#9 hmmm yes I must say I have found it a bit suspicious when I come across that!
I have had people play ok but making mistakes then all of a sudden all perfect moves to the end....
Here's another factor,
When my rating in correspondence was around 1500 I would get auto paired into a LOT of ganes with people provisionally ranked 1500? , presumably brand new to the site.
A lot of those players dont finish and let their games time out, so I am pronounced the winner. That artificially inflated my correspondence rating to like 1550 when it was really more like 1450.
I just havent been able to concentrate recently so my rating dropped down to around 1400 and if I set my game parameters to exclude those rated above 1450 I avoid the 1500? brand new players so my ranking us more stable and realistic with less timeout wins.
It doesnt fully explain the disparity in MY rankings, but I think it could be a factor if someone was about 1500 or 1600 correspondence yet say 1300 or 1400 in faster times.
@KateKidna I was still getting paired with new players all the way up to almost 1800 (provisional) and a lot of the wins I have are against people who were new to chess or treated correspondence like a blitz game. The wins really inflated my rating and I assume now that I'm no longer provisionally rated my pairings will get much harder. Time to kiss that 1800+ rating goodbye.
Realistically my correspondence rating is probably 150 points better than my classical rating. So I expect to drop back to about 1650. That's gonna hurt. :(