Rating Wrecker Accounts

I am curious if I am the only one who notices this. Probably close to 60% of the games I start are against accounts that are only a few days old. I usually always check a profile prior to starting, but dont always get to it or it doesnt always load properly. The players are usually much better than their rating states, and I end up losing a lot of my rating if I continue to play the game. Now, I really dont care about ratings (especially on the Internet) however, I use my rating to guage where I'm at, and how I'm progressing (or not progressing as it may be). This is kind of an annoyance, and I'm unsure why chess.com allows it to go on. Other chess sites have IP blockers so you cannot register a new account with the same IP. Why doesn't chess.com utilize this? Do others have an opinion on this?

Your RD in Blitz is 22

It would take dynamite for a new player to move your rating.

http://support.chess.com/Knowledgebase/Article/View/16/0/how-do-ratings-work

play unrated games if you're so paranoid

IP blocking is a terrible idea for a lot of reasons.

I doubt anyone would make multiple accounts for the sole purpose of ruining the rating of other players. 

I would imagine that you're just at the level where the people who won their first few games on chess.com would be, so you'd get a lot of these new people. Also, the rating points you lose is based off of your opponent's rating after the game, AFAIK, so if they were new and went up a lot of rating points after your game, it wouldn't affect your rating as much.

My best guesses for why anyone would do multiple accounts is:

1. To play themselves and thus bolster their own ratings(this requires continual rotations of new ones, hence once one account gets so low it doesn't help much) This is easily noticed. I am sure people get caught all the time for it.

2. I can actually see someone who wants anonymity to play certain opponents as part of a psych. job.

3. They for some o.c.d. reason find it necessary to have a separate id for each type of chess they play.

I personally see where this could be beneficial for keeping track of statistics for someone who plays an overwhelming amount of games. For example, I advocate the use of multiple id's for premium customers, who have been verified by proper id. It would be nice to seperate your results for each type of opening/defense and color variations to help you better see where you are at with each.I don't think it is absolutely necessary for ones development and you could still do the math to find this out yourself. However, this begins to make more work for Chess.com's staff, hence they will probably either charge more and/or will give you slower less attentive service for certain issues. So we must be careful what we wish.

4. The other dirty reason for multiple accounts, would obviously give a troll a new bridge to burn.

 Playing people better than you is how you improve. 

I thought that paying members had access to stats such as win/lose percentage with white, black, etc.  Or perhaps I'm just talking out of my ass.  In any case, I wouldn't recommend making an alternate account for every type of opening since that would be pretty difficult to manage.  Even if you're trying to assess your skill with each opening, there's probably a better, more efficient way to accomplish this.  If you simply don't want to ruin your rating when trying out new openings, playing unrated would suffice.

We are definitely on the same wave length. I can only think of one way that playing unrated would give you a false result though. I tend to play differently when it counts. I am more nervous and I am sure that this has an effect on my true rating, so if you, for example, are trying to use your experience here to simulate live tourneys, I would recommend playing rated. It helps to better incorperate the human factor. So I could see having an id just to see how you play differently than normal, as you prepare for tourneys and as you try different methods to keep you focused, you could see how each affects you. I realize this may seem like cheating if you don't let your one and only character take a hit, but I play on Chessmaster with another character, does that mean I have an unfair advantage when I play here with my only id? it is tedious and subjective, I can see why multiple id's aren't encouraged.

nameno1had wrote: "They for some o.c.d. reason find it necessary to have a separate id for each type of chess they play."

I love this idea, that way i could have a Dr. Jeckle and Mr. Hyde approach to chess.

I believe a lot of you are reading past what I said. I know this is a large site, but when most of the people I start games with have accounts no more than a few days old, I find it suspicious. I have seen this trend since I started this account. I play everyday, multiple games/ day. So through-out the ~1800 games I've played, I've started and aborted many more because of this trend. Its not about "not playing someone better than me". Its about trying to have my rating reflect my actual play. If people who are 1700-1900 players have low ratings on here, that will not give me an accurate rating whether I beat them, or lose to them.

When I play a game, its about fun - but I do like to track MY skill level and what better way to do that than through ratings. But, skewed ratings because of a surplus of "new" players (I believe its really new accounts, NOT new players), just seems unfair to me.

chessnow.com had this issue, they implemented a filter whereby you can filter the number of games a player has played when seeking. I have suggested this to chess.com on multiple occasions, but to no avail.

If you play correspondence games you can filter by the number of games played (i.e., you can create a 'challenge' that is only open to those who've played at least X number of games) - not sure if that is available for live games as I don't play live very often.   But if you played correspondence I know you can take care of this issue very easily.   I've done that in the past for exactly the reasons you mention - though I would imagine the reason you're running into so many people who've played so few games has more to do with high initial turnover at the site (I don't know for sure, but that's my guess).   That is, people open an account, play a few games, and stop playing - it would be interesting to know what is the average games played per account opened on chess.com, I bet it would be pretty low.   There is a large pool of people who play a lot of games but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a much larger pool who only play a few and then drift away.

I do agree that blocking ip's won't stop the guilty but, it sure could screw up an innocent and less educated guy, who ended up with someones old address if that is at all possible, I think that is possible, as I know my isp changes my ip every 6 months. It would stand to reason that with so many web users, recycling ip's at some point is the only feasible way to meet the demand.

I play live chess. Its not the "too few games", rather the start date on the account. This option is not available in live chess and I believe it should be. I can see how the IP thing can be an issue, especially if there are 2 people in 1 household that would like accounts. But there should at least be a filter for live chess like there is for correspondence.