its impossible to win games now

No

Hey you forgot to thumbs down my comment

Honestly, doesn't happen to me.

Improving Your Chess - Resources for Beginners and Beyond...

https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell/improving-your-chess-resources-for-beginners-and-beyond

https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell

You said sandbagging got worse after GothamChess recent videos, i smell some strange stuff there

Nah, more likely that he just watched GothamChess and started playing worse

it is very hard to win...but also, some people here just suck. either way...shut up if your not going to be useful. don't attack someone for complaining unless you have a legit reason. it's very rude to put players down because you think you have skill. kinda makes me wish we didn't have social media when people start acting high and mighty.

Damn.

Just as a fun thought experiment: if there really was a subtantial amount of these sandbaggers, wouldn’t that mean that quite a few of them would also be on their way down to that lower rating to start climbing back up? I mean they can’t just stay at a low rating win after win because their rating would go up.

So it would stand to reason that there would be just as many free wins from the sanbaggers lowering their ratings on purpose as there are losses to sanbaggers climbing back up.

Now I do not believe in all these sanbaggers, but just as a thought experiment, I think it should work like that. So even if these people did exist, it should not matter.

Ok 340 rapid

Just kidding 😂

You make a good point. But it's frustrating to always hear the same types of complaints from beginners- "my opponents are outplaying me, they must be cheating/sandbagging" is the oldest complaint in the book. Cheaters and sandbaggers make up a fraction of a percent of players even at very low levels.

People try to advise the beginners how they can improve their play, some even offer personal game analysis or a small amount of coaching. We look at their games and point out that their opponents played appropriately for their rating and the complainer keeps making some particular mistake, like one move blunders, ignoring king safety, ignoring the opponent's moves or getting into time trouble. But they just ignore all this insight, get even angrier and keep complaining.

The sad thing is, those are the beginners who will probably never surpass their current rating bracket, because when something goes badly they point their finger anywhere but at themselves. I was a beginner very recently and I experienced the same feeling that I couldn't break out of the 800s because my opponents were playing so well. I didn't come to the forums and whinge, I analysed my games, worked out what I was doing wrong and put in the work to fix it. I did that over and over again. I'm still doing it. That's the only way to improve. You don't improve by blaming your mistakes on other people.

The amount of resources available to help with improving is massive and growing by the day and in all sorts of formats. The only way beginners don't improve their play over time is if they don't want to (which is completely fair enough) or if they're lazy. The ones who make complaints like this are the laziest, and they want other people to agree with them that the system is rigged against them. They're looking for an excuse to quit without having to face the reality of why they're quitting.

@Habanababananero "Now I do not believe in all these sanbaggers,,,,,,,,,,," this is probably because you fundamentally recognize the the Poster is dead wrong. A Sandbagger is out to purposely lose games to lower his score. As such the Poster would not be losing, but winning against a Sandbagger.

"So it would stand to reason that there would be just as many free wins from the sanbaggers lowering their ratings on purpose as there are losses to sanbaggers climbing back up." Yes this would be true as long as, both the win/loss points are equal. But sandbagging for the most part {IMO} is to lower ones score, so that in competition they are assured of winning a majority of games so as to win the prize.

You both make good points. It IS a little weird that beginners like this seem to think people are artificially keep their rating low just to beat up on 500's. How is that fun, or even good content? I can't think of anything more boring.

You're right, genuine sandbaggers will drop their rating for a reason, like to enter a tournament which is only open to under 1,000s, and win a prize. They lose as many points as they need to, then stop playing and enter the tournament. After putting all that work in, I can't picture why they would then bother working their way all the way back up to their real rating, which also risks being flagged by chess.com cheat detection, as it's essentially an unauthorised speedrun. So does losing a lot of games on purpose.

That's why the vast majority of sandbaggers just make new accounts to do it which start at roughly the correct rating and try to work their way (a bit either up or down) to the rating they need to hit without arousing suspicion (fairly equal wins and losses).

Habanero is right too, statistically for every 500 rated sandbagger whooping 500s and thus increasing their rating, that same person needs to lose just as many games in order to keep their rating down, so even when you play one it's a 50/50 split whether they'll deliberately win or deliberately lose. Which means their existence has zero impact on beginners.

So this complaint from beginners isn't just paranoid and kinda pathetic, it's completely nonsensical.

weak minded people sandbag to get an award that is non relevant

I don't think people are purposely sandbagging. My stance on this is people at lower levels are getting better at the game, but it's ridiculously hard to climb in ranking because you have to win an astronomical amount of games (assuming you have some losses thrown in). I get whooped on at 750 ranking and do win *some* of my games, but I can tell when someone is or should be ranked higher than they are. Maybe they are on the climb but it's taking forever to go from 700-900 cause you have to win something like 30 consecutive games without losses or like 50 if you lose one out of every like 3-4 games. It's really difficult to climb out of that hole unless you play a lot. My take on it.

But that's literally applicable at every rating range.

You don't have to get consecutive wins, that's complete nonsense, you just have to average out in the positive over time. It's the whole point of the Elo system.

Say you're a fast improver and when you play 9 games, you win 5 and lose 4, that's +8 every 9 games, so it would take you 225 games total to go from 700 to 900.

If you're finding it harder to improve and for every 25 games you win 13 and lose 12, it takes 25 games for you to get +8. Do that 25 times, it'll take you 625 games to get +200.

For me, I have to do EXACTLY the same thing to go from 1530 to 1730. My gains from a win are pretty much exclusively +7, +8 or +9, depending on the opponent's rating, so that's exactly the same as it is for beginners. In fact, as you get to really high Elos, you gain a lot LESS rating points for your games.

Beginners certainly don't have it harder than the rest of us. They DEFINITELY don't have a harder climb, since improvement comes vastly more easily at a low Elo.

Well that's cool, I've never been at your rank and I'm sure it's equally hard. Don't expect me to make it up there any time soon.

I do have a theory for why these types of complaints always come from beginners which is causing this reinforcement of the completely untrue idea that it's harder to climb in rating as a beginner.

If as a beginner you're finding the amount of work needed for improvement frustrating, you might speak up about it by commenting about it in the forums, wondering if this is normal because you didn't expect it to be so hard. In the forums, they read dumb ideas about sandbagging etc which make them feel better about themselves at the cost of killing their hope. Most of those people quit, the rest learn to adapt to the process and either don't find it frustrating anymore or realise that nobody wants to listen to them complaining that chess is hard. So either way, they stop complaining about it.

Non beginners are used to the process and have accepted it being slow, and kept going anyway and seen their skills and rating improve. They understand that everybody else has to go through the exact same thing and it doesn't get any easier so complaining is only going to waste your own energy.

I get that I sound like some kind of angry boomer telling people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But that's the reality- chess is hard. Harder for some than others, but not because of any kind of issue with the system. I believe everyone is capable of getting genuinely good at chess if they did the work they need to do, but I can also accept that some people aren't cut out for it, it just doesn't work for their personality or they don't enjoy the game enough for it to be worth it.

My Elo was 750 nine months ish ago. It's not easy and it's not fast, but if I can do it, there's no reason why you can't.

Good for you.