Chess economics and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Could it be that the reason we have a number of people currently playing 1000+ games is simple chess economics?

Short wins used to yield no points to the winner, now they do. Here comes the Law of Unintended Consequences...

New Players on the site mostly play a few moves and drop out of sight forever.

Ergo - sign up as many new players as possible, if you are a decent blitz player, and you will get hundreds of time forfeits that NOW GIVE YOU RATING POINTS.  The relatively few serious opponants you encounter you don't have to always beat - just stay in the book and prolong the games --  meanwhile the newcomers keep disappering and your rating keeps climbing.

It's like a license to print rating points 

It's not that big of a deal.  The population curve doesn't change, so your rating will eventually reflect your actual performance.

Au contraire!  In this case the population pool of your opponants IS changing.  You are constantly facing a changing pool of opponants who show up against you with a nominal rating of 1200, who forfeit, giving you some free points, and who disappear forever, to be replaced by more of the same.  Endless free points!

It would be amusing if it didn't eat up so much chess.com bandwith.

 I could win against 1000 players rated 1200 and wouldnt get even 1 rating point.

There was a guy in prison that got a  US masters rating by continually beating everyone else in his prison.  He is supposedly a "master" of the Grob... But that was a closed pool.  And besides, that one new player who is strong, but is new to the site would likely clean someone out of all those "bogus" points.

Are you sure?  Under the Glicko system?

Just for fun I downloaded the DIY Glicko calculator from

http://www.netspeed.com.au/ianandjan/IansPage/ratings/GlickoCalculator.htm

I plugged in your chess.com rating - 2380 and Glicko RD -75

Then I plugged a paltry 50 wins for you against players rated 1200 with Glicko RD's of 400.  The result, you went up 14 points to 2394.

Congratulations!  

 I think they have fixed it so the higher rated gets zero points for a win if the rating difference is over a certain amount. I dont mind this and in fact I am for such a restriction. However, maybe in tournaments this shouldnt apply ?

I know that some systems have rating differential - say 350 or 400 points where you get no points for a win, but I don't think the pure Glicko formula works that way.

Can anybody on staff weigh in?  Could NM Reb make Senior Master if he punked enough 1200s  ?

In the end it's all relative. If you are padding your rating from all these newbies that drop off, then so can everyone else. So what, you gain 14 points for beating 50 1200's. So can't the other guy. In the end, it's how you beat the people that are near your own rating. 

I know where you're coming from though... some scrub always has to try to game the system and you're just wondering if it can be done. My opinion is that that scrub is few and far between. Honestly, playing 100's of games against 1200's would get kind of boring....

And yes, I am a 1200. New to the site, but I don't plan on dropping off any time soon

Ooops, my bad!  I went back and reread Mark Glickman's article on the Glicko system and realized that I'm not allowed to plug an RD of 400 into the formula.  The Glicko formula is based on a max RD of 350, it turns out, and when I plugged that into the spreadhsheet, sure enough, after 50 consecutive wins of 1200's NM Reb's rating went up exactly -0-.

NM Reb, you are correct as usual!  My apologies for doubting you.  

So it turns out that by gaming the system you can run your rating up to a stratospheric 1550.   Who wouldn't want to do that?  

I suspect that the people playing hundreds or thousands of game are simply obsessed rather than trying to gain some advantage.