One day when I was playing at RedHotPawn I noticed that
Xenophobe's rating changed dramatically in a very short period of
time. The rating itself increased with only 30-50 points, but the
number of won games increased with about 30. All that happened in
the time of maybe one hour, so I thought it was something
extraordinary.
Now I have seen that Mathew has lost all of the 33 games he has
played but lost only about 50 rating points, so he must have lost all
the games to very high rated players. All the lost games seem to be
private, because I can't find them when searching under "Public
Games".
My conclusion is that Mathew lost about 30 games to Xenophobe and
did that on purpose to inflate Xenophobe's rating. Probably he
resigned all of the games after only a couple of moves. It's
interesting to see that the inflation phenomenon has reached
RedHotPawn. I have seen it at another site before.
There could be a conspiracy between Mathew and Xenophobe, but I
believe they are the very same person. I have read all their posts in
the forum and I think they write in a similar style to each other. In
one post Xenophobe talked something about that he didn't want to
play high rated players in a tournament, which I thought sounded
weird. Furthermore that post was a reply to a post by Xenophobe and
was answered by another post by Xenophobe. Three post from
Xenophobe in a row! Maybe Xenophobe thought he was logged in as
Mathew when he wrote the second post.
It's quite entertaining to see this person, pretending he is two
different players. I have had a lot of fun reading all of your posts
Xenophobe (even before the forums were closed down).
Keep up the good work Xenophobe!
You have made this site more interesting.
Happy New Year Everybody!!! :-)
I've noticed this too, late at night my time (est) there will be a lot of 2
move games between the same players. player 1 will always win and
their rating will increase as player 2 loses and their rating decreases.
I suspect that they are one and the same and the person continues
playing using player 1 with a bogus rating.
Since it is easy to create multiple players with different email
addresses, there is really nothing to stop this. I guess some people
suffer from rating envy.
dcpk
There are some things we can, and will, do, at some point. When the
site started and we had a small number of users it wasn't practical but
now there is a base of long term players we can introduce a system
that, for example, means that your initial RHP rating can only be
obtained from, say, 5 games against veteran players - and then you
get a proper starting rating rather than the blanket 1200. Until then,
the rating would be only provisional and games between two new
players wouldn't effect the rating. Or something like that.
Cheers,
Chris
I thought that I would just throw this out as food for thought. But what
if you could only gain in rating points if your opponent was rated within
200 points of your rating? This would not stop the ‘inflation
phenomenon’ but it would limit it. Someone with a 1400+ rating could
not start a new identity to use it to inflate their own rating. This would
also keep players from trying to inflate their rating by playing a lot of
games with lower rated players. For example, there is one player with
a 1400+ rating, who has bragged about their chess ability in the
forums but when you look at their “30 Recently Active Public Games”
their average opponent rating is 1186. I know that there would be
some drawbacks with this but I do think it would better the rating
system.
Just a thought
GoodKnight
Concerning ratings, I have completed only 3 games on this site so far. I have won all 3. The first two were against the same opponent. If I recall correctly, his or her rating at the time was in the 1300 range. Now it is higher. Each time I won, I picked up 30 or more rating points over my starting baseline of 1200. The third win was against someone in the 1400 range, in other words someone who was 150 or more points higher than me. I picked up only 3 rating points for the win. I thought this strange.
Yes, that was what I meant. I have been at another site with a similar
rating system. There you could see players with unbelievable ratings
of 3000-4000 points. They were called "inflaters". I don't think this
kind of behaviour is a big problem. It just makes the rating system
less reliable. Some players will look better than they really are. If
someone can become happy with a high rating, I think that's good.
/Amnell
Thanks for the insight Chris. I agree with what was said earlier that the
childish behavior of the 2% should not be allowed to tarnish such a
great chess site. I would personally vote to boot both
xenophobe/mathew and stevens off the site. Althought they would
probably just sign up under a different name they would have to start
back with a 1200 rating and might learn that this childish behavior will
not be toleranted. But however you handle it know that most everyone
on the site will support your decision.
Thanks for a great site!
GoodKnight
We finally hear from the great Amnell who gets his rating points by
selecting weak opposition and avoiding strong players. If you ever had
any courage or class, you would have excepted one of my challenges
to a game. My theory is that you are using a program to help you with
the moves. Why don't you tell everyone here at RHP what sort of
program/hardware you are using so that people who play you know
who/what it is that they are winning/losing to. I like to play my own
moves without assistance from a machine personally, but I guess that
is not for everyone. Maybe you would prefer some sort of arrangement
whereby I could spot you some material so as to enjoy a similar
advantage as you do against the others! I have avoided nobody on
this site and if there is any player over 1400 whom I have not played,
it is because they have rejected my invitation. I found your assertions
about my rating "inflation" quite entertaining! For those who are
interested, yes my rating did increase quite dramatically on a single
day during the holidays(about 30 points or so), which was due to my
claiming wins against tardy opponents. There were some that I let go
for several days and decided that as I am going back to work soon I
won't have time to continue my(at that time somewhere around 150)
games. So as crude and as callous as it seems, I thinned out my
gameoload by calling in the time-out wins and changing my settings
so as not to allow new challenges.Do you have any other interesting
conspiracy theories Amnell? Maybe the Russians are sending radio
transmissions to control the thoughts of us Westerners. Maybe
America is conducting surreptitious negotiations with the Martians!
Maybe I am one of the Martians. We need a humor forum here at
RHP. We should expect to be hearing allot from Amnell if we ever get
one. I hope everyone had a pleasant Christmas and enjoyed their
time off. All the best for the coming New Year!!
If it is true that Mr. xenophobe has challenged amnell to some chess
games I would implore amnell to stop cowering and take him up on
his challenge. I personally would love to see the results! Perhaps
amnell is afraid of Mr. xenophobe's anti-computer strategy as Mr.
xenophobe has made it clear that he is aware of amnell's computer
assistance yet will play him anyway!
For your information, Sherlock, I have not played even a single game
against "xenophane". It is true that many of my games were lost after
only a few moves as a result of timing out. I am very new not just to
Red Hot Pawn, but also to internet chess in general. I did not get to
the games on time and paid the price. This does not concern me as I
am here to learn chess, not to try to be a bigshot with a high rating
like yourself. Why don't you stop harrassing people and put your
energy to good use coming up with a better "single bullet theory"
regarding JFK!!!