It ALMOST never works, Bill, you just have to be good at selecting those low rated players. (Playing floored players and avoiding younger players would help.)
A 2000 player playing a 1500 player has a .94676 chance of winning according to the expected performance formula.
Under the current formulas, the K for a 2000 player playing one game is about 27.02
So (1.0 - 0.94676) X 27.02 is a ratings gain of about 1.4385 points. These days that doesn’t get rounded up to a 2 point gain.
Could be, but I doubt it. When in doubt, innocently seek a post-mortem. Winners can always explain what they were thinking.
You’d better be playing in just matches, then. If you play in tournaments, you don’t get to select your opponents. And if you get paired against a player who is probably under-rated, and decide to forfeit without notice, how is that going to sit with the TD and the other players? The rating-gain scheme isn’t going to work forever.
Bill Smythe
No, it won’t work forever, but I can think of several people who used that strategy to make the final push to hit 2200. And in some clubs you can come pretty close to creating an event where you will only be paired against the players you want to play. Sometimes ‘invitational’ events have been put together to get a player over that last hump, and I think there have been players who did it with ladder-like events.
These are all ways of gaming the (ratings) system to one’s advantage, but they’re not cheating. And it happens in other sports. If a baseball, football or basketball team that has made the playoffs rests a few star players towards the end of the season, is that cheating? When Bear Bryant unofficially arranged his bowl opponents a week or two before the end of the season in the hopes of smoothing Alabama’s route to a national championship, was that cheating?
Matches create other challenges with using them to reach a ratings threshold, including the 400 point limit between the players and the fact that players are limited to the number of points they can earn in a single match and over time via match play.
As to players who withdraw suddenly, usually to protect their rating on a day when they’re not playing well, most TDs have seen that often enough to know who the players are who are likely to do it.
I know of one player who was convinced that his victories in the first two rounds of a four round event got him to 2200, so he withdrew. He was quite upset that when his post-event rating was computed he was still 1 or 2 points shy, and he wrote a rather bitter email to the office about it.