I must be missing something here. Why would someone purposely lower their rank (“sandbag”) to play weaker opponents which would only result in raising their rank again? If someone wants to play weaker opponents why not just challenge weaker opponents higher up on a ladder? The only logical reason to sandbag would seem to be a sociopathic intention to decrease others’ ranks.
From my own experience: the weakest player I can change is 5 stones stronger.
Also the ladder is correspondence, but limited to 3 games.
The message you got from “system” was not originated by an AI. If I understand it correctly, it is a new communication method from the mods. One purpose is to anonymize the moderator in communication; whether it has other purposes I do not know.
I think it is safe to say that I have more experience dealing with sandbagging than anyone on OGS, since I spent about half my time on the issue when I was moderating. Assuming the data you have presented is correct (I’m not wasting my time looking at your games), I actually believe your story.
Most sandbaggers want a larger rank gap than three stones because they like beating their opponent severely. Also, rank-manipulating sandbaggers tend to resign with very decisive leads near the end of the game. The most important factor in your favor is that you say you are restricting the minimum rank of your challenges to 4k. I don’t believe an actual sandbagger would do this.
However, as others have mentioned, it is still problematic if your behaviors are creating an unintentional sandbagging effect—if, for example, more than half of your won games are being lost. (That would be extreme, I think, but where one draws the line is hard to say.) If that is the case, I would expect that you would want to address the problem by changing some of the behaviors you itemize. @jlt gave some good recommendations for doing that.
3 Likes
I looked at the last 15 games I resigned and I was ahead in only one of them (which is not necessarily representative, I’m pretty sure it’s worse than that usually): leo21 vs. mart900
I judged that group on the bottom to be probably dead with my skills at making life, but maybe saveable if I really tried. I didn’t really feel like trying, and since it was likely the last interesting thing to happen in that game I decided I’d rather play a new one.
Of course the AI saw a way to save the group so I guess I should have as well.
Funny how different we all are. 
I am about your strength and trying to live there would have been a fun experience for me!
Perhaps people report you, not because you resign while being ahead, but because you resign too early?
For instance
AI says you were behind in these two games, but at this stage a kyu player still has reasonable hopes to win against an opponent of equal strength.
2 Likes
Hi @mart900 , I am the mod who handled this case, and I’m going to roughly explain how it went.
Someone reported you for sandbagging. I looked you up and saw that you had previously been warned against sandbagging and some of your games had been annulled for that reason a while back.
So I looked closer at your profile and saw that you lost a relatively big proportion of games.
This is usually a first indicator (but just an indicator) for sandbagging. (Similar btw for AI use if there are too many wins, proportionally. 
)
Then I looked through the games you recently resigned and annulled those in which you were ahead.
Everyone has a game here or there which they accidentally resign too early - it’s normal - and as a mod, it’s of course hard to see for me if it’s done on purpose or if it’s done accidentally, so I mainly judge by how often it happens (except in those weird, extreme cases in which some 1d or so occasionally plays a game like a 25k and then resigns, and then it’s obvious).
Some of your games looked to me like rather accidental resignations (when I’d be like, oh yeah, I would have resigned as well), while others were not so clear.
For example, this one mart900 vs. KvotheGo09 , or this andysif vs. mart900 (so early in the game!), and especially this one mart900 vs. nonservium .
So from my point of view, it definitely looked like it could very well be intentional sandbagging, even more so with the information that you had been warned before, and I felt like I needed to be very clear that this is not okay.
However, when reading this thread, I fully believe you that it was unintentional. If I had known it was unintentional, I would have been much friendlier, obviously, but I would have informed you that someone complained about you, and I would have asked you to take better care not to resign too early in your games, I guess.
7 Likes
A game at move 200 with roughly an AI estimate of 10 points ahead was annulled???
Honestly moderator team does not see the ridiculousness of this micromanagement!!!
If y’all are so certain this is what is best for the community, put a site banner that says “Community announcement: moderators can and will annul won and lost games according to their judgement at any point and for whatever reason. There is no indication to the player that it had been annulled, unless they specifically search for it in their game history.”
See how that goes.
1 Like
A game where there was a moderately strong suspicion of sandbagging! It seems to have been a wrong call, but understandable, and we should assume the moderators are doing their best in good faith at a difficult job.
Tucked away in your post is the implicit suggestion that users should be notified of annulled games, which seems a reasonable thing to expect.
4 Likes
Serious question:
When I get a tournament game with a 1d, what is the proper étiquette, according to moderator team?
Resign immediately, so as not waste the dan time?
Resign after 8 moves, because dan would win anyway and they deserve to take the tiny rank points?
Because of course playing the game is unthinkable.
I’m not a moderator but I think your opponent’s rank is irrelevant. Just do your best and resign when you think the situation is hopeless if your opponent were of the same rank as you.
When I was FFG 12k, I played a tournament game IRL against a 1k. The game was quite balanced, and my opponent was scared at some point. Finally I made an endgame mistake and lost by 20 points.
6 Likes
In the position below, I suppose black realised (too late) that they can’t connect at M10 (so their previous move at S6 was a mistake) and they might have felt caught with their pants down. But black incorrectly assumed that this mistake lost the lead.
In the position below, black overplayed in the fight on the lower side and white is leading now. It is rather early for black to resign, but I suppose that a respectful + pessimistic player might still do that in this situation.
Edit: Oops. I cannot think of a reason for a white resignation in the position below. Perhaps some urgent real life matter came up, so they had to leave the game?
In the position below, I also cannot understand why black resigned. Perhaps black hallucinated that white can live on the right with O10 & P9, or that white M8 works to kill black’s cutting stones? Or black had some urgent real life matter to attend to?
I don’t want to criticise how @KAOSkonfused handled this. Hindsight is 20/20 as they say. It can be difficult to avoid confirmation bias when investigating a player’s game history in light of a report. Mods are not infallible.
Still, I think that in most cases moderator misjudgements do get corrected, as it was here (retracting sandbagging suspicion).
5 Likes
That would be the logical thing, but we’re obviously against logic here.
We are not allowed to think for ourselves, we are only supposed to think what moderator team expects from us.
Rest assured if you had won that game here you would be called a sandbagger and the game would be annulled.
If your opponent was scared and resigned the game would also be annulled. And they would be called a sandbagger.
Only if someone catches it. How many games are being annulled and nobody knows about it?
1 Like
As far as I remember from being a moderator, most annulments happen if the result was wrong due to score cheating or a reported scoring mistake, or when the winner was botting, or when the loser was sandbagging.
Mods are not annulling games nilly-willy just because the game has a “wrong” result.
2 Likes
It certainly sounds like it. 
It’s White, not Black, who resigned.
1 Like
You can play until scoring, or the game is lost (according to the state of the board, not the player carts).
If you don’t want to play against a dan player, you can cancel at the beginning of the game.
Ok, how much lost? The moment score estimator says I’m losing I should resign?
What if analysis is off and there’s no SE?
I wouldn’t want to be accused of stalling!!!
I wonder how often you, @mart900, consider resigning during a game? As about 5 kyu I agree that Black looks rather small — but I count this as a small lead for Black on the board, just counting pairs without thinking about correct endgame, and I suppose it took about 90 seconds. Surely that is not too hard to do or too long to spend once or twice in a correspondence game (even with 29 others going on)?