Cheating; Holowczak's Chess Article

[IanCalvert]

Justin,

Thanks very much for the link to your criticisms and to the 4NCL Online posts on this topic. The Holowczak article in "Chess" was posted on the 4NCL website and provoked much interesting discussion there over recent weeks .

D'oh! seems an appropriate final word from me.

[Roger de Coverly]

Because Carl has told us not to name anyone

It gets to be a higher profile when the winning team of a long standing International Junior event is changed because one of the players receives the lichess red card and the organisers change the match results.

[Paul Cooksey]

I don't cross-post with facebook as a rule, but since this from an official page and seems to be seeking publicity:

If the fear of losing is greater than the fear of getting caught cheating, people will cheat.
As far as I can tell, the only consequence cheating in official online events can possibly get you is being quietly banned from the site you were playing on. No sanctions of any kind for OTB events, and the chess world will never know what you did.
Scholastic events--even elite ones--are consistently seeing an absurdly high number of accounts getting closed. Open events aren't quite as bad... but darn close.
I am optimistic that this problem will mostly fix itself once over the board play returns. But until then, I think giving USCF or FIDE the authority to ban a player from OTB tournaments based on cheating in official online events is a good place to start. We might then be able to avoid the kind of disaster I witnessed today, where one of the most elite scholastic events in the United States, the Barber Tournament of Middle School State Champions, saw 10% of its players removed from the tournament for fair play violations. Going into the last round, the player leading had won 3 games out of 5, and received 2 full point byes for playing with cheaters in the other two.
I am all for being more lenient with kids than with adults, but I would still ban them for at least a year, or preferably two. It's mind boggling to me that an adult would get anything other than life.
I'm very thankful that I'm a strong enough player that I have never suspected a single one of my own opponents of any foul play in any serious online event. But most people don't get to play almost exclusively with strong GMs.

In my opinion this is typical of what you see elsewhere, including by English players on twitter. Much less concern about false accusations than we have on this forum. Wrongly, in my opinion. But still, "we need to clamp down harder on cheating" does seem the public mood.