Concerns About Smurfing and Rating Manipulation on Chess.com

What still has not been addressed is what people gain by intentionally sinking their rating? It's not like there's money at stake here.

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@25. More to the point, people can seek games with players rated much lower than them without changing their rating. Same with seeking higher rating.

All I can think is that some folks are more prone to conspiracy thinking. It might be human nature to seek explanation (and justification); an ancient survival technique. Most times, it's simply Occam's Razor - I need to become better at winning and stop looking for boogie men.

I don't think sandbagging detection or enforcing reports on sandbaggers is great here. Look at the tournament pools and who is winning. I would show one account who is doing that shenanigans since 2023 and still hanging out here but it is not allowed for obvious reasons.

My God, please, be a man.

It is against the rules, for GMs that do SpeedRuns, they need to have a specific account approved by chess.com, and after end the SpeedRun all the opponents receive their ELO points back.

Yes, and such people as Anna Cramling have done this, and explicitly explained that all rating points would be restored.

But let's look at the likelihoods. There are about 20,000,000 games played here on a typical day. Let's be really outrageous and estimate that 1000 GMs played 100 games each today in rating-rushes with a view to creating YouTube videos, that means 100,000 contaminated games, or 1 in 200 games was a grand master messing things up (this is obviously a level that only a conspiracy theorist could believe, but let's work with it).

That means that if you play innocently, you will play 199 real games for every game that you lose catastrophically because it's a GM. Looking at what happens to your ratings, ignoring that you are automatically paired with people of similar rating, and assuming that you could drift up and down without affecting your likelihood of winning (i.e. let's assume the results are random because you're always playing someone of identical standard), then your total expected drift in rating is about the square root of the number of games you played, multiplied by the step-size (which is 8 in rating points here). The square root of 199 is about 14, so you'd expect to drift about 113 points in normal games, compared to the 8 points you lost because of the GM. In effect, 93% of your expected change in rating is random, and only 7% is down to the GM.

But actually your overall drift is less than that, because the system has a built-in dampening effect. If you lose some points to the GM, you will get paired against people of a lower standard, so you ought to gain the points again.

Even if the site is full of stressed grand masters desperately trying to bolster their YouTube career, they're doing nothing more than extracting some rating points from the overall system. If they start at 400 and keep playing until they've reached 3000, they have extracted 2600 points from the pool, and given that Chess.com has over 100 million users, who between them must have more than 40,000,000,000 points (I just assumed everyone's a 400 player...), each new GM account is extracting at most 0.0000065% of each other user's overall rating before it maxes out and the GM has to open themselves another account.

Over the last 30 days I've dropped from 783 ELO to 593. The vast majority of my losses are against accounts that are less than 6 months old and many that are days old playing above 80% accuracy. I report and nothing happens. IMO this is staistcially impossible without a lot of cheating happening.

Tell it like it is, brother. Or sister, as the case may be.

If I have two gifts in chess, one is the ability to make a crap move and, a nano-second later, realize there was an incredibly better move on the board. But only after the crap move. The other is to get so focused on a small section of the board that the rest of the board evaporates in my mind ... move after move after move.

I too review all of my games. Commonly, after getting thumped by what seems to be a super duper GM, the analysis shows that he played horribly, but I played even more horribly. And, after a triumph that I am sure will be celebrated by the chess world for eons, the analysis shows that I barely squeaked by a dunce who was at the nadir of his chess prowess.

Just recently I missed a M1 ... five times in six consecutive moves. Which means my opponent missed it also. Without either of us ever seeing that M1.

To quote that old rascal, Shakepeare: The fault ... lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.."

There's no surfing going on. It's all in your head. The reason why you think your opponents play so well is because you are not strong enough to see all the tactics they missed in the game. Another reason why they can seem to be much better than their perceived rating is when you miss tactics that they allowed when they made their last move, this often gives them easy play meaning it's easier for them to play because now because you missed a tactic, often followed by other blunders I've seen this happen many times in beginner games, I can't really explain it, but when you miss tactics, and make follow up blunders for your opponent, it just makes it easy for him to play, easier to come up with replies to your moves, and they look like a genius, when in reality you just gave him the game and because of that you gave him easier play.

Another thing. There is just much more beginner content out there these days. I mean chess.com first has a lot more content for beginners then it did 10 years ago. Also with all the free YouTube series out there, it's easy for someone to learn about chess, compared to 20 years ago, when I started playing. A 1000 rating back then would probably be 300 rating now. There is so much chess content out there that even 300 rated players are a lot better than they where 20 years ago. Also we are post covid where more people picked up chess, and post the rating change, where they made 10 minute games rapid gg games, which made it a lot harder to get a good blitz rating. Also we are post queens gambit. More people came and started playing chess after that movie came out, meaning even more people studying chess and getting better. All these things combined, you have a lot stronger people at the lower ratings.

This community will not acknowledge that there's a problem. I been experiencing this more and more, look at my games you got 1,000 elo players playing 70 plus move games in 3 to 4 min if I mis position or end up losing any exchange its over and most of these 1,000 blitz are supposed to be a beginner, so I'm to believe a beginner plays 85% accurate chess while also playing 70 move games, while also doing it in 3 min, while also making top 2 possible engine moves the entire game, at beginner.....Yep totally no problem look at my last 35 games... Not to mention the 3 min 70 move games are a average move speed of 2.1 seconds per move, blitz is the new bullet apparently...

you dislike winning?

Not everyone likes winning! Logically the whole win-lose thing makes no sense. Apparently, according to psychologists, most people dislike losing more than they like winning, which means that in an environment like chess.com where you are going to end up winning and losing about 50% of the time, playing chess should make you less happy overall - so why don't we all just give up??! Winning is no fun if it is for the wrong reason: opponent blundered, ran out of time, something stupid happened. I like the patterns that chess makes, the nice tactics, the fun stuff. If someone blunders, it just messes all that up - all those lines we could have explored, now pointlessly wasted. I can't see any motivation to play on, if my opponent hangs their queen for no reason (or if I do!). If I realise one of us has been missing a good move for about 5 moves, it feels like a chess-game that "shouldn't have happened", so again I want to stop.

Also, life is collaborative. We do stuff together. Making other people sad is no fun. OTB chess is nicer, because you know the guy/gal on the other side of the board, you can be friends, you can make them happy in other ways, you can explore the game together, and you can choose to play with people who win all the time and like winning, lose all the time but don't mind losing, or win half the time and enjoy the friendly rivalry. Here, you have no idea what the other person is thinking, and no way to be friends. But we do get to play chess... so it's worth it.

... if you're interested in weird psychology, I realise my last game is a typical example of me messing up psychologically. I spotted a mate that I hadn't planned, it was purest accident. I realised I'd missed it for 3 whole moves! My opponent and I had been piddling around doing silly things when they should have stopped it, and I should have played it. So I played enough of it to realise it was really mate, and quite a nice pattern too, but then couldn't bring myself to play the last move because I didn't deserve it. I didn't plan it, and didn't even see it.

Not a very edifying game!

I'd say most players are in this exact same boat of great wins and horrible losses. Here are two of my recent games. First is 94.5 accuracy, second is 52.6.

I have worse recent games (42%), but I used the same opening to show how vastly different games can turn out, even with the same starting moves.