I have seen many players who have intentionally lost to lower rated players in order to bring their rating down. This has allowed them to win big cash prizes at the top tournaments. I’m wondering if USCF is taking precautions against this.
The difficulty is distinguishing between a player who is just having a bad day and one who is intentionally losing to lower rated players.
TDs have the the authority to sanction players if they believe they are intentionally losing, but I don’t know how often it’s used. Not very often, I suspect.
Ratings floors are probably the primary tool that the office has for dealing with sandbagging. Some organizers, notably the CCA, have also set up lists of minimum ratings for some of the players in their events.
In terms of the rules, there is rule 20L - more about collusion.
But there is also in the Code of Ethics:
So, yes, it is literally against the rules as well. But, as nolan points out, it’s appears to not be an easy thing to make stick or to prove at all (in the sense of a violation.) Even the best players can have a blunderific day, and the key element is to prove that a loss is deliberate.
Nothwithstanding the notes above about the difficulty in catching this scum, low rated players playing extremely well in the first couple rounds against much higher rated players ARE noticed by the TD staff, and most good TDs can AND DO recognize this possibility fairly quickly, and make rating adjustments before much more damage can be done.
This is just a note for those attempting to find ways around the rules.
On a post that I wrote on my blog about the National Open, one commenter mentioned that one of the players who tied for first in my section took a large hit on their rating losing to a bunch of 1200 - 1300 rated players. This conveniently drpped them below 1800. I looked at his history a little more deeply and noticed he had maintained a rating over 1800 for quite awhile and was even over 1900.
I then looked at the other player’s history and noticed that he too had a long period of time rated over 1800 and 1900. His drop was a little more subtle then the other player’s drop. It was a little more gradual.
I suppose it would be too much to ask an organizer to review the history of every single player entering his tournament to see if there is a pattern of dumping leading up to the event. I think if I had seen these two players’ histories I might have assigned them a minimum rating of 1800 and made them play in the Under 2000. Now having won over 2000 they will have an 1800 floor, but it didn’t help those who were legitimate B players who lost to them in the event.
In my experience, the up and coming and quickly improving player has a better chance to win the section than the sandbagger does. Who would you really expect to win, a player who was over 2100 at some point playing u2000, or a future IM playing there like Zhe Quan was when he won a U2000 Chicago Open? I can say that I’m personally more worried when I’m paired against a younger player than an older sandbagging player.
A lot of the sandbaggers are not that old. I’m happy when I see young up and coming players win the section. I have no problems with rapidly improving players winning. I do resent the players who put a lot of effort into losing points at just the right time.
Also, deliberately losing can get to be a bad habit, to the point where it really does reduce the sandbagger’s playing strength. You forget how to win. I’ve seen apparent sandbaggers not be able to win when it really counts, e.g. when they are on the verge of winning a prize in the final round. Practice makes perfect, and this can apply to losing also.
Bill Smythe
Perhaps the fault lies not in their inability to win, but in the assumption that they were sandbagging.
Or, perhaps they were beaten by someone who simply did a better job of sandbagging.
It’s hard to see how viable enforcement could be created. In my own case I had a lot of wins against players 200 points above my rating and maybe an equal number of losses against players 200 points under my rating. If I’d been looking at my own record of the mid-80s I’d have said I was a sandbagger. I wasn’t, it was just a quirk in my playing style.
Hopefully you talking about me 
I have been playing a lot, and quickly improving probably due to my friends/ICC. It also is bad for adults that high school tournaments are not rated usually.
For everyone else I am just asking this because some of my opponents at my past two tournaments have been severaly underrated. Especially one of them who has won a lot of money at every major tournament so far.
I think the golden age of American sandbaggers was in New York during the late 70s and early 80s, when a lot of very strong Russian players were going there straight from the USSR. I knew several young, formerly Russian candidate master players (generally stronger than American experts of the time) who kept their rating just under 2000 to win prizes in the ‘A’ section of the large tournaments. To me there was no contest between them and regular 1800-1990s players. After cleaning up in a big tournament those sandbaggers would lose low entry fee quads to keep the rating down. That must be tons of fun, especially for the younger players keeping themselves from competing at their real skill level. Can’t see where the prize money, which is neither very reliable or particularly great anyway, compensates for what they’re missing in competitive enjoyment.
I agree that very strong upcoming players generally play better than sandbaggers lurking in the same prize category.
In one example I’m thinking of, a player from Eastern Europe beat several masters, one of them twice, in his first month of USA play before his rating came out.
Later, he lost to a 900 and a 1200 in the same (small) tournament.
Then, he wanted to play in the U.S. Masters. Unfortunately, he had sandbagged his way below 2200, so was not eligible. Justice triumphs.
This one I don’t understand. If he won, how was he sandbagging at all, let alone better?
Bill Smythe
But, I wouldn’t count on the Ethics Committee doing anything about sandbaggers unless they admit it and sign in blood. In one of my local events a few years ago, a few months before the world open, a 1990+ player lost to 1505, 1332, 1402 and drew with a beginner child at 490. For one of the three losses he actually showed up 70 minutes late to a marked forfeit and talked the player into playing him just to lose! He stated to me after the tournament that he was keeping his rating down for the World Open. I filed an ethics complaint and when he changed his story during the complaint process, the committee ruled 8-0 for him as it was his word against mine. The moral of the story is, catch them if you can and by all means try, but don’t expect a lot of support if they deny it and you don’t have multiple witnesses to the confession.
I wonder what the odds are of a strong class A player having a raw performance rating 1100 points below his rating?
One way is to pre-screen results from previous tournaments to catch sandbagging and assign a higher rating, or do as the World Open does - diminish potential prizes for anyone having an official rating 30 points higher than the section during the previous year limited to $2000. That happened to one player in the U2000 section last year.
Mike
Was this a tournament you organized/directed?
Why didn’t you just throw him out of the tournament and refuse to rate those games?
Otherwise, it sounds like you were asking the Ethics Commitee to do something you weren’t willing to do yourself.
TDs and organizers are the first line of defense against sandbaggers, and if the USCF ever takes a harder line against sandbaggers IMHO it should go after the TDs and affiliates who permit it to happen in their events, too.
Yes - I said that in the original post
Tournament was over when he made the statement, throwing him out would have been a little pointless. Not rating the games didn’t occur to me at the time and would have been possible.
I filed an ethics complaint against a friend. I asked that he be given a 2000 floor to prevent any of this *&^% from happening again. I don’t tolerate this stuff in tournaments and have booted players out of events before. If I hadn’t been willing to do something I would have ignored it.
Oh yes, that is a really good solution. 
Sandbagging is hard to prove. The USCF doesn’t support a TD who reports a potential sandbagger and you suggest the USCF go after its affiliates and TD’s? I guess in all the events you have done, you can swear that no one has ever sandbagged?
I can only recall two really suspicious games in events I directed, in both cases I threw the player who I thought was sandbagging out of the tournament and didn’t submit those games for rating. Neither of the players protested their expulsion much.
I’m not saying the USCF should always go after the TD or affiliate, but I could point you to some players on MSA who have REPEATEDLY lost to players 500 or more points below them and then gone on to score much better in Grand Prix events a few months later, though apparently they’ve never won enough to earn a money floor.
I have suggested more times than I care to mention that the USCF should have stiffer policies towards such players. Defining those policies won’t be easy, but first the USCF has to have the political resolve to set stiffer penalties for violation of the rules, and had better be prepared to back the office staff when they start enforcing them. Right now I’m not sure which of those is less likely to occur.
Moreover, if we go after the players, then don’t any TDs and affiliates who allow this to happen multiple times deserve some kind of sanction as well? (I’ve had one player tell me that he will not play in small or non-cash tournaments run by a certain TD because he lets one such player give away points in those events.)
I could show you players who go to major events like World Open, lose a couple games in the 7-day and re-enter the 5-day, Lose a couple more and re-enter into the 3 day and then win big money and keep their ratings down. Sandbagging or bad luck?
If the TDs and Affiliates are the front line, then the USCF better back them first. But remember this is a game, it isn’t life and death. I wouldn’t want to be in a 1984ish chess world where every game is submitted to the Great Rybka for validation of human originality or every bad tournament gets a player submitted to the Truth squad to see if it was an off day or sandbagging.
If you can prove a TD is repeatedly technically inefficient, looks the other way and winks while someone dumps points, by all means go after him. I haven’t run into those kinds of TDs, 99% are honest and ethical and work hard. Suspecting and proving are worlds apart.
What I would like to stop is playing directors, TDs who direct and try to play at the same time in events larger than club events. We stopped it at the National level a couple years ago, stopping it at the regional level is next. I played in a large regional a couple years ago and the Chief TD insisted on playing too. He finally stopped after multiple compaints from me but just didn’t seem to get that you can’t do both objectively at the regional level. You really can’t even do it at the club level, but there might not be club events without a playing TD.
MA
I’m in complete agreement with regards to playing TDs, but as you note, when the issue has been raised in the past, the counter-argument has usually been something like “If I can’t play and direct, then there won’t be as many events held in our area.”
I don’t know the full details of the event you are citing, much less why Ethics chose not to act, but I suspect that an objective review of the games wouldn’t find conclusive evidence of sandbagging. I think there are much clearer cases out there, and yet it’s exceedingly rare for anything to be done about it.
As to the question of what’s clear evidence of sandbagging, that’s been one of the problems.
I once played in an event in Missouri. In the last round, my opponent, rated a good 300 points above me, took 45 minutes to make a move about 25 moves in and then played about the only losing move on the board.
Was that a deliberate loss or was it just chess-blindness? I’ll never know. Another equally odd-looking loss in that round, also by a much higher rated player, knocked me out of the top class prize.
Here we go again. As he has done several time before, on this forum and others, Mr. Atkins leaves out some important information about this ethics case. If it had just been “his word against mine” the decision might have turned out differently. However, there were in fact two witnesses to the defendant’s conversation with Mr. Atkins. One of them submitted a statement to the Committee which DID NOT SUPPORT Mr. Atkins version of events. That being the case, there was simply no way the Committee could find for the plaintiff.
Though he has denied it repeatedly, I think the real problem Mr. Atkins has with the decision is that he thinks that because he is a well-known TD with a national reputation, his word should have been accepted over all other evidence. Sorry but that’s not how it works.
– Hal Terrie