I am an internet chess freak, I nearly dont play anymore over the board, only online, I spend usually every day 2,3 hours playing online.

I know that there are still some people who play FICS and other servers, but if you want to do it seriously and always have enough opponents, there are only 2 big solutions, either ICC or the German chessbase-server, playchess.com

After having played several thousands of games (also standard games) online I must really complain about ICC, I am very disappointed of them! Cheating is the one main problem of online chess and I can expect that a server really does some effort to eliminate cheaters. So does playchess.com: every day they catch between 15 and 30 cheaters and state this public ("..has commited a rule offense.."). What I consider at them also very helpful is that they mark these cheaters: they never get anymore a higher rank then the rank "pawn", so serious players who know this, play only against opponents rated in the rank of knight/bishop and this way avoid to play people who have a record for having been caught in the past. Additionally the personal service at the German server works well; I did sent the admin of playchess.com 4 games and told him that I was sure that these guys cheated, I asked him to check this back. And really, to my own surprise (I was sure to never hear of him again) it worked, 3 of them soon lost their rating and rank.

The opposite at ICC, I am very disappointed of them. During the last years I played for sure 5.000 to 6.000 games on ICC (more then 30 % long time controls > 15 minutes). Well, the estimations of the percentage of cheaters on the servers vary, the German server once told that at their server the percentage is not higher then 3 %, I would say the truth is more in the area of 5 - 7 %. But what ever you believe this percentage is, after several thousand of games on ICC (and believe me, I often had the feeling I get cheated on), there must have been some dozens caught, if ICC takes the fight against cheaters serious. But it never happened!!! Of all those many games I played they caught not one. Of course I reported dozens of suspicious games, I mailed them to what they call a "speedtrap-account" (they believe to catch cheaters from the speed they are doing their moves). The only thing what happened is, that speedtrap is now censoring me and I cant mail there anything more! Then I wrote to the manager of ICC. What I received was something saying: well, if we catch cheaters, we fire them (not like the German server where they only lose their rating/rank), but we only do this, if we are absolutely sure. But as a fact this never happens! Thousands of games and not one cheater caught, this is impossible! Something very serious is here wrong at ICC.

I am very disappointed about ICC and will not anymore play there. As an experienced online player I can only recommend all people to do the same and to play in the future on playchess.com. Not that there all cheaters are caught, this is impossible, but at least they try it and at least every day they catch 10 – 30 cheaters.