Account closed... Inactive... RED CROSS???

Yeah, I know now. Thanks. You are the 20th comment about it?? Oops. Hehe

My friend's account was closed to "closed: fair play" and there is no reason that I can see. He wasn't cheating or anything; he was just participating in our annual work chess league which we use chess.com to execute. I'm afraid next year we are going to have to migrate off this site because of it which is a shame, because chess.com is really the best chess site out there from a user friendly perspective. However, capricious closings of accounts are going to force us to leave. I hope chess.com would give warnings or actually inquire before acting in such final ways.

Chess.com is not capricious. They do not close just based on an accusation. They investigate and only close an account when they are sure.

Read the Help page explanation- https://support.chess.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1444879-fair-play-on-chess-com-what-you-need-to-know

They are quite thorough. While loyalty is a good thing, it is possible that you don't know your friend as well as you think.

He did nothing serious. His only games were played against us at work. He happens to be a fabulous player and the tournament is meaningless without him as he is tied as the best player at our company. I'm not sure what kind of "investigation" they do, but in his case, they simply closed his account and gave him no notification. He simply couldn't login anymore and is labeled as "closed: fair play".

I say "capricious" from experience. I'm not trying to be nasty about it; I'm just calling it as I see it. On a site that gives you a game explorer during matches, shows you the most common moves from your position, and then shows the most common responses and the various win rates, I can't imagine any reason that someone could be considered cheating! All of those things are cheating in my opinion. The only thing worse would be simply piping in some chess program to play for you, but even so, the rating on this site doesn't carry real meaning anyway, so who would care?

All I know is, my co workers and I enjoy chess and chess.com is interfering with our tournament even though many of us are paying members. Perhaps an "investigation" might include interacting with the users he plays in tournaments with as we know that he doesn't cheat. He's just that good!

You can read about cheating detection in the Cheating forum. It is one of the groups. Chess.com doesn't reveal their methods but it looks at multiple games. 

Most people believe that the use of engines during games between humans should continue to be forbidden and actively discouraged.

The use of databases is only allowed in correspondence chess, not in live chess. This was common practice before the internet and powerful chess engines were available.

I can tell you point blank; he didn't cheat, and he was banned. I don't really care what their methods are because they clearly missed the mark here. Perhaps they should spend less time trying to cull players from their site and instead focus on making the iphone app function better.

I think that the use of computers should be allowed - but that people who use them should be labeled as "computer accounts" - so that other people have a choice whether to play them or not. 

Of course, those playing with computers without a computer account should be banned as they are now. 

Since this has become about cheating it's time to lock.

https://support.chess.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1444879-fair-play-on-chess-com-what-you-need-to-know

Discussions of cheating, potential cheating or cheat detection are not allowed on the general forums. If you would like to have that discussion, join the following group.

https://www.chess.com/groups/home/cheating-forum