Swooping

    Keywords: Online Go

Swooping is a term I like to use to describe the techinque some online players use to get even games against stronger players. A extreme form of this technique is possible on KGS, where one can create an account above one's strength, then play rated games (often blitz) until one wins by chance, thereby solidifying the rating. After this, the idea is to play free games at that rating, which will usually be significantly above one's real strength.

Swoopers on KGS can be detected by rapidly decreasing rank graphs which stabilize at a point where mostly free games are in the record.

On other servers, it's harder to get free games, and on wBaduk, it's not possible to create a new account above 1k, so swooping is less pronounced---one just loses a lot of games. A funny thing happens, though: often a swooper's declining rating even playing rated games will stabilize at a level higher than that of previous accounts. On servers which promote slowly, this can be a useful technique, especially for double-digit kyus who may be improving quickly offline.

Swooping is a kind of reverse sandbagging, and is a bit unfair to one's opponents. In my opinion, is understandable why players do it, however.

-Calvin


This is a copy of the living page "Swooping" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2011 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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