Why I don't sign up for any chess.com tournaments

The follow is what players are left in the 1000-1400 division -

kevin235 (1904)	24-0-0	24	72	Active
takeosao (2302)	24-0-0	24	72	Active
Rayyan (2104)	24-0-0	24	72	Active
okalbo6666 (2006)	23-0-1	23.5	69.75	Active
MaxiKing (1975)	23-1-0	23	69	Active
Canuck-1 (2171)	23-1-0	23	67	Active
dane_jay (1701)	23-0-0	23	67	Active
cons (2393)	23-1-0	23	66	Active
Paddee (2228)	22-1-1	22.5	70.75	Active
oliebol (2040)	22-2-0	22	67	Active
rubenshein (1890)	21-1-0	21	58	Active

And that is only the top outliers of the tournament.  If you want, don't sign up for a tournament with rating classes.

Peoples ratings go up when they win.  People who don't win don't advance in tournaments.

I'd fully expect the remaining players in the latter rounds of a tournament to have a much higher rating than when they started.

This list seems perfectly reasonable to me.

I agree with P_U_N.  The games won in the tournament are not likely to account for a rating increase of such magnitude; clearly, other games have been won outside the tournament as well.  It makes one wonder if these players were ever really 1400 players, or were just sandbagging.  Without a very good explanation, the answer seems rather clear.  After all, one does not become a 2000 player over night, so how did these players qualify for the tournemant to start with?  How many games did they have to throw?  Once one of them wins -- and with obvious pride, no doubt -- will he or she then fake an injury to qualify for the Special Olympics?  That would seem to be the next step.

It would be useful to know what the trajectory was. Were they new players who had only played a little bit (minimum for tourney)? Sandbagging is not the only option you know, and places blame where blame may not be required.

Under-rated may be more accurate without judgement.

Given how long these tournaments go on it's not surprising that a percentage will go up a lot of points.  If they were members long before the tournament started then sandbagging might be true but more likely they were relatively new members. 

It started over a year ago and with over 1400 players, you are complaining that less than 1% are now very highly rated.  No doubt they were well over 1400 standard when they started but if they were new to the site that's the way it goes.  When ther first chess.com tournies started there were very few other ones you could join...

The presumption of innocence is just a presumption, and outside a court of law, has no more basis in fact than a presumption of guilt.  Are you trying to tell me that all of these players joined just before this tournament began?  And wait, that's not all.  They also have so little experience with chess as to not realize that they have no business in a tournament whose entry is defined by such a rating range?  No, I think I will have to stick with the sandbagging explanation as the only one that makes any sense whatsoever.  For the record, I am in a tournament whose entry criteria involves a rating under 1600, and I am now over that limit.  But not nearly like this, and with all the games I win on time, I am probably lucky to be as good as a true 1600.  That is not the same as a 2300 masquerading as a 1400.

vance, this is not the World Open where large sums of money are available if you win a rating restricted event. 

If the links to the players names worked I would check a few but the links just bring me to the forums page.

MM78, I agree with you.  This is why the honor system should work here.  But apparently it doesn't, so what conclusion are we left to draw?

that is pretty damn funny.  I don't join them just because I imagine they will take forever.  Are there prizes or anything?  Why would anyone try to do the sandbagging thing?

You'd have to bring that up with them, now, wouldn't you?  But your argument seems to be that YOU would not do this, therefore nobody else would, therefore it cannot be sandbagging.  So as an analogy, I would not steal, therefore nobody else would (especially with the US dollar in such decline), so when we have what appears to be theft, it must really be a misunderstanding, is that it?  Sounds almost like the contract killer rationalizing by saying that he never killed someone who wasn't going to die anyway.

Just click on tournaments and you can see the results,  - who knows, maybe they have mult. accounts.

If the honor system doesn't work in the tournaments, I'm probably losing alot of games to computers.  Apparantly there is some amount of pride in being rated 2000+ and having a trohpy that says "1st place - under 1400 division"

Now that's pretty damn funny.

A posible solution:

If a tournament player's rating comes to exceed the tourney brackets upper limit (say the 1200-1400 group) in any round that he/she wins, then that player is automacally promoted/placed into the tourney next higher bracket (1400-1600).

This takes care of the sandbaggers, unrated new players, etc. Policies and rules can be further tweeked and ajusted to level the bracket players. An example would be two bracket promos max as ones rating would tend to level after the time invested.

Such a policy would certainly make me reconsider joining a tourney.

Maybee these people are leveraging the full rules of correspondence chess, I have played very well with a 2000+ player before, simply by following a grandmaster game...but it wasn't very enjoyable, so I just mostly play OTB now.

Some words from a player who was actually in that tournament...

I made it to round 3 in the 1st Chess.com Tournament (1001-1400 division); I presume that this is the tournament you're talking about.  I can tell you that there are some of us who really can improve by several hundred points (and I mean playing strength, before you figure in the possibility of being ove /unde ).  I really did play at the 1300-1400 level early in the tournament (my rating crossed 1400 a few months after the tournament started the February before last, along with most of the players in my group), but by the time I was in Round 3, I had improved quite a bit (partially as a result of playing so many games, partially as a result of the helpful articles that Chess.com has been making available), and my rating has now crossed 1700.

Vance917, I believe that the number of games in each round of the tournament (8 at the time the 1st Chess.com tournament started; the newer official site tourneys have you playing 10 games at a time, which is why I don't join them anymore) is enough to account for such a rating change, when you figure that in order to advance to Round 3 you have to win nearly all of your games, and we're talking about winning most of 24 games in order to advance to Round 4.  Given that these tournaments don't account for all of the players' games, it seems to me that these players have simply improved within the last year and 3 months.  You see, I learned while I was in that tournament that it was really a race to improve.  We all started out rated under 1401 (this is a rough indication of our skill levels at the start of the tournament, although some of us were a bit unde ), and the people who win the second and third rounds are the people who improve more quickly than their competitors.  Many of these people were fairly new to chess (for example, I had almost no real practice until I joined this website-one month before the tournament started-because I don't know anyone in my town who likes to play chess), but had much potential for advancement, and have to some degree realized that potential within the last year and a quarter.

This makes sense because the first two rounds eliminated all but the top few percent of the players, which at this point are the ones who could advance the most quickly (see above).

I imagine that this problem is compounded in a correspondence tournament that is played via snail mail, because the time span would be longer (this is an assumption, as I have never actually played snail-mail postal chess).

p.s. everything from post #9 on this forum down to the long message I posted was posted while I was writing that post, so I didn't read any of the messages after post #8 before posting my message.

So - you can be fairly new to chess, and be in the top 1% of chess.com within a year?  interesting.

I'd just prefer to think that these people are not cheating, or sandbagging, or being unethical - and that they just take the max time to make all moves, and search databases extensively for the best moves.

This solution has been implemented in a sense; the players who join a tournament and then have their rating rise or fall before the tournament starts are now automatically moved to the correct rating division.  After the beginning of the tourney, you're allowed to raise your rating as much as you want, and it's a mad dash to improve more quickly than your opponents (that's how you get better than them, as their rating was similar to yours at the beginning).

I have improved from 1300+ to 1700+ since I joined the tournament, as it's been over a year and a quarter now.  I may be a bit ove , though.