I was around 1500 and played this guy who was 1542. We played 3 games, which I lost.

http://www.chess.com/livechess/profile/Alex_1

If you check his profile, you'll see that his rating jumped 150 points in 3 games, from playing a lower rated player (me) and another 40 points from playing a much lower rated player right after me.

He hasn't played many games yet so his rating deviation is very high.  Once he plays a lot of games, he will reach his approximate real rating and he will stay around there.  There's no glitch and he'll just end up where he belongs eventually.

mtguy your a beginner and wouldnt understand but that isnt a glitch

I am still wildly confused about the points awarded.

Last week I played a guy who had never completed a game.  He only had a half dozen wins by timeouts and he had over 1450 points.

The last "win" I had by timeout, I received 0 points  Something is awfully screwy in this process.

Games have to have a minimum number of completed moves before they count toward ratings-- I think there have to be four moves.  Your most recent game where your opponent timed out had only 2.5 completed moves.

Change in ratings is a function of game density

There's an exception to that minimum move threshold for tournament games.  A week ago I resigned a game before any moves had been played and my rating went down 11 points.  

I expected that when I did it, though.  I was resigning 4 games in a tournament to allow the rest of the players to move on to the next round and to reduce my ongoing game load.

Hello