Carelessness and Craftiness

Submitted by Grayhound on Fri, 06/20/2008 at 11:16am.

In my recent experiances on chess.com, I have been hounded by numerous request to join tournements and play against various unknown members who claim to be begginers. No sooner have I done this than all of a sudden I am playing a person who plays like Kasparov and my rating drops sharply.

The tournaments we enter become rigged with one or two players being seemingly perfect and the rest of the players being ridiculed and humiliated.

I have noticed that many good players deliberatly lose games in order to drop their rating enough so that they can enter tournaments and then gain tournament points. I begin to wonder what the point is of entering tournaments if there is no method of controlling who cannot enter. I cannot belive that there is no method of blocking, banning or "kicking" certain players from entering tournaments.

I would appreciate any comments on how to do this.

» posted in Grayhound's Blog

| 86 reads | 3 comments

Comments:

by roundtuit - 2 months ago
Sydney Australia

Member Since: Sep 2007
Member Points: 1854

Best way is to stick with a known group of friends like our Circle mate, not as much variety, but people to be trusted,

by peterkirby - 2 months ago
Fullerton, CA United States

Member Since: May 2008
Member Points: 79

In real life OTB chess, this is called "sandbagging." It's part of the reason that there are rating floors (once you hit 1600 you can't go below 1400, etc.). In addition to that, tournament directors can force you to play in a higher class if you were higher rated recently.

by Knightly - 2 months ago
Wisconsin United States

Member Since: Nov 2007
Member Points: 452

Very interesting; I have thought this myself. You have a real point. I know that players do deliberately lower their rating so they can join, but I don't know of anyway to ban or block other members from a tournament. Maybe this will come along as another feature, and then the tournaments can become more targeted.

^ Back to top