isn't that an awful lot of work, to have to start all over again? I would hope not very many would open a new account to resume their cheating ways, for precisely this reason.

I don't suppose there is a way to ban IP addresses, is there? Truth be told, I don't know if that would even be feasible.

 So are you implying that Magnus Carlsen is playing under an alias?  I'm sure quite a few masters do this, for whichever reason, seems acceptable.  By no means am I defending the cheaters, however some elevated chess players don't use their name?

I am sure they test their algorithm on some GM games from both normal and correspondence chess, and that their method would not flag Anand, Kasparov, Kramnik, Carlsen or others as cheaters.

No, the only implication I am making is that no system is perfect. 

 I agree with you that the system isn't perfect.  I am only trying to defend my own imaginary self, if I was good at chess, and I suddenly got banned from the chess site for being "unusually good."  However, I do understand that chess.com has multiple tools they use to decide who is a cheater, although like my previous posts, is not reveiled to us.

Banning an IP is simple and certainly within Chess.coms capability. Indeed! I would be shocked if they haven't. It's the first thing a good forum admin does.

As far as cheating goes, I find it terribly sad that someone has invested so much of their self-worth into an online game community that they feel they need to cheat to inflate their image. I speaks of a truly desolate existance. They have my sincere pity.

You don't get banned for being good... you get banned for being perfect. Therefore Anand, Kasparov, Kramnik et al would not get banned under this methodology because, believe it or not, they are human and make many nonperfect moves.

Nobody gets flagged for being unusually good, as far as I understand. They get flagged for being unusually computer-like.

 That makes sense.

Unfortunately banning an IP address isn't really feasible... just because there's one cheater in the household shouldn't mean that nobody else from there is allowed to create an account. That would be like putting me in jail because my brother stole a car.

Thats not quite true.  You can hold a 1620 rating and not play in matches that would take your rating higher in the federation.  But you could have played games and gotten better and hold a much higher rating here. 

Not to mention many IPs are dynamically allocated and therefore if you ban someone on an IP, that IP might be someone else (another ISP customer) later on. And changing IPs is relatively easy to do so it wouldn't be permanent anyways.