Player X has 2000 Rating points.
He starts playing against 1500 Rated players and always beat them and get his rating high.
Is this legal according to the Terms of Service ?
It is definitely not pretending to be rated different than you are.
But is it legal ?
Yes, why not ?
Also, it's not easy at you make it sound. At some point, X's rating will barely move anymore (beating 1500s you'll only gain 1 point at a time, if that, when in the 2200s). And his rating deviation will increase, eventually resulting in a "?" rating. To lose the ?, X should play against a player rated more like him.
And in theory, the 1500s have a (small) chance of beating X, with one loss ruining the gains of 20 wins, which supposedly evens out.
> And in theory, the 1500s have a (small) chance of beating X, with one loss ruining the gains of 20 wins, which supposedly evens out.
I'd like to see someone run the numbers on
database.lichess.org and see if they match up with
http://www.glicko.net/glicko/glicko2.pdf . Doing so is prohibilively expensive in terms of effort but would serve to verify player ratings.
They called this eeking on FICS. Pretty popular little hobby. Led to some players having ridiculously high ratings despite being only "pretty good." Theoretically the math works out that they should slip up once in awhile against players that they can gain rating points against. In practice, it never happens.
This is one of the reasons that any rating pool that allows players to choose their opponents is far less accurate than automatically pairing pools. A major reason why lichess needs actual auto-pairing pools with their own ratings and not just shortcut buttons (these are not auto-pairing pools as much as some people would like you to think they are).
As Phillip pointed out, choosing your opponents carefully is vital in this exercise.
On FICS, these players exploited a particular flaw: They could choose opponents who were unrated in blitz (and treated as if they were 1720 by the rating system) but had demonstrated a level much lower than 1720 in their other (usually slower) games. It's easy to gain a lot of points when you are playing 1000 level players rated 1720 :)
In FIDE & USCF rated play, actually, the opposite result has occurred: upsets are more frequent than predicted by the formula, and lower rated players gained points from higher rated players on the whole. Steps have been taken to try to mitigate this effect (e.g. USCF bonus system, FIDE 400 point rule & higher K).
If a 2000 player takes on all 1500s without any opponent screening, I suspect they will be upset slightly more often than predicted and actually lose points rather than gain in the long run. It'd be interesting to see the lichess data though and see whether or not my prediction is right.
That's why on chesscube there were 2 ratings - normal one and tournament one. In tournaments it would not happen. I think it is definitely legal, but not very wise. Because why would you enjoy high rating if you can't play players on your rating level or stronger and feel that if you meet someone higher rated even a bit than you, your dead. Besides you can slip against even the weakest onces once for a while or your comp freeze so you will lose so many points. Why is it legal? Becouse lichess let you choose rating range while creating a game. But you will surely not learn anything nor improve much as well. That is your personal price for that.
In practice, the ELO rating system just isn't accurate for measuring the winning chances of one player against a much better one.
I play exclusively in tournaments, so i get paired with a lot of lower-rated players.
In the last 3 weeks, i have 37 wins, 1 loss, and 2 draws against 1500-1600 rated competition.
I have gained 16 rating points overall from these games.
There is another boosting effect; keeping par with equals or scraping points from better players requires very different kind of skills than beating far lower rated opponents. Some concentrate on a small (and mostly unimportant) portion of chess skills by choosing weaker opponents only. Their ratings don't reflect their true chess skills.
Playing low rated players is NOT considered as boosting since there is an option that lower rated player may beat high-rated player.This discussion can be closed.
