Rankings

I am aware that chess ranking scores are subjective, yet I have notices a curious phenomenon. My ranking consistently goes down when I win a game and goes up when I lose. I know a lot of my wins were sloppy and that affects ranking, but there is a definite patern. A lot of my losses were sloppy too. A few were games I surrendered after only a few moves, yet even in those my ranking went up by a few points. What is going on here?

You might want to read up on the Glicko rating system (that chess.com uses) and how that is different from the more intuitive ELO systems that you're thinking along the lines of.

Resign every game and you will be Grandmaster in no time.

I couldn't find a single time this happened to you, i went back to July. Your problem might be that you think of the number as a ranking. It's not. It's a rating, and the higher it is, the better it is.

Also, whether the game is "sloppy" does not matter in the rating. And as Shivsky said, chess.com uses the Glicko rating system, so your rating is not subjective, its determined by mathematical formulae.

Ranking or rating, it doesn't really matter. It is not as if I get any money for it. I just want to see it go up. I just might have to start throwing games.

I just noticed a player whose score went up by nearly 200 points after losing to someone rated 200 points below them in 25 moves. I give up. I am just going to look at wins and losses. This ranking thing is too subjective for my tastes.

Really? That shouldn't happen. Can you include a link?

It's not subjective at all.  You just don't know how to read your own rating.  For your past 10 games your rating increased after every win and decreased after every loss.

the rating seen next to your name is the rating after the game 

It just occured to me that perhaps the OP is referring to "Today's Rank" that is listed under your rating on the right, not to his actual rating. If so, you can lose a game and still go up in rank because several others lost too, and vice versa. Your rank won't be determined by your individual result as the results of others will affect it, even if you don't play.

Yeah, I think catnapper may have a point...

To add to this confusion, when people start out with a new chess.com account, they start with a rating that is quite high given the performance level of most beginners.  (granted that it does comes down to where their "chess.com playing strength" might actually be)

Not sure if chess.com counts these provisional players into its ranking system ... if it did, that implies even more chaos and non-deterministic behavior.

Wow..."non-deterministic behavior"...

Thanks for the help. I have decided to simply consider wins and losses. The rating is just vanity, at least for me.

on the lightning tournament some players didn't have a ranking #. The player who placed 2nd in the tournament didn't say "2nd" and his name wasn't posted on the final win board. His ranking read "---" what does "---" mean? why do some players not have a ranking by their name and just have these --- marks?  Thank you for your response in advance.