I know that you all hear cheating claims periodically, i would not write if there was not rock solid evidence. There is a player named Ogunmefun who is master strength whom attempted to sandbag to the U2000 at the HB tourney but was stopped. He nearly won the under 2200 section anyway(tied for 4th 6.5 points). He came in 2nd at the 04 under 2000. 3rd at the 04 world open. 5pts in the u2200 at the world open 05.
Now the evidence. The tourney immediately prior to the current North American Open which is going on now(where he is leading the field). He loses at the prior tourney to a 715 rated player, next loses to a 695 rated player, draws a 1448, draws an 1114 and then loses to a 1222 for a performance of 798! after 5 games to lose 60 points and drop in to the A section and go to the North American Open and rob. Please do not promote this behavior
Something of this nature first needs to be pointed out the Chief TD of the TOurnament in which he is participating now. Then it can be coordinated for the TD or someone else to file a complaint to the ethics committee something like this they may ask the Exec Board to floor him. Even in G/30 THere is no way a 2000 should draw or lose to U1000 players. Only other explanation is the TD got the wrong ID number. Report it to the TD in the tournament and then let them investigate. If the TD “suspects” he can assign him a higher rating and bump him up.
For what it is worth, the validation process DID flag this result as being unusually poor (defined as having a simple ‘performance rating’ more than 600 points below an established rating), and the TD overrode the warning. (The event was submitted online.)
That check was intended to help prevent incorrect IDs. How should we differentiate between someone who is just having a bad day and something more suspicious, like this event?
What do the TDs here think the USCF should do about situations like this? (I can think of a player from Utah who has several equally suspicious results, I’m sure I could find others.)
Should we refuse to rate such an event without an explanation from the TD as to why he permitted this behavior?
For events that have already been rated, should the player’s result or possibly the entire section be vacated?
Should the player be assigned a floor?
Should the player be warned or suspended?
Should the TD and/or affiliate who permitted such an event to be rated be warned or suspended?
I agree – this looks really bad. For his “efforts,” it appears to me that he “won” approximately $740 at the North American Open, as he finished in an 8-way tie for third. Hopefully, someone alerted the CCA and Chief TD at the tournament and, again hopefully, those winnings were withheld pending some kind of investigation. Yes, at the very least he should be given a 2000 floor and some kind of suspension. There is no way a 2000 rated player should have had the kind of performance he had at the previous tournament – not even blindfolded! Too bad someone allowed that…
The only excuses I could see could be a time control problem, but a G/30 tournament? I’m only rated around 1700 and I’ve only lost or drawn 3 or 4 games for a person rated 400 points below me in about 250 games. Having that happen in one tournament is blatent sandbagging.
Perhaps the TD allowed this? The TD who ran this tournament is a National TD. If he were a club TD or local, I’d be even more suspicious.
I would think USCF would call the TD and talk to them. Judging by the history of this player, he’s always played strong, and in big tournaments.
More than likely the TD has an explination for it, it had to have been a red flag at the event and there was a discussion about it.
It would be interesting to hear what the reason was though, if it were a sandbag, i would floor this player at 2000.
No, I don’t buy the “time problem” reason. During the same weekend, he played in the US G/15 and his Quick Rating went up 83 points! Of course, I am sure the player knew that QR was meaningless for future tournaments, so he played his normal game. This appears to me to be very blatant, indeed.
The “flag,” I am sure was by-passed because the TD was sure he was the right player indeed, and just wanted to tournament rated. Perhaps no thought was given to the sandbagging aspect – the only thought was probably “Is he the right player?”. Besides, the so-called red flags show up only after the fact – when the tournament is submitted for rating.
At the very least, I would suggest erasing his results for that tournament before the next re-rate. Heck, the 7 yr old rated 715 who he played in round three had no other wins! Lost all five of his other games. That, coupled with the results of all his other games should tell you something. Unless “we” take this type of cheating more seriously, it will continue or get worse.
Ironically, I just realized, while going through my son’s games in our Chess Base file, that this guy played him during the first round of the HB Global. My 16-yr old kid is a pretty good player, 3-time National Grades Champion (8th, 9th, and 11th grades), and he held my son to a hard-fought draw. At the time, my kid was rated 2077. Since becoming an Expert, my son has played in 61 tournaments and, along the way, has played his fair share of low-rated players. His worst loss since becoming an Expert was to a player rated 1521 (1658 post-tny). Of course, he has also had his fair share of wins and draws against masters, FMs, and IMs. Now he is rated 2161. The point is that this guy was just as good as him and at the HB actually had better results!
In fairness to the TD where the sandbagging took place, most of us are alerted about cheating by the opponents themselves. I have seen cheating and, also ironically, I was one of the TDs at the HB Global. Obviously, those players rated U1000 at the tournament in question were not about to complain… I suppose in a relatively small tournament like that one, it should have been noticed. Who knows… And, if it is noticed, how many TDs are willing to take drastic action. We should…
So far nobody has suggested what the USCF should do about situations like this, either when they are submitted for rating or afterwards.
If we apply a floor retroactively to a player such as this, that might increase the post-event ratings of some of the opponents who ‘defeated’ that player. I’m not sure that’s a desirable side effect.
Another possibility is substituting a dummy ID and treating that player as if he was unrated. That would likely result in lowering the post-event ratings of those opponents. (I’ll have to think about a way to do that while still showing the ID of the player for crosstable historical purposes.)
The ratings chair (Mark Glickman) has offered to come up with some statistical measures to look for suspicious results, though the simple ‘performance rating’ test in the validation routines caught this one.
However, the question still remains what measures should the USCF take, and against whom?
Should the TD be held responsible for submitting events that raise red flags? After all, the TD has ‘signed off’ on the event being in compliance with all USCF tournament rules, including those that cover blatant attempts to manipulate someone’s rating.
Before answering that, consider what we might find if we reviewed YOUR events.
BTW, I did a quick check and I found nearly 800 players with an established regular rating over 1500 who have lost 50 or more points in an event rated since May of 2004. How many of those are legitimate bad results?
Incidentally, the player in question here has had just one such event, there are nearly 100 players who have had 2 or more events in the last 18 months in which they lost 50 or more points.
I think I know of whom you speak. Around here they call him a “grandbagger.” At least I think he got an 1800 floor after HB.
I would really like to see a floor instituted for people like this, but I guess the hard part is coming up with an objective standard. Maybe it would be enough to have a committee made up of National TDs that make these decisions. Then I think there should be a way for TDs to report overt sandbagging behavior to be reviewed.
Yes, the Utah player I had in mind cashed in big at HB. I gave some thought to recommending to the ED that he be assigned a floor of 1999, in part because that would stick out like a sore thumb now that we show floors on MSA, and in part because I didn’t like the idea of making the guy a ‘life expert’ administratively.
I would say definately floor this guy. But isn’t there something programattically you can do to look up in the past 3 years or so some big losses?
You could probably limit it to one tournament, maybe print out a report and instutute the same rule.
It might take a while to run such a report, but with the data I downloaded, it’s pretty easy to set up a rating difference on wins and just do a search on negative numbers. Wins over 800 points shouldn’t be that large? Of course, I’ve only looked at a small amount of data
It does look like sandbagging. There are two major problems with this theory.
The player is from Texas, in a tournament in Illinois. If your going to sandbag … you can go to any tournament to sandbag. Why spend the money in airfare, or the price of gas to drive, from Texas to Illinois? Why spend for hotel and the cost of being out of state … just to sandbag? The player did not play all the games. He did get a first round bye, than withdrew for the last and final game. If you are going to sandbag, why withdraw?
Who knows, the player could be a drunk … lets see how good you play when you blow a 0.15. He could be sandbagging … or he just spent way to much time at the bar.
The problem with these suggestions is that you cannot make a rule forbidding someone from playing badly, any more than you can bar someone from playing too well (another popular complaint when another player in a class seciton scores too many points). I agree that this example is very suspicious, and he should probably be given a 2000 floor. (I suspect Bill Goichberg will do that anyway.) What I don’t believe is that there is any “programmatic” way to deal with this kind of situation. There is no substitute for human judgment.
Programmatically, you might get a good view of the history of any player, and it wouldn’t take someone to post on a forum to point out something like this. You could trap similiar situations, but yea, you couldn’t get them all.
I guess if the USCF reviews our own events, they could find discrepancies also, but, if that is the case, so be it – we should all be held accountable. We all make mistakes, but, hopefully, in the process, we are all trying to do the best job we can. Things do slip through the cracks, as they say, and we should be able to explain that. No system is perfect, and, I guess, we just have to try to minimize the errors and catch what appears to be blatant attempts to cheat, as it appears to be the case in this one. We can’t catch them all, but by trying and taking some sort of action, we could discourage some of the cheating.
Obviously, there is no easy answer but, again, we owe it to the other players to do our best…
No quite my point. You could write a routine to flag cases “similar” to this. What you could not do is write a program to decide what to do about them. To take an extreme example, suppose closer investigation showed that the player was paralyzed drunk during the tournament. Should he still get a floor (which would, in effect, protect him from the effects of his idiotic behavior)?
We had a player here (he died around a year ago) who had severe cerebral palsy. While he was never a strong player (I think he peaked in the low 1100’s), he often had to take heavy doses of tranquilizers to control his muscle spasms, and those probably had a 300-400 point impact on his playing strength from game to game.
However, when he ‘defeated’ a local A player who had a reputation for being master strength though as far as I can tell he never had a published rating over about 2050, I refused to rate that game and I kicked the higher rated player out of that event.
At least I think he got an 1800 floor after HB.
It is almost like a scarlet letter thing. I think you would get Christmas cards for life from the Utah chess community.