Anyone else feel this way? I play as 1k on kgs and have some good wins and some devastating losses. But i'm 1d on tygem and if i win 3 more games i go up to 2d. So i'm wondering if this is a common experience, or maybe i match up well with them, or anything like that.

I'm pretty sure that the kyu ranks on Tygem are stronger than those on kgs (and have many more sandbaggers), but the dan ranks are weaker.

Congratulations on making 2 dan!

i didn't expect it to be this bad, i guess... i'm wondering if i should make a new account to play all of the sandbaggers

Because the strong dan players are sandbagging the other strong dan players are making kyu account to play against them. That means there are less strong dan players and more are going to make kyu account to play sandbaggers. Anybody see a pattern?

Maybe we should just reverse the ranking system. Beginners get 9d and Professionals get 30k.

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While I was teaching the game to a friend of mine, my mother from the other room:
"Cutting? Killing? Poking out eyes? What the hell are you playing?"

I quite enjoy Tygem. I was well and truly sandbagged - I started playing a 17k some weeks back. Alhtough I'm struggling with many aspects of the game.. it became clear that my opponent was a little stronger than me... once he'd destroyed me I pressed him on his true rank. By logging in and out under a different account he showed himself to be 9 Dan.

His name was Kyun something but anyway he then spent a couple of hours going through various aspects of my game.. really polite and helpful guy..

Good players seem to play at at low levels on Tygem and I got the impression he was fishing for taking on students... If you want an even game you need to check the game record of players.. Some strong players record multiple losses.. they get into a winning position and then resign...

I can't say I object.. it was very interesting couple of hours.. the extent to which he knew extended patterns was amazing... he frequently showed me examples of when a stones position can have a dramatically different outcome to a stone placed next to it... he knew these patterns inside out.. This wasn't just obvious contact playes but plays that were "distant" from other stones...

He looked me up a few times after but we lost contact.. so I'll have to return to my 3 Dan whos teaching me.... life sucks..

I actually had a similar experience. except it happened when a 9d was watching my game then offered to be my teacher for 10 dollars a month. it was kinda weird, but funny. i didn't take him up on his offer, but he seemed extremely knowledgeable and experienced.

Tygem sandbagging annoys me a lot. Every time I join a game I feel like I'm playing a random player with no correlation to his rank.
I'm 5k in KGS but I'm not able to keep a 10k rank in Tygem: I either crush someone (poor real 10k) or get crushed. I get very few even games. I don't even think I'll be able to keep 10k for long, I'm more on my way to 11k..

9 dan?! I have difficulty believing a true 9 dan would sandbag. He could have just made a quick account as a 9 dan; I would be more likely to believe that it was just a sdk player messing with me. No offense but I find your story hard to buy.

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"shinigami" IGS server, "Entautista" Tygem Server

yes they do sandbad.
i have 5dan accound and two other kyu account.

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"The more we think we know about
The greater the unknown"
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His account is "mylove07" over two years he won games moving up from 6Dan to 9 Dan... he masquerades as "jinai" (an account I can't find now... but I still have the game record).

I don't think he set out to beat/humiliate/sandbag me... I just think he was trying to drum up business...

The word sandbag does drum up images of an adolescent trying to prove how "big" he is. I've got to say that the Chinese guys who are now going through games with me are all high ranking ( I found a cluster of a 3 Dan, 4 Dan and 5 Dan at work. One won a provincial competition back home in China.) they seem just have a genuine desire to get my game improved and a mild curiosity as to why a westerner is playing Weiqi... Clearly when they play me they win... but they're not "sandbagging" bas far as I understand it.. they're just being helpful/kind...

O GOD THE HORROR! Actually there is nothing wrong with sandbaggers because it helps weaker players like me get stronger. I guess I was wrong in thinking dan players would not sandbag.

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"shinigami" IGS server, "Entautista" Tygem Server

The dan ranks are definitely weak. I afew days ago I got 7d here, whereas on kgs i am (probably weak) solid 5d on more than 3 accounts. keeping 5d is easy for me now because i got a strength spurt out of nowhere mere weeks ago, though i dont see myself getting kgs 6d in the next 2,3 months or anything. Too strong. Tygem on the other hand... Well, all this time it was just an experimentation server for me. I did all kinds of ridiculous openings and i even tried completely unique/weeeiiiiird ways of playing the game as a whole. It's a fairly anonymous server compared to kgs (maybe it partly explains why i feel no pressure at all in my games even against someone strong, unlike kgs which makes me nervous for some reason. the players are just stronger) so I didnt mind resigning when my opponent wouldnt resign, or when i simply wanted to stop playing, or when my experiment was completed. every time i got serious i had straight wins for miles, since i was at like 5d for a while, which can be as low as kgs 2d in my opinion. So that's how I piled up like 250 games on my account, and then over the last 3 weeks i got serious and pumped it to 7d because i wanted to bet, play stronger players, and get the same rank as my strong canadian friend ^^ The 6d on Tygem disappoint me...

On KGS, even a game against a 3d, whom as of late I can usually give 2 stones and win 60+% of the time (really depends on the 3d!) I can also lose to them in an even game, not that rarely! KGS is so strong! lol. Maybe I lose 2-3/10, just a guess. 3d Tygem... i feel like i would never lose after 30+ games.

At the rate im going right now, i might even get tygem 8d. im not saying a lot about myself, but that the ranks are quite soft. perhaps all the real badboys are clumped up at 8 or 9d*

It's the same on Wbaduk, though I tihnk WBaduk is at least as soft or even softer than Tygem, I got 7d there even more easily back when i was playing there.

...

I should not be 7d. Anywhere.

At least it's good for the morale!

I really like Tygem, it's grown on me. I like the interface and something about the scheme, and I like that you can get a game in seconds with automatch, very fast. The rating system in terms of games to rank up also works really well, doesn't have the horrible problems of KGS rating system that have caused me to become the account-hopper I am today =D

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I read an interesting hypothesis on Tygem's schizophrenic correlation between rank and actual playing strength on gosensations the other day:(You can find the full article here: http://gosensations.com/?id=2&server_id=3&new_id=1194)

Actually, I've started using this as the main mental image with which I face my opponents on Tygem: a group of people standing behind a computer, discussing moves and taking turns playing. Just last night I played a very chatty 50-year old man who completely lost the game early on, let me kill off two of his groups in less than 60 moves and proceeded to use all his time on chatting about my homecountry and speaking foreign languages. When he entered byo-yomi he started playing a lot differently (though not markedly better). A big blunder in reading made the game from a 50 point win into a closer 9.5 win for me. I asked for a rematch because he seemed like a nice guy, and after just 30 moves I was 50+ points behind. He simply crushed me, killed off one of my groups, and then I crawled back to eventually win the game by 12.5 points. His reading and slowing down at the crucial moments showed a skill that couldn't possibly have let his groups die in the first game. Though I might be imagining things, I was pretty sure it was not the same person. When I poked around a little on this, and remarked he played a lot differently than in the first game, he simply said bye and left. Complete personality and playing style switch during 2 games? Yep, playing on Tygem is like playing a multi-headed opponent. Some of the heads are better at go than the others, but you never know which head you'll be facing next. I kind of like it that way, it has allowed me to play some really close games against stronger opponents that I just can't face in even games on KGS yet.

Wow. That makes a lot of sense, especially explaining why Asian servers have so many "sandbaggers" compared to KGS.

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We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

I'd also add that the system is different than KGS. In particular, you set your initial rank on Tygem, and it is calculated on KGS from games.

When I made my first account on Tygem, I set my rank several stones weaker than what I thought it should be, because it didn't feel right to skip to what I felt my rank should be. It wasn't really that I got pleasure from sandbagging, but rather that I wanted to "earn" my rank.

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be immersed

IGS has strong players at BC (beginner class = 18k) and at 17k and start to stabilize around 15-16k. So, real 17-18ks have tough time rising above that to 15-16k level. But, once you make it past that, it is extremely consistent while being much stronger than kgs at the same level.

My son is at 13-14k level at IGS but could easily pass as 8-9k on kgs.

While you can set at any rank initially, and require 20 rated games to have a solid rating, computer will adjust several ranks with only few win/loses during that stage to settle you in. After that, usually 10wins or 1000 points to move up to next kyu. So at 2:1 win ratio, it would require 30games to move up 1kyu at ddk level. At 3:2 win ratio, it takes 50games to move up.

While one can suspect a BC with 10000 games to be of a sandbagger of sort, it may not necessarily be true. Easterners typically do not study the game like the Western players. My wife for example, have logged over 700 rated game and pretty consistent at 15-16k level and have not improved at all for the duration of past 600 games or so. So, without any study, I doubt she will get 1k stronger with another 1000 games.

For amount of go players there are in Korea, actual go book sales ratio maybe close to 1000:1 ratio with players here. That is 1 in 1000 would buy one book as opposed to every player buying a go book here.

While sh loves playing the game, she hates studying. She has more than 30 Korean books at every level available in the bookshelf (mine), she would not read a single page to improve. She just enjoys at her level.

According to this link, BC is below 22k:

IGS Promotion / Demotion Bands

In IGS it is very very difficult to play even games until you are 16k. At BC and 17k, too many fake ranks with more than 1000 rated games.

You almost want to play elsewhere until you can play even games with 16k on IGS. Once you get there you have dozens at equal level at any given time.

If you want to play at BC or 17k, you must screen the opponent and make sure he has less than 100 total games on his stats.