Master-Candidate USCF, “chess.com Blitz Master”, former State Champion in “Regular”, “Blitz” and “Quick” competitions, “4-player Chess Master” (top 1k player), Chess Coach

Ran chess camp in which a certain, current Top30 player in the world started his career as a 4yo.
Worked for the chess school in which another current Top50 player started / played. Goetterfunken knows quite a bit, but not enough (for my own taste) about chess. But I coached students that won thousands of rating points, state titles, you name it.

Mostly stopped playing here at chess.com for regular, 64square, chess bc I'm still unhappy w the anti-cheating effort here. I think most of the workload necessary to do cheater detection needs to be done by a really good algorithm, AI whatever. It seems there is technical hurdles here, or the way it is done does not work well / is too slow, costly probably? OK obviously idk enough about it. But what I see is the user perspective of it. And as a user it does look NOT GOOD!

Heard that nb cheats under rating 1000? I saw this given as an official answer. Never heard a worse one. Saw it happening w a student. Rating 900 vs rating 850. Opponent didn’t even use 5 seconds for the whole game, each move instantly played. Obviously by cheating software like we know already from certain videos. Cheater “sacrifices” a pawn in move 3 then plays 99-100% perfect for 25+ moves straight w/o even thinking a second. Plays an amazing mate sequence at the end. Transmission of moves takes longer, ridiculous. Probably bc it officially doesn’t happen the cheater NEVER got banned as long as I checked.

Since I paid for (diamond) membership, imo the included or free lessons are superficial, everything good costs A LOT LOT LOT extra. But a good lesson is worth a lot, of course.
So some positive comment: A couple of features here, are enjoyable though (eg 4-way chess :-)).

I came to this half-assed “good bye” resolution after:
In spring 2023 I played 3 games (regular chess) here, my opponent won all three (many moves LONG) 60-second bullet games !!! with a remarkable 98% accuracy, after my report it still took 6 weeks for this user to get banned (and other users to become cheated). Again and again, this is NOT GOOD enough! Did a certain controversy between Magnus and Hans not also start here? I think so, kinda, right? Whatever.

To finish it up: Is it better, on especially one other FREE chess website? Yes, I think so!
Hence, see you (mostly) on lichess dot org.

Update 2025, came back, paid for 3 months
Diamond mbshp to see if anything has changed.
NOT!