Sunday, November 16, 2025

I CLOSED MY CHESSDOTCOM ACCOUNT

Today, on 16 November 2025, I voluntarily and deliberately closed my chess.com account. 

That account was created in 2024, and my username was Mikromeister. 

Already in summer 2025, I cancelled my subscription and stopped playing on that platform. The reasons I cited in my blog were the following:

  • The platform ChessDotCom was politicising chess, doing so aggressively and in a biased, selective, discriminative manner. 
  • There were an awful number of cheaters, opponents using databases and chess engines during live, rapid games. According to the platform's own data, on some days, more than 50% of my opponents violated the rules of fair play and I got some rating points back. 
  • The way the platform handled complaints, cheaters and corresponding ratings was far from being transparent and understandable.

During that period when I used the platform, I was unaware of the scandals concerning Kramnik, Naroditsky or Navara.

Today, I closed my account, sending to ChessDotCom the following explanation:

"Asking questions about fair play, based on statistical evidence, is not the same as making baseless accusations. ChessDotCom's demagoguery is intolerable."

On 24 December 2024, ChessDotCom announced that GM Kramnik's, the former world champion, blog has been closed and his account has been muted. The platform provided an explanation, which contained confusion concerning the meanings of relevant terms:

"Our team carefully investigated many dozens of players about which GM Kramnik raised suspicions. In the vast majority of cases, we found his accusations baseless. 

Unfortunately, GM Kramnik has continued to take his accusations public..."

Suspicions are not accusations. Kramnik's suspicions were not baseless - most of his questions were based on statistical evidence and anomalies discovered.

The issue is about possible cheating in online games.

Recently, again, ChessDotCom repeated its confusing demagoguery:

ChessDotCom, 12 November 2025

That article was published on ChessDotCom's official News channel. Quotation:

"At the end of 2023, Chess.com muted Kramnik's account following repeated accusations against other players. He was later suspended from prize events and is now permanently banned, following what Chess.com called repeated, and egregious, violations of the company's Community Policy." 

ChessDotCom has completely dismissed, ignored or distorted Kramnik's own repeated explanations and arguments. For Kramnik's arguments, see, for example:

Kramnik, V. 
Levitov Chess World, 27 November 2023 

Quotations:

"I'm not trying to I'm not saying that Hikaru was playing not fair because I don't have uh not the legacy actually and I'm not a mathematician and that's not me who has to judge..." (8:01)
"...those statistics are very very unusual, let's say extremely nonstandard, and since if we are really trying to fight against, you know, against cheating, if we really take it seriously, I believe that such results, such performances must be very seriously checked, maybe the, and maybe the result of the check will be, you know, like that or like this, but you cannot leave such outrageous, I mean performances, without further check, and that is the only reason why I started this..." (8:26)

To those who understand probability theory, confirmation theory and the basics of statistics, ChessDotCom's demagogical accusations and denials amount to the declaration that

2 + 2 = 5

This company is an Orwellian chess dystopia. 

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