I am a SDK EGF and created a new account on at 25k. The reason i did that was obviously not because i wanted to sandbag, but to see the playing style of the asian beginner players, how they overplay and try to punish that; in short for purely practising reasons. Also, even though i'm stronger than 25k, i'm not sure about my rank in such a fighting oriented server, so i thought wth let's put it at 25k and after 20-30 games it should start to converge to the real rank.

I have played 34 rated games thus far and i'm sitting at 22k at the moment with an 18-16 score. Since the server doesn't allow ranked games between players with a difference greater than 4 stones, my strongest opponent was around 19k, on paper...

The weakest player i have played was around 15k kgs, maybe even a bit stronger. All of my opponents knew the simplest josekis and the majority of them even the new AI variations. I have played against a 25k with 38-33 score who absolutely destroyed me. I gave him initially 3 stones and he absolutely obliterated me, so then i played him evenly (not a ranked game anymore) and brought out a micro chinese and some "weird" attachment joseki when i kakari his 4-4 stone. Another guy was also 25k with a score around 200-200 when i played him a few days ago. Today he is 4d at 205-228.

I don't have a problem playing against a much stronger player and losing, even badly, but this is so frustrating, giving handicap to basically dan players all the time and getting stomped. Then, the problem is it's very hard to escape the 20-25k region since one keeps playing ranked games with these people all the time. It's also telling how much sandbagging is going on, since there are a couple players at 25-23k and very few at 23-18k.
Just so frustrating...

How is it possible to go from 25k to 4d with just about 30 games?

I suppose some of your opponents just wanted to see the playing style of beginner players, how they overplay and try to punish that. Maybe just for practice...

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be immersed