Cheating & Fair Play

Engine or solver assistance: using any program, script, browser extension, second device or website that suggests moves or evaluates positions during a rated or casual human game.

Outside help: receiving advice from another person, streaming your board to a stronger player, or playing on the same account as someone else.

Account abuse: multiple accounts, account sharing, playing on someone else's account, or creating a new account to escape a sanction.

Rating manipulation: sandbagging (losing on purpose to lower your rating), boosting (arranging wins), farming a friend's account, or coordinating results in any way.

Result manipulation: deliberate disconnection to avoid a loss, abusing the disconnect claim, stalling the clock to force an abandonment, or exploiting a bug to gain an advantage.

Bots: automating play, matchmaking, or puzzle solving. Playing our labelled practice bots is of course fine - they are unrated.

Using the rules page, opening ideas, notes and general study material outside of a live game.

Using the post-game AI review, puzzle solutions and coaching features - they are available only after the game has finished.

Playing the practice bots at any difficulty, and analysing your own finished games as often as you like.

We compare your moves against reference engine evaluations and look at accuracy relative to your rating, move-time distributions, improbable consistency, and behaviour across accounts and devices.

We use technical signals such as account linkage, session patterns and abuse logs. Automated flags are indicative only - no account is closed for cheating without human review of the underlying evidence.

Because our review involves an element of automated analysis, you always have the right to human intervention, to state your point of view, and to contest the outcome (GDPR Art. 22).

Depending on the severity and history, we may: void affected games, reset or freeze a rating, remove leaderboard and puzzle records, restrict matchmaking, suspend an account temporarily, or close it permanently.

Sanctions may extend to alternate accounts operated by the same person.

Harassment, hate speech, threats and sexual content directed at minors are handled separately and result in immediate closure, plus a report to the authorities where the law requires it.

Report a suspected cheater or abusive player by emailing support@playcorridor.com with the usernames and approximate time of the game. Do not accuse other players publicly - false public accusations are themselves a breach of the User Agreement.

If you believe a sanction against you was wrong, reply to the notification or write to support@playcorridor.com within 30 days. A different reviewer will re-examine the case, and we will tell you the outcome and the reasoning as far as disclosure does not compromise our detection methods.

We do not publish the details of individual cases, and we do not confirm the status of another player's account.