Wins against 1200 Rated Opponents

Why do I keep running across people who have numerous wins against 1200 rated opponents in games that seem to have timed out after a handful of moves.  Is this a method of rating manipulation?  If so, I'm curious as to why as it seems rather empty and skews the numbers pretty badly.

If I think I'm playing a 1700 rated player who only got there after five wins against imaginary opponents then my win messes up my rating as I really beat a 1200 or worse opponent.

I suppose it doesn't really matter as I'm playing to learn anyway.  Just curious.

What do you mean? When you're playing them you check their game history, and you find this out?

report abuse bottom on every page you dont need to make a thread

I don't think anyone plays 1200 players to manipulate their rating... 1200 is the default rating that new players get, so playing 1200s you run a good chance of playing someone who is much stronger than their 1200 rating would indicate... you play a Master, lose, and get ratings penalized as if you'd played a beginner (I don't like the system, but that's for another post).

However, there are some folks who are chess.com "greeters"  they play brand new 1200 players to welcome them to the chess.com community and kindly introduce them to the Chess played here... as you can imagine many people join, agree to play a game, and then disappear after a few moves, realizing they don't really care that much about slow correspondence chess.... hence the timeouts. 

It sounds to me like you've encountered some chess.com greeters -- pretty much the furthest thing from ratings manipulators there are! 

Chess.com greeters are unrated matches, I dont think he was referring about them.

JG27Pyth is right they are greeters.  I did not notice the big "Welcome to chess.com" and "unrated game" tags on the games.  That helps.

And, yes tryst, I do check out the game history of people I'm playing to see who they've been playing and what kinds of openings and play they do.  I don't think it's cheating but if it is I can stop.  It seems in postal chess you can do all sorts of research.

What are you talking about? I didn't imply you were cheating, I just wanted to know how you found out. It's not cheating to look at peoples online profile.

I didn't take insult.  Frankly I don't know if it's legal or not.  I know you can use books, databases etc.  You are not to put position into a chess engine or playing software.  I do that after the game to check for tactical blunders and such.

I just click on the opponent and then look at his chess archive.   Hit view on a couple of interesting games.  See how long his games go etc.