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Sandbagging
Path: BadHabits   · Prev: Escaping   · Next: RequestingBlackAgainstAWeakerOpponent
    Keywords: Tournament

Sandbagging on a Go server (or in an over-the-board tournament) is deliberately setting your rank lower than it should be.

Jan De Wit wonders: what's the point of doing this? Surely it is not to increase your rating by winning lots of games; just setting your rating higher should do the trick. And if it is done only to avoid defeat, why not play at the Hippo's Room at Yahoo or some other low level server?

It makes me think of the motto of War Games with a twist: the only way not to lose is not to play at all :-)

HolIgor: Players sandbag for different reasons. Some like to win, some think that they are teaching and in some cases a pool of players that play mainly each other is formed and thus nobody makes progress. On IGS the number of double-digit kyu players is comparatively small. The median of the strength distribution is 2k. This means that half of the total pool of the players is at least that strong.

It is very naive to think that if you set your rank as 30k you'll quickly get to your true strength. It takes a lot of games (20 or more) to progress one level. You can estimate how many games a person has to play to progress by 10 levels. And if there are several runners like this they will make it difficult for each other. Still I believe that by the mere number of games people play on the Go servers their ratings are more accurate than in the real life, where you play two games per week in a club and sometimes in the tournaments. Mainly your rating is estimated by stronger players.

Grauniad: Relative ratings between players on Go servers may be more accurate than in real life for the reason you give, but there is a problem with the absolute rating because of the difficulty comparing with real life, as noted elsewhere on SL. (What am I saying: That the Internet is not real life? :-)



Path: BadHabits   · Prev: Escaping   · Next: RequestingBlackAgainstAWeakerOpponent
This is a copy of the living page "Sandbagging" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2003 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.