question about ratings

Support
1

Hey,

I am sorry if this question has been asked many times over…. but i was wondering anyways:

imagine being a 10 kyu. You only play against 20 kyu players.

every tenth game or so you play against somebody who is not really a 20 kyu but against someone actually plays with a low rated account for some reason, the player actually is , say, 1 dan level , and not 20kyu.

as the difference between 10 kyu and 20 kyu is big, even if you win all the games, except the one against the fake 20kyu player, you now will go backwards in rating as the wins don t really add up because the rating difference is so large, but the one loss will result in maybe 0.3 kyu loss or so, for exactly the same reason, being the large rating difference between 10 kyu and 20kyu.

so now, after 40 games of this, having met about four of those fake 20kyus , our player is now 11 kyu. And in another 150 games or so, probably about15 kyu-ish.

i suppose the weight factor of the differnce between the ratings of the players fades out a bit as you slowly descend in rank and get closer to your 20 kyu opponents.i am not sure in what way that is calculated though. but it s not that important i think, as

you did not lose any skills.

but will soon be a 20kyu player, screwing with the rating of another 10 kyu player doing the same as you did, and like that, in the end, we will all end up with about the same rating but all at very different levels…..

In what way does this scenario not unfold like this on OGS?

in what way is this a wrong description of what would happen or is happening?:sunny:

1 Like
2

It’s easy to have correct rank: just don’t play only against much weaker opponents.

4 Likes
3

If you play only weaker players, then this situation can occur.

However, a “1 dan pretending to be 20k” is against the rules and it’s called sandbagging. If you experience this, you can press the “call a moderator” button next to the game, and report the game. The offending user will get a warning, or a ban if they have a history of this behavior.

3 Likes
4

My example may be silly or extreme but let’s assume one follows your advice and starts as a 1 Kyu playing in correspondence simultaneous McMahon tournaments .

You are now scheduled to play against some 5 Kyus, which games you ll lose. You re scheduled against some 10 Kyus, which some you ll wij and some you ll lose, and some 20 Kyi’s are also in your group. And once in a while one of those fake 20 Kyu comes along.

Which result after a while, that all the players weaker than them, will end up with low ranks, in the end.

It s the same scenario it ll only take a bit longer.

5

Yeah, thanks, this may help some, but I expect many people prefer to not do so. For many reasons.

6

Do you experience sandbagging players?

7

For sure, as the years pass, over hundreds, or even thousands of games, one will meet many of these people, I m not sure what percentage of games it occurs but I suspect it adds to a phenomena in where we all play each other in the same groups, over time, this may have a remarkable influence on the evolution of your rating, within this pool of players.

It would result in a group of players with about the same strength of mid sdk to mid ddk who see their rating slowly winding down over the years wondering how they get worse at the game over time.

But maybe Im tripping. :sunny:

8

I’m sure you’ll meet sandbaggers over thousands of games but I would assume a “non-zero but negligible” amount of sandbagging would have a “non-zero but negligible” effect on ratings overall.

3 Likes
9

Sandbaggers who play a lot of games need to resign or play badly half of their games to maintain a low rank, so you still have 50% chance to win against them. Only the influx of new players who register at a wrong rank may affect your rank in the long run. The opposite also happens, people who are 20k strength but register at 6k or higher (airbaggers). If there are more sandbaggers than airbaggers, this creates deflation of the rating system, so you will get demoted, but the same will happen to everyone, and this probably happened:

2 Likes
10

You won’t reach 20k if you consistently win 90 % of your games against players rated as 20k (it doesn’t matter whether they really are 20k or not).

You lose rating points against the 10 % of dans and win rating points against the real 20 kyus.

And the 20 kyus will play each other too with (except for the hidden dans) a win rate of 45 %. They won’t stay 20k.

The hidden dan players will get to 19k at some point.

11

How do you know if you’re up against a player like that?
Every time I encounter a 20th kyu player who crushes me by a score of nearly 100 points, I suspect something similar.
But I’ve never complained about such players. Perhaps they just suddenly calculaterd better than me—at the beginning levels, that’s entirely possible.

12

watch this 6 minutes video. https://youtu.be/13i2ggvpXPY?si=orSRWyJHSBlbnxN3
don’t be lazy.