Yes, let’s legalize everything that isn’t enforceable as a crime. Profound, indeed! Do I hear support for bestiality?
The organizer reported the incident. Several players commented about it online. A person closely affiliated with the organizer wrote the story in Chess Life, including the allegedly thrown game and some strong words about what happened. The organizer certainly did not “pretend he didn’t notice the cheating.”
However, the organizer paid the prize money to the player rather than risk a lawsuit. He chose to protect himself economically. Can you blame him?
Michael Aigner
Don’t flatter youself, you haven’t achieved sarcasm, which would imply wit, you’ve only achieved indignation and intolerance for an opinion that differs from your own, very conventional view.
I never believed C players, or even B and A players should pay big entry fees to compete for big money; they’re amateurs, if they don’t accept that fact then they’re dillusional.
As for a solution. Of course there’s a very good one. Become a good player yourself so the sandbaggers won’t be able to bother you. Anyhow, I suspect this issue will continue going in circles for many years to come.
John, it doesn’t appear you’ve played in a rated event since 1991. You also don’t appear to have directed any events in that time frame.
Why are sandbagging or high prize funds for class players issues that concern you?
When is the title system going to take effect? That would solve at least some of the issues. Rating floors wouldn’t be needed either. Tournament sections could be based on titles and not on ratings. No point for a sandbagger to lower their rating by losing because they can’t lose their title. Placing in tournaments with sufficient monetary gain or performance would earn a title even if the rating were not up to the level were it would automatically earn a title.
The rating would go back to just being used to gauge strength or results expectation. Imagine that.
Perhaps not the Organizer - but certainly the Chief TD.
If you “report” something, but take no action yourself, about the best you can expect is that the Office will add your report to a file - and will take action when the file becomes big enough. In a sense, by doing this the Office is “backing you up” by confirming the action that you took. The TD chose to rate the games and signed a statement that all games were played by the book; the organizer (perhaps depending on the TD) paid the prize money. Why do you expect anyone else to pay attention when you “report” your suspicions, without proof? The only thing I can think of is that you believe that in a case of your word against theirs, everyone should instantly accept your word (and act on it, even when you chose not to).
Yes, USCF should “back up” organizers and TDs - but they should also “back up” players. Players are innocent until proven guilty - not innocent until accused.
(Took the liberty of editing out my dramaqueen exiting remark; needed to go out and cool off a bit [it’s around 95 out there but I still cooled down! 
])
Nolan,
I’ve pretty much had a twenty year period of forced inactivity due in large part to the location I was living at, there were no local chess clubs and my wife and I couldn’t put out much money for things like travelling to tournaments. After my wife’s death I moved to Central Florida, where I did a lot of playing in the late 70s, and I’m planning to become active again as soon I’ve scraped some of the rust off my game.
On the one hand sandbaggers affect all players and I think everyone who participates in tournaments should be concerned about them. On the other hand I never found them to be a big problem in my own play; more often than not they’d offer me a draw and, depending on circumstances, I’d accept. I don’t condone their activity. In fact, I wish no one was doing it, but that’s wishful thinking. We also touched on the issue of game fixing, where players agree in advance on the outcome to get a better slice of prize money – I’ve seen that extend over two or three boards in the last round of a Swiss tournament. In my own case I’ve refused to get into that but, to be honest if I was playing someone near my own rating who I knew to be a sandbagger and much stronger than myself I generally accepted a draw if offered – unless of course I had a clearly won game, naturally.
Game fixing would be hard enough to get under control in its own right and it’s so close to sandbagging that I suppose the two would need to be dealt with as almost the same issue.
The only things I’m trying to say in this thread are b Should amateur players be playing for professional type cash prizes?[/b] It seems a bit contradictory to me, if one is an amateur doesn’t that mean the person is not doing this for big money? Since it’s the big purse that creates sandbaggers why not cut to the cause of the problem and put amateur competition back to where the competition is mainly for trophies? I didn’t see big prizes for below expert players till the post Fischer period, and a lot of us said from the start that the whole system broke when amateurs were suddenly playing for big cash prizes. The rest I’ve already said, but I’ll repeat it again. If expert and higher can be considered professional wouldn’t it make sense to concentrate most of the cash prizes in that area, and distribute it by place rather than by class? I’d much rather see masters winning money prizes for finishing somewhere in the top 20 than to see a D-C-B-A winning what would have been that prize for having finishing top in that particular class.
For the record I’ve never been a master so I’m not giving these views from an elitist position, I’m giving them because I think sandbagging is an easily avoidable problem if the idea of playing in tournaments was to get as good as possible first, and worrying about prize money later.
– The other thing is players who become obsessed with sandbaggers playing against them help create their own defeat. I used to tell the ones I knew that if they were any good they wouldn’t be holding their own rating down, they must be afraid of players anywhere near their own true strength, and that happens to be true.
Sorry if my views on this rankle some people. Admittedly I’m not looking at this from a tournament organizer’s view. It might be a necessity to have a lot of low rated players entering so their fees will make the big prizes in the open section possible. If so I still think there’s a viable way around that. Whatever happened to playing just because we happen to enjoy playing instead of entering as a class player looking for some lucrative prize? I know when I was a C and a B player I didn’t mind that the big money wouldn’t be in my category. The act of playing in the tournament was its own reward, if I did well against other Cs and Bs a trophy and small cash prize was more than enough reward. I don’t remember sandbaggers being a real problem back then.
Same person, I believe. Pretty well known guy too. I think he serves on the Executive Board. (Not Goichberg)
The case I refer to had little to do with the Office and more to do with an actual discussion by the Executive Board itself. I don’t necessarily disagree with the decision that the Board reached, considering that a lawsuit was threatened.
However, I disagree with those in this thread who expect the organizer who makes minimum wage or even less to be first in line to put his rear end out to be sued (even if, a year later, he wins the case). Even if you have a mountain of evidence that you can present in court, the cost to do so is far greater than the resources of most organizers. Certainly it is cheaper to pay a $2000 prize than to do the ‘right’ thing and defend a $20,000 lawsuit.
Michael Aigner
I tend to agree with Mr. Aigner. It seems the best way to handle it is to collect reports of suspicious activity over several events and then implement sanctions separate from any specific tournament. That way if the sanction is a suspension from playing for X number of years, filing a court case becomes pretty pointless.
Maybe require that if found guilty they wear a big scarlet “S” t-shirt. 
Reducing prize money might reduce sandbagging in the lower sections but I’m not sure. Sandbaggers tend to be more about beating the system than what they win. Winning a $1,000 section prize isn’t going to earn you a living.
Good point. That’s always baffled me too, even the best of them can’t be making much money at it.
You contradict yourself. Mr. Aigner is complaining that the USCF did not take overt action based on ONE report.
Even the $14,000 sole first place prizes in the U/2000 and U/1800 sections of the World Open aren’t exactly something one can plan to live on.
The thing is, what you’ve suggested has been tried, and found to lose money by most of the big organizers. In many tournaments, the lower sections subsidize the higher ones. If you can’t entice players into the lower sections with what they consider decent prizes, you’ll have a hard time paying the prizes to the masters. As an example, I’ve run a few “$1 Opens”, with a donated $100 prize fund, and (usually) a free site. These have a $1 entry fee, and small prizes. They haven’t been very popular. I can’t imagine running an event with, say, $100 entry fee for the open section and a $1000-$500-$300 prize fund coupled with a $15 U2000 section that just awarded trophies as class prizes. I think it would turn off the masters being expected to pay so much more than the class players, and would turn off the class players by not giving them anything substantial to play for.
Don’t take my word for it, though, try it yourself and let us know how it goes. I see this forum as an incubator for new ideas, and this one might just work.
Alex Relyea
Thank you, Alex, I’ll definitely take your word for it. I’ve been turning a lot of this over between visits and, as I said in another post – exactly what you’ve said here – that the entry fees from lower sections make the big cash prizes possible for the open sections. So, unless tournaments are generously funded outside of entry fees, the whole thing would become untenable.
Also, after considering what I said, the tournaments I was referring to were before large prizes in class sections became commonplace. Those of us who were active in the sixties and early seventies know it was a completely different environment, in other words, prior to Fischer’s forcing the idea that there should be money in American chess.
It’s understandable that all players would like to compete for real prize money. There’s nothing wrong with that except it makes sandbaggers inevitable and the rules against them will always be difficult to enforce – even grandmasters go on record as playing some really terrible games, so officially labelling some lesser player a sandbagger on the basis of lost games will always be a touchy business. Still, real amateur players do win good prize money with or without sandbaggers playing against them.
I admire your running tournaments that would discourage these things and only wish, as you do, that the results were better.
Here’s joining you in the hope that this incubator thread comes up with some good ideas. 
His initial point was that no immediate action was taken. Your reply was that the tournament/TD should handle it. He correctly pointed out that there are probably legal problems with doing that. However, there are probably legal problems with the USCF taking immediate action based on one tournament as well. Therefore, I tend to agree with Mr. Aigner that the USCF needs to do something and it shouldn’t be left at the TD level. I think it needs to be more along the lines that the USCF has a process to report suspicious activity and take action.
Say more, please. What do you do on the first instance of what looks like sandbagging? Do you refuse to rate the game? If so, what do you tell the (presumably honest) sandbag-ee? Picture some eight-year-old David who thinks he’s just knocked off Goliath. And then there are David’s parents. Mind you, I’m not saying it can’t be done, I just wonder HOW you do it?
(Side note to the fellow who said he doesn’t understand why people sandbag for comparatively small prizes: sandbagging is a game unto itself, and a challenging and complicated enough one that some chess players will gravitate toward it.)
It’s next to impossible for a TD to detect sandbagging from a single game, and even harder for the USCF office, because the office wasn’t at the tournament.
Bingo!
You can, of course, report your suspicions. One thing the Office can do is maintain files on suspicious behavior that might span many different events (and many different Organizers). Only, please don’t report a first offense and then moan and groan and posture on the Forums when the Office “doesn’t back me up!”
Ummm. Say more please.
As a director, what do you do, and at what point do you do it?
I’m reading plenty of accounts of sandbagging here, and several accounts of reporting suspected sandbagging to USCF or to CCA, but not so much about directors who have refused to rate sandbagged games, or of how else they might sanction a sandbagger; and how they work through that with all the players who are affected.
Here’s a wild and (let’s hope) unlikely hypothetical. Player dumps his first game. You’ve said you can’t do much about that. Fair enough. Then he dumps the second game. Now maybe it’s time to do something. Do you refuse to rate game 2? Or do you then go back and also refuse to rate game one? If so, now three players have been affected. What do you do about the pairings and standings in the tournament?
What about looking at the issue probabilistically? According to the Elo rating system, isn’t a 400-point difference supposed to mean a 95 percent chance of victory, and an 800-point difference a 100 percent chance? So if you see a player boot two games in a row to players rated 400 or more points lower, or even one game to a player rated 800 points lower, and he doesn’t seem drunk or depressed, it makes good sense to keep a weather eye on his next game for further suspicious underperformance, doesn’t it?