Fix sandbagging or I'm gone

Just played in an arena tournament and the majority of my losses were to low rated players, sometimes under 1000, who had 80% accuracy in 3/0 games.

Sorry, that is NOT how low rated players legitimately play, especially at fast time controls. Fact: this site doesn't do anything to sandbaggers and everyone knows it. The result is that legitimate players are at a significant disadvantage and their ratings are subject to predation by people playing way under their rating...assuming, of course, that engine use isn't also present.

Leagues are a big part of this problem, because it encourages sandbaggers who get easy league points via soft pairings in arenas. Either fix it or don't expect money from me ever again.

Accounts get closed for that. If you see someone that is purposely doing it, you should report it:

https://support.chess.com/article/209-how-do-i-report-someone

Though, a lot of players dropped 100-200 points just by playing a lot more trying to advance in leagues, so that not really considering sandbagging 

Maybe you were getting beaten by lower rated players because you were super drunk?

Lol jk yes unfortunately chess.com is known for being rather incompetent when it comes to punishing cheaters, sandbaggers and stallers, which is why I also refuse to pay for premium (which is a shame, I'd like to do more than one puzzle rush a day). Best you can do is just ignore and roll with it. It doesn't happen every game and it's still fun to play some meaningless blitz and bullet games 

I agree the sandbagging is really bad and won't / can't be fixed.  I stopped playing in U1500 tournaments because the same people sandbag over and over and over to win the tournament. I've reported so many of them, clear cut cases, and the same players are still there, still doing it. Started playing the Open sections as there is less of it, but would prefer the rated sections. 

Yes, I mean there players who play at a strength of around 1600... They purposely go on losing streaks before entering tournaments, resigning however many games in a row at move 10 until their rating in under 1500. Then they can join an U1500 tournament and whoop butt cause they "sandbagged" to get their rating lower.  Some people LOVE getting first place trophies. Haha    

So, sandbagging is losing games on purpose to lower rating and it happens a lot unfortunately. Not saying it would be easy to stop! Almost impossible really... 

Ya a lot of members are new, that's for sure. The site did definitely see a boom during Covid, and also after that Queens Gambit movie.  It makes me regret deleting my old account  I had jay_194 before this one for about 10 years. 

Yes almost always do  

Deleted the old account after getting frustrated with chess and swearing I'd never play again Lol. Silly. But came back of course. 

Please don't publicly accuse players or request mass reporting 

I would argue it's not an accusation, it is shown right there as a fact. 

BUT, no problem, won't actually argue the simple rules Lol.  Deleted rest of post too. Sorry! 

Basically, public reports aren't allowed. If you report someone to the site, they'll handle it if they agree. 

I took a look through the player's archives and didn't notice any obvious sandbagging before events (or at all for that matter), at least not in the past 9 or so months.

Understood!  I still feel my original post had merit, so I've messaged you to get away from discussing on forum  

Sounds like "enhanced user experience" to me. 

Nah, tournaments are completely shocking. I looked into a daily one and every winner is banned for cheating. And it happens months later.

If you notice someone is sandbagging, report them. Chess.com usually takes action if they were actually sandbagging. I have reported 2 accounts that got closed for sandbagging. 

it happens. someone might be a skilled player, say from a chess club at school, and have just opened their account. another possibility is that those players play only rapid or blitz, so their daily rating is very low.

If you've reported them and Chess.com hasn't done anything about it, it's because they're not actually sandbagging - you shoud join https://www.chess.com/club/cheating-forum so you can learn what sandbagging really looks like.

Actually, it's well known that there are some members here who keep on believing that, despite the amount of work Chess.com puts into detecting and banning cheatiing.

The main challenge Chess.com faces is a philosophical one: they allow anyone with an email address to create an account and participate in almost everything. So anyone can create a new account and cheat. They'll get caught and the account will be closed pretty shortly. but that's not much comfort to the people who lose to them in that time window, and they can just come back and do the same thing.

To combat this, Chess.com would need to give people more filter options on their game seeks: I'm not sure if "Premium only" is an option, but because Chess.com offers a free 1 month trial of Premium membership, that's not helping. But Leagues have actually encouraged people to play with the 1 account - allowing people to filter their game seeks by a minimum League would be awesome. Verification is another initiative - people have to give actual personal details to get entry into those verified cash only events, but being able to filter your normal game seeks to Verified only members would see much less cheating in those games; it might take much longer to find a game because it's a much smaller pool of games, but maybe some people would find that worth it. Adding those sort of game filters is probably less of a technical challenge than it is a philosophical one: it will be interesting to see if Chess.com ever gets to that point.

You are confusing putting on work with getting work done. Just because they put on work doesn't mean they are doing a good job at it. Sure they ban a lot of people, but that's because a lot of them cheat, but they ban only the most obvious ones but I have seen at least half a dozen cheaters going unpunished ( I save the username of the people I suspect and check every now and then to see their status. A few get banned rather quickly, others take a while, some have their accs inactive not due to cheating ... however there's a couple whose accs are still active).

" bUt hOw CaN yOu bE sO SuRe tHaT tHeY aRe ChEaTinG? iF tHeY DiDn'T gEt bAnNeD iS pRoBaBLy bEcAuSe ThEy wErEn'T ChEaTinG. "

Yes they were and it was obvious. They just weren't doing it often. Some I just suspect, some I know for a fact. For example take this one dude. We played and he missed the most primitive tactic before move 10. Ok so far so good, 1700s do it all the time and I do as well sometimes. He asks for rematch, I accept and launch an evans gambit, he accepts it and is completely booked up on the theory, but always averaging between 6-10 second every move. No one at 1600 knows much theory in the evans gambit accepted as black. I checked he had no games in the evans gambit in his history. He is taking the same amount of time to calculate deep positional subtleties and forced moves with his king. The amount of time he takes to recapture the queen in a queen exchange is the same amount of time it takes him to play tactics with some crazy super long combination sacrifices.. We played a couple more games and he completely obliterates me taking full advantage of every inaccuracy and relentless punishing any moves I make that the engine considers sub-optimal. In these games he also knew Dutch theory, alekhine defense theory and even caro-kann fantasy theory as well. A friend of mine who has premium acc and I go to check his games and the vast majority of his wins is above 95%. A few with 90% accuracy... there was maybe one or two with some 80% and none below that. He had NEVER lost a single rematch. Funnily enough, the times he lost before the rematch he plays like a complete beginner, has little opening knowledge and there's variation in the amount of time it takes for him to move. Upon looking at his history of games you can see that after crushing a few people in a row with astonishing precision he plays a few games terribly or make some random erratic moves and resigns within the first few moves without necessarily blundering. Also worth noting that after some investigation, from the top of my head I remember he was also able to out book players in the najdorf, sveshnikov, kings indian, french winawer and even benko gambit as white. With black I recall there was evidence of him knowing more theory than his opponent in the smithmorra , gruenfeld, carokann advance, and some line of the catalan i don't remember. There were other as well, pretty much any theory he knew. What I said about time stamps, crazy tactics, obvious recaptures, forced moves and subtle positional moves applied to most of these games as well. Only thing more impressive than his opening knowledge and middlegame understanding was his ability to convert endgames. Why make a human move and eliminate your opponent's only active piece and chance of counterplay when you can calculate a king march escaping a bunch of checks to avoid a perpetual and then checkmate your opponent right? I reported him, my friend reported and I'm sure other people reported him as well because it was rather obvious . Last time I checked last month before formatting my old laptop to give it to my niece his acc was still active, so you're going to have to forgive me if I don't agree with you when it comes to chess.com doing a good job when it comes to banning cheaters. Because unless this dude has a super memory to know a bunch of theory in a bunch of different lines and is able to calculate super fast but sometimes has a brain freeze that makes him play like a U 1000, he was cheating.

There was another dude who was somewhat similar but even more obvious than this one and I knew for a fact he was cheating as well. For some weeks he went unpunished until he faced another cheater who was able to draw him and they both got banned. Why did it take so long?

Now I am not by any means saying that it's easy banning 100% of the cheaters. And sandbaggers are even harder to spot, but the only thing more obvious than this dude would be if he was vomitting 100% of stockfish's top suggestion in every move in every single game. Which begs the question, does chess.com actually care about banning cheaters, or there are just so many that they can do a shiitty job banning only the most obvious ones just so that they have a super high number of cheaters banned to brag about ? How come a measly 1600 knows they're cheating and chess.com mighty algorithm and team of experts don't? Well, they either don't allocate enough resources to check every cheating report they get because they're too cheap (which is understandable - they're a business and if in order to save money for a higher profit margin they have to allow some cheaters just so I can play for free, it's fine, I don't face cheaters often) to do so -  or what's  worse, they check and decide to do nothing because this one particular dude had a premium account.

But oh well, we'll never know because for whatever reason we are not allowed to discuss cheating and cheaters and now I just got this thread closed because the moderators are very competent at shutting down any threads that mentions cheating with their pre-made response - which is fine, they're only doing their job so it's more than fair.  Now if only chess.com cheating detection team was half as good as the forums moderators, chess.com would have gotten rid of of most cheaters by now. #rantover #inb4thelock

I dont play arena tournaments on here anymore. I dont think alot of it is sandbaggers, i think people tilt alot in a tournaments, so this taught me to not play the rating rather too play the position. I wasnt taking my opponent to seriously and i was playing dubious moves thinking id get a quick win, which is not the way i should of played. But either way it sucks to lose 15-20 elo from one game so i dont play in them anymore.

You can discuss cheating in https://www.chess.com/club/cheating-forum, and I think you'll find that what you think is "obvious" is not obvious at all. I don't think their reports pick out just rematches, but they've got the ability to analyze just those and would identify the sort of cheating you describe. You can supply that detail, you know.