I don’t consider new accounts or “?” accounts as “sandbaggers”. They can easily state their true strength in chat or search for games with higher ranks and their “?” indicates uncertainty already. The only way creating a new account would lead to sandbagging would be if that was the intention of the person. Someone who wants to create an alternate account with an honest intention shouldn’t be discouraged from it because other do it to sandbag.
I like your point about glicko being particularly designed to make those rank jumps if necessary, but still, in my experience DDK/TPK on OGS was brutal. As someone who has started on and only played on OGS for the first six months, the rare occasions where I was encouraged by rankings were the times I made my alternate accounts and immediately got a higher rank(2-3 higher) than my already existing one. I did not use those alternate accounts for any schemes or shennanigans (except 7sec blitz :D) and I don’t see how it was bad for me or the server.
Yeah, I’m on “stay on your main account” side. If you win against sdks, glicko isn’t gonna oppress you and keep you in ddk ranks, you’ll be sdk. If you win against dans, you’ll be dan.
And you get all your game history nice and tight in one place. I like that.
I wasn’t aware there were sides. I was just pointing out the possible benefits of an alternative account regarding this topic. Sure, you could prefer having your history in one place but I don’t think it will help you become 20 kyu.
I think it is established that there is some opression at 25kyu- on OGS, because of +/-. There is further annoyances at tpk and ddk because of sandbaggers, learning to navigate the server, scorecheaters/stallers.
Just saying, if the question is how to become 20kyu on ogs, then the simplest answer is to make a new account and play in a motivated fashion.
As a 25kyu, you can win more than 5 games against same rank and not rank up. At any other rank, that’s not possible. Rating might be treated same but rank doesn’t. Beginners don’t take hours to figure out every little detail about the system, they think they are 25k, not 1000-something glicko rating points.
Besides all the site-mechanics of how rank is calculated, it might be worth your time to study some of the fundamentals, as this will help you A LOT when playing other 20-25kyu players - many of whom have not grasped these concepts yet.
I wrote these articles about the 19x19 game specifically with beginners in mind, so hopefully these will help:
As qualified beginner you can enjoy freedom and exploration but don’t lure yourself too much: go is a very demanding game. One liberty less and you lose a fight, one intersection too far and you get invaded or cut.
In that sense you can understand that you can’t lose time by playing a useless move and that’s a very common failure to eliminate first if you want to go deeper in reading and theory.
Don’t connect if you are already connected, don’t give more prisoners, don’t play something which do nothing (it’s called a dame point), don’t fill your territory…
More advanced is don’t kill something already killed, more easy is don’t eat the stones which can no more escape, it’s a pure waste of time.
It looks easy but it’s very common failures and it’s something possible to look at after the game is finished.
What Go books (if any) have you read? A good complete beginner’s book (such as A Complete Introduction to the Game) and a good tsumego book (such as the first volume in Graded Go Problems for Beginners or Black to Play! Train the Basics) should give you enough knowledge to reach 20 kyu.
OGS’ rating is kinda harsh for beginner and create a different account won’t really solves anything if you’re still inexperiences. You could train on others server (Tygem, igs-pandanet, Fox) as well, its good experience to learn different playstyles on each servers.
Go in the beginning (out of print) by Iwamoto is by far the best for the kind of player who like something a bit exhaustive (at his level). In the spirit of “basic techniques of go” which aim at the next level.
Hmm, I’m late to the party, I see. This business about creating an alt account is too important, however, to let it go, as it might well get someone banned for sandbagging. If you create an alt account, it needs to be transparent about your real rank (like if I created an account called “Conrad–11k”), or you need to rank it up against bots so as not to cheat any people, or it needs to be dedicated to a special purpose such as a different speed or board size (in which case you are entitled to start as ?, since, after all, you may not be as strong at the different speed or size). But if you create an alt that plays the same games as your main account, you risk getting banned as a sandbagger. If you want to argue intention, then we will drop the term “sandbagger” and call it “defrauding your opponent” (“unintentionally,” of course). Talking about intention is pointless, because none of us is a mind reader.