My account has been tagged as suspicous regarding fair play policy !

The early bird gets the worm... Yeah, but the second rat gets the cheese.

Lots of people would request it, so the required CPU power would be huge.  And a single unfinished game is rarely enough to get sufficient proof anyway.

There have been 2.5 million games played so far today.  If 1% of people decide they want to get their game checked mid-game, that's still 25,000 games that would need checked very quickly; you'd need to get the results back in a minute or two at the slowest, so you'd need to throw a ton of CPU power at it on very short notice.  Since this could potentially happen with several hundred games at a time, you would need a ton of CPU power available on standby at all times.

On my computer (and I have a pretty high-end laptop), analysing a single game to a reasonable depth can take several minutes.  To have this analysis completed within two minutes or less (it would probably have to be more like 30-60 seconds for blitz) would mean splitting the workload among several different CPUs.

This is quite doable - on a very small scale.  You would need several CPUs and a big chunk of RAM for every game you wanted to be able to handle.

The m5.24xlarge option on AWS gives 96 CPUs and a boatload of RAM.  That's probably enough to keep up with 10-20 simultaneous games and get them done in sufficient time to make a decision before the game finishes.  Looking at the pricing, that's over $32,000 per year.  So to be able to keep up with 10-20 simultaneous analyses of ongoing games, we're looking at $32,000 per year.

There are currently about 7,600 games going on right now in the live server, and it's been a lot busier at other times of day.  To be able to keep up with 1% of the current games would require 4-5 or more of the m5.24xlarge AWS instances.  Now we're talking about $150,000 per year to be able to keep up with about 75 reports on active games.  Money doesn't grow on trees, even for chess.com.

Additionally, analysing the current unfinished game is only rarely enough to prove that somebody is cheating.  You would usually need to analyse a number of their previous games; in some cases, you might need to check several dozen games or more.  Now, instead of 4-5 of the m5.24xlarge instances, we're talking a bare minimum of 40-50 or more, and probably more like 100.  That $150,000 per year is now at least $1,500,000 per year, and probably more like $3,000,000.

Even if you limit the number of reports from people who haven't proved themselves, if you allow this kind of easy mid-game report, even allowing everyone one report per month will still result in a huge number of these reports.  This is simply not practical.

The idea that I don't care about the members is ridiculous.  I'm not an employee; I'm an unpaid volunteer.  I have personally spent a number of hours of my own time developing an analysis tool that anyone can use.  Since I finished the initial version of that analyser, I have used my own computer and my own electricity and my own time to analyse something in the region of 100,000 games, resulting in reports that led to the bans over well over 500 cheaters, with many more reports of borderline cases that haven't reached banning thresholds and many other players confirmed as not suspicious.  It's easy to say "you don't care" from the outside, but you don't actually have a clue how much time, effort, and money chess.com, its employees, and its volunteers are putting into this.

Everything is simple when you are not the one doing it,and have no idea whats involved.

I don't really notice cheaters.  Once in a while, admin adds rating points, but I don't really know which opponent was the culprit or what they did. As for the requested reply, you say you read a comment someone plays on in a lost position, you quit.  This is abuse.  1  there is a time limit factor. 2.  someone has made a subjective judgement on a lost position.  endings are an area of vast ignorance, so taking some anonymous opinion and using it as an excuse to abandon a game is a poor practice. The usual method by which opponents put me off my stride is "talking to me". That I notice. 

Then you can quit 50% of your games or something, because so many people get these comments on their profile... it doesn't mean anything

Yeah, lots of people accuse anyone who beats them.

I've even seen people accuse others of cheating by remote mind control.  Some of these accusations are simply ridiculous.

While I have run into players I've suspected of cheating, at my level I think the incidence is low.  Usually you can tell if a player rated 600 suddenly stats crushing players rated 2000. 

Also if you  abort games for no good reason you're wasting someone's time.

So.....You base your conduct toward other players ,, on posts others have commented about them, however you object that other players base their conduct toward you on those same comments?

Discussions about cheating - Chess Forums - Chess.com has a summary of all of the Fair Play closures since Chess.com started reporting them in their monthly updates in May 2019.

That thread also explains why discussions about cheating aren't allowed in the public forums, which is why I am locking this thread.

UpbeatAngle moderator