Opponent's Rating did not change after several losses

I was playing a tournament against a player and they timed out of all of their existing games but their rating remained unchanged. They now have more than 10 losses in a row, but they have the same rating now as they did before these losses. How is this possible?

I forgot to add that all of these losses were in games that had more than 6 moves, and most had more than 20 moves.

are you sure the rating did not change?

edit: i looked at the tournaments you are in and found a guy with 10 loses in a row and his rating has gone down. You are probably looking at the rating shown in the tournament pairing. that rating never changes. It is the rating that you have at the start of the tournament.

Sounds like a problem. You can "contact" the staff at the bottom of the page about it.

You can check out the person's game archive here:

http://www.chess.com/home/game_archive.html?member=Zealthared&show=echess

As you can see, his rating is 1498 after many losses. I checked my game archive, and my other opponent's game archives, and their rating always changes after a loss.

In case anyone is interested, here is the response from chess.com:

"This happens when a member times out in several games. They are given a rating "floor". This is to protect the people they time out against, so that their rating goes up against a player relative to their strength, and not a player that is significantly and artificially lower rated than themselves."

I would argue that this is not a good way to deal with this issue because if someone times out of 1 game then their rating goes down, but if they time out of 20 games then they are rewarded with no rating change. Instead, the rating used to calculate the rating adjustment for his opponents should remain the same, but the person timing out should have their rating decreased.

Does anyone else have an opinion about this?

be glad you are not the one with ten losses!!!

remember the staff always figures it out, just have fun

A rating is a measure of skill. It is neither a reward nor a score.

Timing out is a result of bad planning. It is not factor in correspondence chess skill. With that said there has to be some adverse effect for occasional timeouts otherwise more players would purposely time out rather than resign or be checkmated.

Consider this as well, if the rating falls too much then the next opponents will be disappointed by the non-competitive game with the strong but under-rated player.

TadDude, I understand your point, but timing out is currently either (1) a loss with a rating decrease, or (2) a loss without a rating decrease. If the first approach was consistently applied to all cases then I would not have a problem, but this is not the case. Sometimes the rating is decreased, sometimes it is not.

Why even have a time control if timing out means nothing?

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system:

...to protect the integrity of big tournaments and combat sandbagging...

i.e., if they didn't use a floor, then someone could artificially lower their rating, then enter a tournament against lower-rated players and dominate it.

Or is that what you were planning to do, and now that we've foiled your diabolic plans... ?

LOL. I have been caught!

This was an interesting paragraph from the wikipedia post you shared above:

"A floor is your current rating minus 200 rating points. For instance, once someone has reached a rating of 1600, they can never fall below 1400 for rating and competition purposes. (To protect the integrity of big tournaments and combat sandbagging)."

I totally agree with this approach, but this is not what happened in this situation. An analogy would be this: a player enters a huge tournament and suffers loss after loss due to their clock timing out. In order to prevent their opponents rating from being dragged down too much the tournament director freezes the player's rating at 1498 (their starting rating). This happy loser heads home from the tournament with 20 loses and the same rating as they started with. Hmm, does this make sense to anyone?

Not sure what the solution is.   If they lose the same points for timing out it makes sense since their rating accurately reflects their performance even if not their playing strength.  Ever play someone with a much lower rating and they play like a grandmaster, refusing to make any error, and you wonder who the hell did they lose to in the past?  Sandbagging does occur, I'm not certain there is a "fair" way to deal with people who lose on purpose AND their opponents. 

Incorrect. The tournament Director would lower thier starting rate (1498) 200 points to 1298 as the article points out. 

They would not leave the tournament a happy camper.

You misunderstood what I said. I was not saying how it would be handled according to the article, I was saying how it is being handled now by chess.com. What I wrote was an analogy to the situation I started this post about, not a summary of the article. Please read carefully before posting replies.

One small point:

If someone times out 20 games, and each game cost him a rating drop, then the last player he timed out would get significantly less 'gain' as the first game to timeout.

In short; if someone times out a bunch., the poor victims (i.e. the winning opponents) should get the same relative bonus.  Perhaps this is also a reason for chess.com's action.

If you want to see rating sillyness., check out some of the 2600+ rated people who have never beaten anyone above a 2300....

IMHO just play and have fun.

- Michael.

didn't your rating go up by winning?

so stop moaning, lol