> knowlegable moderators who can identify signs of cheating and ban offenders
Oh boy, this absolutely does not work for chess at high levels. Endless debates and arguments.
Like this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1ctj85n/viih_sou_upd...
A very good player invented a stupid opening and then somehow won a lot of games against top players with it, and chess.com decided he was cheating (without presenting evidence) and banned him. It really seems like he wasn't.
Well, statistics would be the only mechanism. If a player was on average playing at level X in one setting, but at a lower level Y in a setting where it was considered impossible to cheat, that's about as good as you can do.
But it's pretty impossible to point to a single move and say "that's definitely a cheat move".
You can look at moves as a series of probabilities. For each move, classify if it's more a blunder or inspired move and then look at people's games and see if they consistently have 1-2 moves that are much much better than their typical.
The problem is that at that level they're more likely to make the absolute perfect move than not. Super GMs often play 95-98%+ accuracy games.
Top reply there:
> It sounds like if you want the answers you desire then you'll need to contact a lawyer and figure out if you have any right to them.
What legal recourse would there even be here? Some sort of civil action?
IANAL and not particularly familiar with the particulars here, but very likely, the answer is "there is no legal recourse."
As a private entity, chess.com is within its rights to admit or reject people for any reason it wants, except on the basis of certain protected classes (which cheating is not one of them). Furthermore, the terms of use for an account probably says something to the effect of "we have the right to ban you for whatever reason we feel like, and you have no real recourse." One could still attempt to sue, but the almost certain result is to flush tens of thousands of dollars in the toilet just to get thrown out on the motion to dismiss for lack of a case.
The case for defamation is weaker than normal here, since chess.com (from what I can tell) never told anyone but the user that they considered them a cheater--there's no statement being made that can have the quality of being defamatory in the first place, except the statement being made by the user.
> Oh boy, this absolutely does not work for chess at high levels.
Magnus himself said this. If he were to cheat, he'd only get 1-2 moves per game, and sometimes not even the moves explicitly, but merely the notion that "there is a very good / critical move in this position". That would be statistically impossible to accurately detect.