Game cancelled at the beginning

it happens from time to time that I start the game but the opponent does not do the first move for some reason and the game is cancelled in some seconds or in a minute depending on the game format.  I suppose there could be different reasons for that, connection problems, wrong mouse click or anything else, all things like that are ok for me but quite often this situation happens when the opponent has the rating much higher than mine, let's say 100-200 points more. Perhaps I'm wrong but I believe some of those cancellations happen because the opponent sees my rating and decides just not to do the first move, because if he wins he gets only a few rating points but if he loses significantly more points are lost. Does it perhaps make sense to hide the ratings before the first move and show them only after the game is started?

Er nope...

But yea this is a bit nuggy but has it stopped/slowed now?

it happens from time to time. Still don't know the reason behind it 

imto (in my technical opinion) this is because we are not directly connected to the server, we use a browser that does requests to the server periodically. If a user clicks "Play", wait a couple seconds then closes the browser, the server can only rely on a time-out (no news from the user's browser) that takes more than a couple seconds.

So, in the meantime, if you were matched with that user and the game started, you have to wait for the server to inform your browser that the other user disconnected.

There are ways to improve this, but this is already a complex (working) machine and I doubt chess.com would take the risk to change something at that level. (there are other issues, like interface settings sync, race condition between the user choices and the defaults when starting a game etc.).

Do you know if it is possible just to press 'Play' but not to do the first move? Does the game just cancel in this case without any penalty? Your version must be correct but can there be another reason for cancelling?

it only happens to me when i have white...so mabey some people dont want to play black.

I noticed also that a cancelled game is counted in an account B / W tally (in order for everyone to play roughly the same amount as W and B).

They should only take into accounts games that were not aborted / cancelled.