This one, I do have a good answer for. I need to put the kiddo to bed but putting a pin in this so I don't forget.
Here it is.
Chess.com has the same anti-cheat detection it has always had, and it hosted tournaments with cash prizes.
Why did it take Chess.com 2 years to look at every game in those hosted tournaments to detect cheating? The anti-cheating system needs to be used for every single game that has a cash prize associated with it,
bare minimum.
Maximum underline that for emphasis, so I'm not shouting with all caps.
If Chess.com knew Hans was cheating 2 years ago, why did it take this long to ban him? That's not a good look.
If Chess.com did NOT know Hans was cheating 2 years ago, why did they not use their anti-cheating analysis on at the very least all tournament games with cash prizes? That's not a good look either.
And if what prompted the look into Hans was Magnus Carlsen saying he cheated over the board, that's ALSO not a good look, because Chess.com has a deal with Magnus regarding some intellectual property worth millions. His play Magnus app, I believe. There's a conflict of interest when there's millions of dollars associated with the guy who is claiming OTB cheating occurred, without evidence.
Now, suppose Chess.com knew Hans was cheating and didn't go public with it, but due to their relationship with Carlsen, Carlsen found out.
That's ALSO not a good look for Chess.com, because that (stuff) is meant to be private. It shouldn't be giving Carlsen extra special insight as to who is cheating.
Chess.com claims no communication took place between the two parties over this matter. Fine, but Carlsen accuses Hans of cheating, and Chess.com finally goes public with information that it knows Hans was cheating but hasn't banned him over it until now.
Which means they either were not checking for cheating during online games with cash prizes on the line, until years later, and then only when prompted.
What's the point of anti-cheat detection if you don't bother to use it until the world champion makes an UNFOUNDED accusation?
That's my gripe here.
It's a bad look for Chess.com no matter how they handled it. In literally every circumstance they're doing it wrong. very wrong.
This is no way to be handling cheating.
You need to check all games with cash prizes associated with it bare minimum and it shouldn't take you 2 years to find it, especially since they say he hasn't cheated online since 2020. That means they checked all those games too, but they must have done it just now, or they sat on info he committed fraud for two years.
It's either extreme negligence or a conflict of interest. There's no way Chess.com comes out of this looking either competent or not corrupt. one of the two will be associated with them.
Gotta assume incompetence until proven otherwise but it's still a bad look for a site with such advanced cheat detection to not use it in GM tournaments with cash prizes.
What are they using it on? Only people who report there might be cheating?
That's also terrible. People who are the least informed shouldn't be the cheat detection that then gets checked by the experts. The experts should be proactively catching it, not reactively catching it years later when it makes no difference.
To be clear, yeah, they needed to check Hans' history. It shouldn't have taken Magnus' prompting about an OTB game with zero evidence attached for this to occur. That's terribad.