Do you think OGS never heard about this?
If you encounter a cheating case, just use a report, OGS will take care.
When you play online, you know there are opportunities to cheat. That doesn’t mean OGS is not aware of them, OGS will make all the possible for that to not happen.
Note that being 24k after 2 weeks is not extraordinary. Even more if you are a young child.
Happy gaming!
Kids have very plastic brains. Expect them to regularly surpass you in this game 
(speaking from experience)
One of the things you brought up rings very true for me - and that’s the way that interacting with this game can be a huge blow to one’s ego / sense of self.
When I first ran into this game in my mid-30s (somewhere around 2003 or so), I prided myself on being fairly sharp. I had learned and absorbed many other strategy games, and had felt a sense of accomplishment and mastery. But encountering the learning curve of Go felt like smashing my face into a mountain. The worst part was feeling completely lost - making mistake after mistake and not understanding WHY they were mistakes in the first place, or how my human opponents (or the GnuGo AI I kept playing) could find those good moves I kept missing.
That image of myself as a smart, confident, capable person was seriously shaken - and it took a lot of time and mental effort to set the hungry ghost of the ego aside, and focus on improving without all that negative self talk getting in the way.
It took me another 10 years to get really serious about learning this game (like many players here, the AlphaGo / Lee Sedol match in 2016 was the catalyst that got me over the hump), and in the 10 years since I’ve managed to make a very slow climb from 25kyu to my current rank of 7-9kyu (I very rarely play ranked games, so my actual rank is a bit vague).
And yet still - to this day - when I make a major flub in a game - it’s very difficult NOT to take it personally - to not see it as a sign that I’m not as intelligent or capable as I’d like to be.
Also, because I’ve only been playing correspondence games - some of which can last weeks or months - it means that my concentration and multi-tasking capacities can fluctuate up and down based on whatever other stressful events are going on in my real life. At those times, Go can become a mirror - showing me that I am not my best self at times, and it can be difficult to step back, show some kindness to myself, and focus on getting the self-care I need to get back to a place where I can regain access to those resources.
My main take-aways from all this are
The other important thing to remember about that 9 yr old kid is - while the neuroplasticity of youngsters can be a factor - it’s very rare that someone improves so quickly in isolation.
Chances are - especially if that youngster lives anywhere in Asia - that they had a lot of background knowledge and support along the way. Perhaps they grew up watching Go matches on TV. Perhaps they had a parent, aunt, uncle, or grandparent that sat them down and played some hand-holding teaching games.
Go is not a game that anyone just sits down and understands instantly. When you think of other fields that require experiential learning - like Kung Fu or wilderness survival skills - everyone needs to spend some time being bad at it and feeling lost before the school-of-hard-knocks experience of making those mistakes allows one to see how they can get better.
A lot of Go beginners start by trying to figure out the best moves and strategies for attacking, capturing, making eyes - i.e. the most direct route to making points. Learning these types of things have proved successful for mastering other games, why shouldn’t those same approaches work for Go?
However, the thing they miss is - one of the MOST important skills in Go is being able to accurately determine the danger/opportunity levels of the current board position:
Rather than just looking for the next most obvious target, Go requires one to slow down do a LOT of tactical and strategic analysis before you can learn how to answer these questions. And - unfortunately - if you’re unaware of those danger levels to begin with, you will keep making the same mistakes, and feeling lost and confused as to how you ended in those situations.
Getting good at Go isn’t so much learning how to DO - it’s learning how to SEE - reading the risks and opportunities in the landscape of the stones that will show you the range of 3 best moves available to you, and help you understand the relative risk/reward values of each of them so you can choose your best strategy for that moment.
I know this process is frustrating and discouraging - it takes time and effort - not only to go through the steps of learning it, but also to get over all the negative internal voices telling you that you SHOULD be better, or that someone might be progressing faster than you.
My advice is take it easy on yourself. If losing games bothers you - maybe just play some unranked teaching games for a while, or play against the same low-level AI offline so you can try some different things, ask for un-do’s more easily etc. A lot of people here on OGS have offered to help in various ways - maybe just step back and access those resources, and focus on improving instead of needing the satisfaction of a win to somehow justify the effort you’re making. Try to find some joy in this game separate from the agony-of-defeat you keep focusing on. Good luck.
One thing about very young kids learning Go (as young as 5 to 6 yrs), it that when they “learn Go”, they learn Go. There is nothing in the back of their mind, like I need to pick up glossary, or do laundry, or even what I want to eat for lunch, etc. They don’t think of anything, and they don’t even think about the time limit (thus often some kids would get upset when they leave classes when they are fully submerged, they don’t want it to end). Some adults also has this time of “concentration” and focus, and they usually learn a bit faster than others.
However, the most important factor I think kids have also stamp from when they are off Go lessons, like playing with their friends, they don’t obsessed over them. And with Kids’ energy level, they will take a nap or just shutdown, and relax. Truly relax outside of Go classes. This I feel make their learning more effective. They don’t get “burnout” easily and can keep on the Go classes everyday for weeks and months, while some “obsessed” adults, doing Go problems and train day and night, burnout after a while, and have to restart learning what they’ve learned again, and become very inefficient for the amount of time spend on learning Go.
So the secret of learning Go is really just Enjoy the game, and live you life.
all good advice- now maybe if i could unpickel my mind to absord a few basic concepts i could at least start to understand this game
You’re on your way. I can tell.
In direct response to the question as to why someone would cheat…
I suspect that someone who cheats at an online game must have extremely low self esteem.
Either (1) they lack confidence in their own capacity to learn how to play any better, or (2) they confuse their sense of self worth as being what strangers mistakenly think about them - rather than what they genuinely think of themselves.
Either way (or both) it’s quite sad with much to pity. 
All of this message is exactly what I needed to hear this morning. I’ve been up for two, maybe three days straight playing Go, not eating or talking to anyone; but I had lost a lot of the joy I used to feel. It was still there, just buried. But now I feel it, the intense joy of every aspect of this game, from the pleasure of placing a stone to the imaginings and phillososp[hy about the inconceivable possibilites hidden deep within the game.
But goddamn, 2-3 days straight, I should probably lay down
You have put your finger on one genuine problem at OGS: our ranks bottom out at 25k for matchmaking.
If you look at your rating graph you will see that your rating is well below the rank of 25k.
25k is about 500 rating points. You’re currently hovering around 150 rating points,
That means that unfortunately you may sometimes be matched with someone such as yourself, who is still working out the basic mechanics, but more often you will be matched with someone who has got “off the first floor” … and those latter will wipe you out. Both show up as 25k.
@anoek given that OGS ranks seem to be “getting stronger”, and we have this incidental evidence that beginners are still finding that they are being crushed on pairing, I wonder if it’s time to review this floor?
If the old wisdom were true, and “anything below 25k is noise” then surely outcomes for beginners below that should be random and ratings should not get pushed below that level. We are seeing this is not the case: beginners ratings get pushed well down towards the 100 glicko level.
I thought it was that 1 rank = 1 stone handicap stops working, and that’s how ranks are calibrated.
Otherwise ranks don’t do anything different or new than rating.
I brought this up in another thread recently.
You could imagine adding essentially cosmetic ranks below 25kyu ( every 100 rating points is a new rank) and then the pairing system matches to the closest 100 rating points below 25kyu.
Or you could imagine using the 9x9 handicap to calibrate ranks below 25kyu, but presumably you need a lot of those games being played with those handicaps.
Right, but I think we need to revisit this.
Does it matter that 1 rank = 1 stone doesn’t work for TPKs?
Why do we care about that strongly enough to inflict the OPs experience on them?
And … if we do care, there are still solutions: let the matchmaker do matching on rating.
^^
As long as it’s consistent. A 400 rated player could still play with a 20kyu by choice, and how it affects each players rating change after the game has to make sense, or we might accidentally promote the 20kyu to 9 dan in a few games.
Perhaps also worth revisiting the idea that stones don’t work beyond a certain point. I have a feeling that stones probably do still work, but they may no longer match the log formula that has been fit to the “mid” ranks
Sidestepping just a bit.
In about three weeks you produced at least 10 new threads that deal with your first steps into the wonderful and sometimes frustrating world of go.
It feels a bit like a blog. Would it be an idea bundle them in one blog-like thread?
By the way, not always agree with you, but they make nice reading (so please continue).
thanks for the advice don’t i don’t know how to do that i am computer illiterate, i can barely get the computer on , just an old sick guy trying to play learn a little about this game and pass the time, till well, till that time comes.
wow, so sorry to hear this.
you can ask a moderator to place all your threads in a new thread with whatever title you want.
after they merged these threads into the new thread, they will close al those threads with a reference to the new thread.
Yeah I reckon we have enough data collected now that we’re due for analyzing how the choose-your-rank has affected things overall and potentially do some appropriate updates.
Yes - that’s true also 
I think a key factor emerging here is that we need a solution for TPK matching even if 1 stone doesn’t = 1 rank in the TPKs.
I guess this also implies that the idea that “below 25k the outcome is random” needs to be challenged, because that has been an additional fundamental of the 25k bottom limit.
Beyond that we have some teachers here with go activities with children and some understanding of the ranks under 25k. If they could provide us with a view of what could be a ranking system that would be a very interesting first step into improving the one we miss yet.
The EGF and KGS use ranks down to 30k, I don’t see why OGS couldn’t do the same.
