Tom Baron's Fast and Furious

Hi all, the second tournament is set up and open for registration. I've taken off vacation mode from the new version to speed things up a little. I hope to see you all there!

Hi all,

It's come to my attention that a couple of players including one in my group have been cheating. Unfortunately, daily games are pretty prone to this from my experience. Here are a couple of pointers to spot them and eradicate them.

1. MOST IMPORTANTLY They win multiple daily games with 90%+ accuracy so if you're suspicious, review a load of their historical games. Especially looking out for games that feature complicated closed centre positions, humans are rubbish at playing these and accuracy tends to be lower if you aren't a titled player! Remember, they won't be 100% every game they try to evade detection by throwing in dud moves and throwing the odd game. I caught one who thought he was clever by intentionally losing unrated games and winning everything else. Chess.com aren't that dumb! 

2. They play like a god in daily but are utterly hopeless at blitz/bullet. Take a look at our highest rated daily guys in our tournament. Our top player is about 2500 in blitz and rapid and is 1800 daily. Cheaters struggle with faster time controls like blitz.

3. They excel at other parts of the site. Things like chess960 and puzzle rating can be a good indicator. If the suspect plays like Tal but has a puzzle rating of 1200 with a 50% failure rate, possibly a cheat! Cheats won't bother so much with actually learning the game, you don't cheat to learn chess so less/poor interaction is a good indicator

4. They've joined within the last year. Chess.com kills cheats off relatively quickly and you can usually expect a cheat account to be relatively recently set up. 

If you suspect anything REPORT REPORT REPORT. Chess.com spend lots of cash to make sure they are getting these guys but you need to get their attention. 

I am watching every group too 🙂. Let's keep it fair and fun.

What a second day! We have well over 630 games complete now and a fair few of you have already booked yourselves into the second round. Leading the field are Vienna_Gamer and Jack Howorth on 13 wins each and closely following is UnthinkablePL on 12 wins. Extra kudos to vienna_gamer who is currently holding onto a 100% record! 

Still plenty to play for too, remember the top 3 go through so even if you have one of the MVPs above in your group, if you score well, you'll see yourself into the next stage! 

Wow what a first day! 420 games are already finished and there are some cracking checkmates amongst them. 

Four players have already chalked up 7 wins and zero losses!

Big shoutouts to:

Vienna_gamer

Jackhoworth 

Emanviele

And MaikeSchach 

Quite some effort from all of you! Will anyone finish the round on a clean sweep? Will we see any huge upsets? It's all still to play for!

Enjoy the games 😁

Tom

We are about to start, just to thank you all for joining, I wish you all good luck and I hope you enjoy the tournament! Look out for round two which will begin after the first round of this one ends! 

Thanks,

Tom