Given recent events, we feel it is worth clarifying our position on cheating and player bans.

PlayStrategy's policy for a first offence of cheating in our tournaments is a one month ban from competitive play. This is only handed out in the case of a user showing otherwise good behaviour. Further offensives can and will lead to closing a user’s account.

Our decision for this policy is to help avoid false positives. We are at a stage where we want to grow our player base and feel some users deserve a second chance. Our underlying message is please don’t cheat, it ruins the game for everyone except yourself and you are hurting the site.

Currently the most prestigious tournaments on PlayStrategy are the Mind Sports Olympiad events. The MSO is a highly regarded organisation which has been hosting events since 1997 and does conduct its own cheating reviews into all its tournaments. A tournament's results can be considered 'pending'/'in review' until it appears on the MSO medals page: http://msodb.playstrategy.org/Report/YearMedals?olympiadid=29
In the past the MSO has handed out 10 year bans from its competitions when it has found a case of cheating in events. In the online era, this has happened in Chess, Othello, and Xiangqi, to name a few games. PlayStrategy takes its partnership with the MSO seriously, and a player cheating in an MSO event on PlayStrategy will likely incur a longer-term ban from the MSO and PlayStrategy.

If you feel a player has been using any form of outside assistance in any rated game, please report the incident to us via the usual methods. Please provide as much information as to why you have made the report. We do check all reports! For more information read our terms-of-service playstrategy.org/terms-of-service

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