Time Outs

Since I signed up on this site I am now 5 and 0 in correspondence games.  4 of those wins my opponent timed out after 2 or so moves, and I had about 3 more where my opponent timed out withhout moving so they didn't count in my record.  Is this a very common occurence cause it seems hard to get a game around here?  Now that I have five games finished I have signed up for some tournaments in the hope that people in those will be a bit more serious.

     Tournament games are a bit more serious. I think you just caught the influx of new members with the first of the year.

i think when you are new you are more likely to play new players, and new players are very liekly to time out

When I first started playing online (two or three months ago), I experienced playing opponents that were playing over 50 games at once.  I found it fairly easy to win some of these, because they were just moving a piece and getting to the next game in their line.  Have you thought of joining a group?  I started playing opponents from groups I have joined and it is much more challenging and they do not time-out.

I've been getting better games since I got my rating up a bit and started playing tournament games rather than friendlies.  It was only those first few games where most of my opponents timed out after a few moves.