What gets you banned

I've been studying/learning from a lot of online resources and I leave them open in different tabs so I don't loose my place but I don't want to get banned. Do I need to close the tabs when I play live games or does the cheat detection engine look at more in-depth stuff like tab switching?

https://support.chess.com/article/648-what-do-i-need-to-know-about-fair-play-on-chess-com

When you are in a live game, do not use any outside help. No tabs, no browsers. Any outside help IS cheating even if it goes undetected.

[public accusations not allowed -- MS]

this gets you banned : fake games cuz he aborts or asks for draws every game
and leadfs with 7000 points in champ league... please report

What I just said being said, I do not think it mattes what you have open in your web browser tabs, as long as you don’t look at them during the game. As long as you don’t cheat, you are not cheating.

[removed -- MS]
this is possible to draw and ask for them, but it is illegal under chess.com rules.

having tabs open that you are not looking at isn't cheating i'd say

You just have to report. One player faked like that to be above me at 2500points, i had 2100 I worked hard for while he was cheating abort/drawing games... and they closed his account after the fact and i got 1st place in my division. Cheating just needs to be reported friend, do not be worried it is illegal under the rules of sportsmanship to do what tripci there is doing

In one month and a half I have had 5 cheaters in the player's league banned.
Jesus was cheating this week: they banned him
https://www.chess.com/member/jesus_chrlst

This christ was cheating by having something play for him : good moved every turn at 0.1second... 3 consecutive games i watched him play 0.1 seconds moves no matter the complex way the opponent answered... and they banned him.

3 different service people from chess.com helped me and replied to reports of bugs and of cheating as i described. 4 others I have seen been closed for cheating, you must report them yourself if they cheat with proof, links, screenshots. And then they ban. Do not despair my friend!!!

Please don't report potential unfair play in the forums.

https://support.chess.com/article/209-how-do-i-report-someone

As to account closures, the site closes a lot of accounts each month. Here are November's numbers.

That's not reported but premium status has zero bearing on whether or not an account gets closed.

You can read the entire chess.com tos if you want technical specifics, but without doing this, you can just use common sense and treat online chess like if you were playing in person at a chess tournament. Are you allowed to get advice from others players mid-game at a tournament? No. Of course, this is also unethical online. 

Same thing with consulting chess books mid-game when playing online. If you aren't able to legally start flipping through a chess book during an in-person chess tournament, then you shouldn't be allowed to do so online etc. 

Daily chess has slightly different rules than live chess, but live chess online treat like an in-person game. Basically, you can only use your brain

If you have other tabs up when playing live chess, it is okay as long as you aren't checking those tabs to consult for chess information. I prefer to have ONLY the chess tab open when playing because I don't want tabs slowing my internet speed or something, but if you have a YouTube video for background music etc. mid-game then this is allowed. 

cheating

Just to be clear, I don't switch back and forth between tabs when playing. I go back and forth between playing and studying a lot. Like if I loose a few consecutive games I quit playing and go back to studying for a break. I'm going to start closing the tabs to be safe. 

Though it probably is correlated. Premium members are probably less likely to cheat than non-premium members because it's easy to go on and create a free account, rate yourself 1600 with no experience, get mad when you drop 600 points of ELO in half an hour and still haven't won a single game, and then open up analysis board to "win" your next game. Or straight up create an account with the intention of playing at 3700 level for whatever reason.

It's a bit of a different phenomenon of why someone who is paying for premium, isn't on a new account, and plays a lot starts cheating. There is more risk involved.

IIRC this is completely unnecessary. I'm not aware of any client-side cheat detection or Anticheat-like memory profiling done by chess.com. It's probably all done server-side.

In part because it would be very easy to circumvent client-side cheat detection by opening an engine on a different machine. I.e. Playing on your phone while analyzing on your laptop or vice versa.

Online chess cheating isn't like, say, online first person shooter cheating.

FPS cheaters try to get extra information and deny their opponent information, get perfect execution, remove elements of randomness, and make illegal moves, but don't even bother cheating at strategy because computers are bad at it and it's not as important as execution.

Chess already gives you perfect information and near perfect execution, doesn't have randomness, and is usual typically very secure against illegal moves. Chess cheating focuses almost exclusively on the strategic aspects because they're important and computers are great at them.

So it doesn't make any sense to fight chess cheating the way you fight FPS cheating or vice versa. Online chess cheating mostly needs to be fought by game analysis and move time analysis. Not by installing some piece of spyware on the client machine to analyze their computer memory. They don't even need the engine to be in their computer memory, detecting whether someone has other programs running or open browser tabs is neither necessary nor sufficient against even very crude cheating.

可以的