Excuse me, Mark. There is no rating system that stops (or minimizes) sandbagging. Effectively addressing it is an entirely different subject.
There are many things about the interplay of assessment and reward that, in practice, will lead to more or less sandbagging.
Here are two extremes in this regard:
one extreme
playcubit.com: Don Owen, with his new "cubit billiard club" idea has a design-level overlap between assessment and reward. You basically pay for your rating to go down and get paid for it going up. The idea is to build in no incentive to sandbag.
the other extreme
On the other side is league organizations that separate assessment from reward. you are rewarded for WHETHER you won a game, and you are assessed not only by WHETHER but also by HOW you won the game. Any separation between assessment and reward can be exploited. A second problem here is the assessment is limited to a small number (few hundred per year at most) league games. This means each game you futz around with has a notable impact, and it also means you can tear up the weekly and monthly tournaments with no consequence.
Fargo Ratings are between these two extremes but much closer to the first.
another factor
People don't really sandbag for the money. For most it is a relatively small amount of money for a fair amount of effort. If they put the same level of effort per year into a part-time job flipping burgers, they'd have a thousand-dollar payout every year guaranteed. Instead they do it for a feeling they are successfully gaming the system; they are winning at the game within the game. And, importantly, they are perceived by others to be successful at it.
So what sandbaggers want is this: their friends know they REALLY have a higher gear, and their friends know they are successfully exploiting the system to advantage. Way more than people think, sandbagging is about the perception of others.
Billy beams when he overhears, "Hey, do you believe Billy got into the B Division! He's gonna rob it!" because this implies others think
Billy plays higher than B and that
Billy successfully--and presumably cleverly--evaded the assessment process.
An amazing transformation happens when people start believing the ratings. Others stop thinking of your rating as some sort of external label placed on you that may or may not agree with their actual assessment of you game. Your rating becomes an integral part of their assessment of your game. And this turns the whole psychology of sandbagging inside out.
How can people sandbag with Fargo Ratings?
You can lose games on purpose. If you are going to try this, you might want to consider losing games that don't cost too much, like perhaps league games and low-entry-fee weekly tournaments. But this is still going to cost you. You will get less league payout and less tournament payout and you will have spent a lot of your time doing it. Then of course you want to come alive for a bigger tournament that is either handicapped or for which you now qualify. And of course you want to avoid bigger tournaments that are not handicapped, because you will blow your wad (bigger tournaments have longer races and in the later stages have strong opponents). Good luck with this.
In our area we have been doing this for six years, and these conversations we are having now all happened back then. And we had a handful of people who always used to try to hide in the weeds, who always used to play only when they had the nuts, who are exactly the people who you would worry about trying to game the system. And here is the deal: we now have six years of data ON THESE PLAYERS, six years of league, of weekly tournaments, and of bigger tournaments. And we also see what happens when they match up privately. We can look at whether they magically outperform their rating in the bigger events, at whether they underperform in league, at whether they tend outperform their rating when gambling. I cannot say strongly enough that WE DO NOT FIND THIS. Our tests have been negative.
The one place you have to be careful is when a particular rating is assigned significance, like announcing a big "under 600" tournament. If you do this, then the players rated 599 might avoid playing before judgment day for fear their rating will creep over and the players rated 600 or 602 might dump a few matches to get into the big one. This problem is real and is why we recommend avoiding structures that attach significance to a number. One way is to announce a big under 620 tournament and let in anybody who was under 620 when the tournament was announced. Then the next big one might be under 540, etc. That is these cutoffs are not known in advance.
