chess.com's messaging is the opposite of "chances are slim". but they emphasise that they take the issue seriously, albeit with a low false-positive rate. https://www.chess.com/article/view/online-chess-cheating

From the comments, it seems there's also the risk that you'll think cheating occurred, when instead you just missed stuff.

Interesting article. They do however say nothing about the rating of said cheaters (or I missed it).

What I stated before was that it is unlikely in the lower rating levels and I stand by that. If someone cheats he will gain rating fast and leave the lower rating groups.

And yes people also tend to accuse other of cheating if they lose. :) As long as you are not a competitive player the best you can do is to just play and try to improve your own play and have fun.

I believe what happens is most people are 800-1200, many of them decide to cheat at some point rise quickly a few hundred points and them are banned. To be higher rated than maybe 1600 or so you've played more games which also gives more statistical evidence for the cheat detector so less likely you're consistently cheating without getting caught.

That said, there's probably some amount of higher rated cheating that is just smarter than playing every engine move and harder to detect (though chess.com says they have banned a bunch of GMs for cheating)

Ah, I meant that while they could have said "we're confident only x% of games have cheating, it's not as bad as you'd worry it is", they 'own' it and say "we know it's a problem, we all know a cheater, we try hard to stomp it out".

In other words, you would have to be rather bad at cheating to maintain a low rating.

Chess competition is driven by various rating systems which match people fairly well. Computers are very much better than beginner to intermediate players.

The computers are much better than even the best humans though by several hundred rating points (as in, the world #1 would still lose 90+% of their games). The engines being so strong makes the anticheat detectors job easier to statistically find inhuman play before the account reaches a high rating.

Add that chess had already seen a remarkable resurgence this year, before the Queen's Gambit.

https://thenextweb.com/gaming/2020/09/13/the-classic-game-of...

https://www.insider.com/online-chess-has-surged-during-quara...

I absolutely loved the Queen's Gambit, but the root comment has it a bit backwards. It really seems like the Queen's Gambit came at a remarkably opportune time, just as chess was re-emerging into the popular mindspace.