You should read about how ratings work for the site. It is very likely that the player in question has a high Ratings Deviation ( RD) and has bigger jump in ratings than you do. The implication there is that your RD is lower and therefore your rating is more accurate.
http://support.chess.com/Knowledgebase/Article/View/16/0/how-do-ratings-work
Yes, I do understand how ratings work.
I noticed this player picking up 53 pts from 3 games out of 5 in the tournament. He got 63 for the final 2 rounds. BTW he won on time in a lost position in one game. Still, the gain should have been smaller for the final rounds even if he was playing slightly stonger opponents than in the early games as the computer already had an idea of his relative strength.
Anyway, I checked his profile this afternoon. Joined in December. About 35 std games, rating 1821. 7 blitz games, 5 of them in the previously mentioned tournament for a rating of 1614.
So he is a fairly good player, a lot better than me, I'm happy to agree. I don't understand his psychology though. He already has a good idea that he is in the top cohort of players. Where is the ego boost in joining a competition with a >90% chance of a win in every game?
Blitz games are very different from standard. Just because he has an 1821 on standard, doesn't mean his blitz will be the same. Even then, he has only played 35 standard games. That could still be a very inflated rating after a few wins.
As for why he would enter that tournament, he had only played 2 blitz games previously, meaning he maybe doesn't have any idea what his blitz rating should be. I would guess he just saw a tournament with a range that fit his current rating and chose to play in it. I don't see what's wrong with that. Now he is out of that range he will be looking for others that fit his new rating. What's the problem?
Blitz and standard differ only in that you can put the kettle on and make a cup of tea during a standard game, while you'd lose on time if you did that in blitz.
Most players here have fairly similar ratings in Blitz and Standard. Good thing you included the proviso "maybe" he hasn't an idea how he'll go in blitz.
Like maybe Snow White can't totally dominate the 7 Dwarves
You sort of disprove your own argument on two fronts by saying,'BTW he won on time in a lost position in one game.'
1. He was losing to a player in the 1200-1500 range. How does that show he is so much stronger than the rest?
2. Would he have still won on time, in a lost position, if the opponent had 5 minutes left on the clock?
Haven't been on in a couple of days but I will say that a player's RD may not change significantly over a small number of games (I'm pretty sure I could have said will not but can't back that up without further research).
The system is designed to have the rating converge to as accurate of one as quickly as possible but not as quick as a few games.
I've just been passing my time in a 10min tournament for 1200 to 1500 players. The player who finished first started out rating 1498, ended up 1614.
How can this be possible? That's an average gain of 23 points per game played. Now I only play up to plus 200 points, which gives me 12 points for a win. Somehow it seems that the computer has been assessing the winner as if he has won games against players 400 points higher.Note that there is only a 300 point window for the class.
I had assumed that it was a new player, or a new player name being classed too low, but the points gained didn't seem to be reducing through the tournament as the computer should have been working out relative strength. Any ideas?