what is sandbagging in chess?

A sandbagger is a player who intentionally lowers their rating by losing on purpose, often with the intent of entering tournaments that they can easily win. Sandbagging is part of a broader category of rule breaking called rating manipulation, which includes fixing game results by arranging games, playing with multiple accounts, or losing intentionally.

If one player has completely dominated a tournament, and seems to be playing way above their rating, take a look at their game history to see if it looks suspicious. 

Hover over the user’s name, and click on the ‘archive’ icon (sometimes you may have to click on a ‘more’ option first to see this icon)

This option will take you to the player’s recent games. 

Sandbaggers will often resign many games in a row after just a few moves, lowering their rating by a large amount. Sometimes these players will give away their queen before resigning, to make it look like they resigned due to a blunder or misclick. 

If a player has a long string of losses right before they entered a tournament or a club match, they might be a sandbagger. 

Sandbaggers don't always sandbag to enter tournaments! Sandbagging is against the rules whether they are going into a tournament or not. Some sandbaggers just want to win some easy games, and will lower their rating to play lower rated players in auto-match. This is still against the rules! 

If you have played against someone who seemed way stronger than their rating, and you look in their game history and see a long string of losses in just a few moves before they played you, then that could be sandbagging!

If you suspect someone of being a sandbagger, please report them! The fair play team will look further into it. 

yup he is correct.

Lol 😂 here's a true story for ya.. My prior acc I had once bout 50 daylies with like 8 of them the moves very fishy, and so I decided to throw each game because I was so ticked off. I would just make ridiculous moves till every game was completed, and lmao it was a good thing that points meant nothing to me.😂 anyhow, after those were done I then just thought I'd keep throwing games and lol see how low I could make my ratings, when it was about a little under 1600, and kept dropping it till it was under 1000, lmao nearly at 960! 🤣 This was all before I even had heard of sandbagging.