I don't understand how this "rank inflation" could be a problem. If you want to play slow games, play slow games. If someone gets a high rank playing fast (or even SD), it seems like one of these things will happen:

1) They only play fast, so you will never play them. What's the problem?
2) They switch to slow, but b/c of the inflated rank, they lose most of their games. What's the problem?

Emeralddemon, concerning (2):


Do you disagree with this?

My impression is that some of you are taking rank way too serious. I use it for 1) finding opponents of my strength and 2) tracking my progress. And that works even if a few idiots abuse. And in my experience the reverse abuse(aka Sandbagging) is more common, but still not a big problem.

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Sanity is for the weak.

That may be how you feel about rank, but, most notably, KGS TOS disagree with you


If a user is found to be sandbagging, they are deranked so as to not pollute the rating system. I don't care about how high my rank is, but I like to know that whatever my rank it actually means something. I feel that KGS does this very well.

There is at least 1 player on L19 who knows how to make this work, and I'll leave it to him to speak up if he is so inclined. You could ask him at what time limit this would not be possible. But I think there is more than just the time limit involved, though. My understanding is that the strategy also includes giving handicaps near the maximum rated allowance, which is near 5-6 stones (I forget which.)

So the more recent postings seem to suggest that real concern is about a pathologically inflated rating, not the normal blitz / slow skew. First of all, it has to be said that the victims are accepting these games, so they are contributing to the phenomenon. KGS is into stigmatizing players with the ?, ~ and all that. Maybe another character could be added for players with a large ratio of time wins. Would that help or hurt?

OT: I've recently played at 6 stones rated, so I know that is allowed.

The "?" designates uncertainty in rank, and "~" designates a certain type of player. Neither of these statuses impact the rating system. Also, time wins aren't an issue. You could legitimately lose on time (I have lost by time in 25m games with 30s byo-yomi). Regardless, an "SD blitzer" mark will only stigmatize a user, not prevent them from impacting the integrity of your KGS rank. So, I don't think this is a valid solution (opinion, of course).

The original claim, as I understood it, was that in sudden death games (i.e., games with one or no byo-yomi period) an extremely high percentage of matches end in +T, and that (unlike games, even blitz games, with many byo-yomi periods) there was no strong connection between who is winning these SD games and who loses on time.

I think this argument is broadly correct, and that it entails that you could make a small improvement to the ranking system by requiring 5 byo-yomi periods for a ranked game.

This would slightly inconvenience people who like to play SD, but no more than we already inconvenience people who like to play 9x9.

Everything about blitz is a bit of a distraction. The same problem could come up in 1:00 + 0:30x1.

Let's say Alice starts a new account and plays some sudden death games misrepresenting her rank, maybe creates a few accounts before she gets lucky, coming away with a 5d account when she is really only 1d (is a 4 rank jump realistic?)

Now she switches and plays some slow games with the 5d account, losing most of them. Her rank starts dropping, maybe hitting 4d . The SD "trick" only works if you can get people to play you at the wrong handicap. I think this is a bit easier if you're a new [?] account claiming to be a particular rank, but if you're an established rank, are many people going to play you at the wrong handicap? She has to find more 1d and 2d players who are willing to play her at 5-6 stones. And even then, if SD is a coinflip it's only a 50/50 chance the rank will go up. Eventually you'll get a few blitz losses in addition to your slow losses, and the rank will slip further down. It seems to me that at best you can prolong the decline, if you have a continual stream of players willing to play you at the wrong rank.

Of course Alice could always throw away the account and start over again [a bit like start scumming in nethack]. But I'm not convinced you could maintain an account this way. If someone has an example it'd be easy enough to confirm through the archives.

Well, once you achieve an elevated rank the "higher" handicap becomes the appropriate handicap. ^^ Also, I don't think it's quite 50/50 if you are using a certain strategy, e.g. start a complicated fight. If your objective is just to not lose on time, but your opponent is playing to win it is likely he will have a harder time with the severe time restriction than you.

I've never done this, so it would be nice to have a testimonial from someone who has. They could answer these questions easier than I could (and possibly shut me up!).

I haven't been fully following this thread because there are a few things I don't understand...

what difference does it make if your win/loss is on time or not -- isn't a loss still just a loss?

and for rating or not rating blitz games separately from non-blitz games, I haven't yet seen a consensus for the definition of blitz vs non-blitz

About notation of multiple ranks (blitz/slow or whatever) -

Only one rank should be displayed behind your name to avoid cluttering, it would be the rank you achieved in 'slow' time system.
If you haven't played any slow games (or maybe also if your rank still contains a question mark) then your next faster system's rank is shown with, say, a '*' in front of it to indicate that it's a non-slow rank.
All of your ranks would be visible in your personal info, since there's lots of space in there.
When you join/open a game offer the rank that fits the time setting would be displayed in it. Possibly with a '*' if it's a non-slow rank just for easy recognition. (If you don't have the according rank yet but have another non "?" rank then the slowest non "?" rank would be taken instead, duh.)

So you'd see..
Rapyuta [*8d]
Artem92 [7d]

rapyuta[8d]
artem[7d]

Really? I loved watching Rapyuta play. But, were there ever any slow games?

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

Colorblind people are common.

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Occupy Babel!

But this is not a vital enough distinction to pose a significant hurdle on colourblind people. Moreover it's easy enough to make it optional (colourblind mode adds characters instead of colour).

In any case there are plenty of perfectly good methods to deal with the problem of how to display rank in a multi-rank system, so that should not be a show stopper.

Ok, so i will explain it to you, gently.

1. First of all - what is 'real 2d'? There is no such animal. Ranking is there for a purpose - to match people with approx the same strength and to set up proper handi. It makes sense to call yourself a 2d (real or not) only in the context of 'I am of about the same strength as everybody else with the same label in my group.' If you are saying that 'I am a real 2d but not really of the same level in a certain game that this other guy who is also a real 2d' then you can probably see that something is broken.

2. It is all fine and well if you only play blitz and are 2d except in two cases:
- when you decide one day that you want to try a longer time-control game. Your opponent will expect to get a good game from a 'real 2d' and he will get bitterly disappointed. or not.
- when some other slow-game-2d decides to try a fast game and you will be disappointed at his level. or maybe he is a 'real 5d' who seldom plays blitz and you will get clobbered? might not be a problem to you, but still - the rating system will fail to match your respective levels.

3. If we agree that the various game speeds require slightly different skills, in other words - there are people playing well at some setting and not others, the whole system loses precision since all such people are never really ranked properly (say: they are always slightly under-ranked in slow games and slightly over-ranked in fast games.)

And so on... there are other reasons but I assume you can see where I am going with that.

The bottom line is that, under the assumption again that fast and slow games require slightly different skills, your reasoning only makes sense if you think of two closed and distinct populations: slow players and bitz players. Once we assume that most people play all kinds of games, not differentiating makes the rank less meaningful.

Now - if this is really a problem or not, I am not really sure. It seems the world is rolling around nicely as is...

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

The thing is, even if everybody DOES play an even mix, which I don't believe is true
(but for the sake of argument.)

Blitz, lightning, and slow games are different skills, and I believe it's of personal value to track those rankings.

In chess, when I used to play online, My best rating was my blitz, with a somewhat weaker lightning and standard rating. As I studied, certain ranks might go up or down. (For example, when I picked up the King's Gambit for a while, my blitz and lightning went up, my standard went down)

It was not unusual to see "Blitz" masters, who might only be Experts at slow or lightning games.

This helped because, for their blitz games, they were given an opponent who could match that level of quick reading, but they had things to work on in slower games and so were not automatically placed into a player pool way out of their depth.


Imagine the following person in go:

Strong fighter, quick reader, weak opening, weak endgame. Imagine also that this person plays equal numbers of blitz, standard and lightning.

I would imagine this to be a conceivable set of ratings for them:

Lightning: 5d
Blitz: 5d
Standard: 3d

Now, under the current system, that person might end up as a strong 4d. But it's unfair to them and other players to treat them like this:

If they play a standard game they are at a stone disadvantage, and if they play lightning or blitz they have a stone advantage. Hence they will deflate the rankings in Lightning and Blitz and inflate players playing standard games.

EDIT: Consider that they won't be able to move up to 5d easily:

if they move up, they will win 50% of their lightning and blitz and only maybe 15% of their standard, this will result in them having a 38% win rate at 5d, as opposed to a 55% win rate at 4d. They will never equalize.

Just let them have multiple ratings, and let them display whichever one they prefer.
if color codes are not an option, how about a prefix?

Sandalphon[b-4d]
Bantari[s-4d]
rapyuta[l-8d]

or they can just display the weighted average of their games, which would appear the old way:

Sandalphon[4d]

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

As much as I think this sounds cool in theory, I worry that with the current rate of decay to getting a ? through not playing enough, there are a lot of players who wouldn't be able to keep all of their ratings out of ? range. Also, by dividing the data set into 3 categories, it's possible the rating sytem would not have enough data to maintain its current accuracy.

Then there are these KGS tournaments that require one to enter with one's strongest account. I assume that would be the the standard one in this scheme. But maybe not everyone who wants to play is maintaining a standard one?

Despite these drawbacks, any scheme that makes it easier to distinguish the primarily blitz accounts/ratings from others has some value.