While the statistics eg 2.5k ± 0.8 provide a relative means of confidence in someone’s rank, we lack simple information that would help avoid mismatches.
What I believe is a more useful piece of information, is the strength of opponents that they beat. So what I am proposing is a pie or bar chart that groups the strength level they have beaten.
This way, I look at this chart, and I see that they have beaten 1d about 20% of the time, 1k about 50% of the time, 2k about 30% of time.
This gives a much clearer gauge on their strength and I believe a more useful chart.
Without this information at quick notice, the only way to determine someone’s true capability is to manually comb through pages of their games, which is unlikely to happen at the start of a game, and thus makes it easier for these people to slip through the system undetected.
We have mods with experience used to detect and take care of sandbaggers, including other “tools”. Biggest difficulty is lack of reports from victims. By collecting multiple occurences mods are the one with the most information too.
It’s like impossible to detect beforehand someone going to sandbag so i see what you suggest more for confirmation as prevention.
What is more important is finally to intervene as soon as possible (with reports to mods) more as let people scrutinize their opponent list of games.
I didn’t look in detail at his game history, but at least among the 9 most recent games against 2 dans, he won only 3 games, and 2 of these games were with handicap.
Among the 14 most recent games against 3 dans, he won only 2 games, and one of these games was by resignation at move 8 without reason.
Your ingenious proposal would indeed help to identify a tiny minority of sandbaggers. It would also, I suspect, require a lot of work to implement, so undertaking that effort depends on a cost-benefit analysis.
Sadly, it would have no value in detecting the large majority of sandbaggers. Sandbaggers who know their business cannot be stopped. I’m not going to explain that further, as doing so would only help sandbaggers who do not know their business, or don’t care about being caught.
If people are determined to avoid sandbaggers, I suggest they play only people they know and trust.
The main technical limitation that leapt to my mind is recalling that those charts are implemented in fairly low level d3, so it’s a face-full to get started with
If you can get over that hurdle, maybe it’s not too hard to simply subtract the handicap stones from the rank to fix the “stronger/weaker” comparison.
