An alarming amount of Executive and presidential time has gone into scrutinizing the results of online tournaments and dealing with the results of platform suspensions.

Many online accounts have been suspended lately with unclear charges of violating the site rules.

The CFC interim policy is that suspensions by a platform result in suspensions from CFC online play between 4 months and a year depending on the age of the player. We do not have any clear rules in place aside from the interim policy. Where there are no rules in place, appeals can only be directed to the CFC board of directors (AKA executive). A player played a tournament. After the tournament the player had their chess.com account suspended. The player's games were stricken from the tournament.

We have an online committee looking at proposing rules for online play but they are only just struck and there have been several changes to the committee already so while we have the preliminary guidelines, there is no firm policy proposed.

Fred McKim, Bob Gillanders and I looked at the situation and quite a bit of evidence that was provided to us by the parent of the player. There was one game that allegedly was suspicious. Chess.com through their analysis tool indicated that the winning player played at 99.6% accuracy while the opponent played at 99.1% accuracy. I looked at the game and saw quite a few opportunities for improvement for both sides and so was skeptical of the accuracy claims. I ran it through Komodo 13 which gave the accuracy scores of 74% for the player and 52% for the opponent. The opponent while lower rated on chess.com was a 2100 rated FIDE player. The game followed an opening that I had studied before before settling into an isolated queen pawn opening. At the first opportunity, facilitated by the opponent's play, the isolated pawn was liquidated and an equal position was reached where the opponent blundered a piece and resigned on move 26 (going by memory). We all agreed that the player should not be suspended over that game but we could not agree on whether the games should be rated.

We thought about sending the decision to the NAC but after consultations with the chair of that committee Aris Marghetis, we concluded that it really wasn't a matter for the National Appeals Committee. That left the executive as the only avenue for appeal.