Deliberately losing to lower your grade

I won't name them, but I have just seen a player deliberately lose 10 games on the trot after just 1 move in order to reduce their grade. I get why they do this - to qualify for a lower graded tournament - but surely this goes against the spirit of a place like this and should be disallowed?

They didn't resign, they let the clock run down.

That's why they should have rating floors, like in USCF tournaments. In USCF if you win a money prize in a given section, your rating can not go below the lowest possible rating in that section

This is called sandbagging, and is considered a form of cheating.  People have been banned for this.  Please report them to the support team by selecting Report Abuse under the Help menu, or using this link: https://support.chess.com/customer/portal/emails/new 

I could see if you can tell someone is simply plugging moves into a computer, but how can you tell if someone's deliberately losing? People make stupid mistakes all the time

Most people who deliberately lose games don't bother playing more than a few moves.  If someone has a string of 50 consecutive 1-move losses, it's pretty easy to figure out what's going on.  If someone has ten consecutive games where they hung a piece in a won position, they're probably just playing drunk or tired.

Yeah that's probably right, after all if they were deliberately losing they would just resign in 4 moves, not play for 50 moves, of course there are people who just do that to annoy you because they resign in the end and have wasted all your time. 

Sorry, but you're wrong. I saw the rating drop every game.

Ah, thank you. I didn't know reporting people for this was an option. It's good to know thta this is frowned upon, although I'd like to think it was possible to detect this automatically.

Letting your clock run down ten times on the trot after just 1 move is enough for me to make that deduction.

Yeah but you could like..."oops, blundered my queen", play slightly slow to lose on time, be like: "forgot about fool's mate", or "didn't see that bishop..etc." and lose 10 games without suspicion

it's cool to play stronger players. let sandbaggers sandbag

You're not going to forget about fool's mate 10 times in a row.

It's impossible to detect and prove every case of minor sandbagging, but often it's pretty obvious.

stronger players have some ego-driven grudge against playing lower rated players. If they win, then it's easy points, if they lose, then they shouldn't be that high in the 1st place. cowards

LOL, but you can make small inaccuracies throughout the game and gradually let your opponent win

Yeah, but how many people are going to bother doing that deliberately in 50 games?

No one, waste of time, it's not like tournaments have money prizes anyway

I mean they could make an inaccuracy and then resign, pretending it was a miscalculation

Yeah, but if they do it in 50 consecutive games, resigning in under 10 moves, it will still be pretty obvious.

It's not impossible to hide sandbagging, but it takes enough work for little enough benefit that it's unlikely to be a major problem.