Rating manipulators: how it works and how they ruin official tournaments
Today I want to address the issue to chess.com which here for a very long time.
Disclaimer: I do not offense anything or anyone, please don't leave any hate messages to me, chess.com or any accounts shown in this article. This article is for explanation only.
On 20 July 2023 I was playing a daily arena 3+0 tournament. Everything was going well, but at the end of the tournament I saw this:
A random person, who started playing the tournament with rating 114, won! How was that possible?
After some research, I figured out that chess.com has two options for selecting players for the game: By points and by rating. I figured out that the official tournaments pair players by rating, which is fair, unless you are intentionally playing with low rating.
Basically, if you lower your rating you're going to get easier opponents, so you will win more games and maybe win a tournament. Rating manipulators usually resign in a chess game after a couple of moves so they can lower their rating quickly.
I reported this account over 1.5 years ago, but it still haven't got banned. Worst of all, I can see 200, 300 rated players in top 10 players even today! Let's look at this example:
Here's a link to the tournament. As you can see, 4 players in top 10 had rating below 1000 and 2 of them got banned. This really shows how unexciting official tournaments became, there's literally 0 chance to get first place and even if someone from top 3 gets banned, a banned person will still keep his medal and place, which is unfair. (here's an example where third place became actually first, but chess.com gave him a bronze medal)
Now, I'm not telling you that every person in top 10 with rating below 1000 is manipulating their rating or using engine, you really need a lot of proof to be sure, but chess.com algorithm is not filtering out players who literally resign after 1 move 10 games in a row and win a tournament with 100-500 elo which is kind of disappointing.
I personally think that chess.com deals with rating manipulators a lot less effectively than they could be. I think that's because it is not engineered for this task, its main task is to find cheaters. So, what are my suggestions to optimize the algorithm?
1. Make moderators review accounts that dropped 100+ elo in a very short period of time
2. Make moderators review accounts who resigned after 1-5 more than 3 times in a row (Hot take: why resigning after 1 move is allowed?)
3. Make an algorithm filter out 100-1000 elo in top 10 and check them with more attention.
4. Filter out accounts who have a very high rate of getting into top 10 in the tournament and check them with more attention.
5. Also it will be nice to add a feature that if an account in top 3 gets banned, next account replaces him and gets a medal.
Maybe this features are already implemented, what do you think? Have you ever seen an account that definitely manipulated their rating and didn't get banned? Leave a comment!
