FIDE imposed a six-month ban on Li Haoyu for sandbagging
Sandbagging manipulates chess ratings for tournament advantage
Online chess has contributed to an upsurge in both sandbagging and other cheating behaviors
FIDE imposed a six-month ban on Li Haoyu for sandbagging
Sandbagging manipulates chess ratings for tournament advantage
Online chess has contributed to an upsurge in both sandbagging and other cheating behaviors
Sandbagging in chess, the act of intentionally losing to lower one’s rating for tournament advantage, drew global attention in August 2025 after FIDE sanctioned Li Haoyu of China. He lost thirteen consecutive games across two international tournaments in China, resulting in a 400 Elo point drop within a year.
Sandbagging in chess specifically refers to the intentional act of losing games or underperforming to lower one’s Elo rating, enabling a player to qualify for lower-rated tournament sections and target substantial prize money.
According to reports, this manipulation is particularly prevalent in the United States, where open chess tournaments often feature large cash prizes for lower-rated sections, making sandbagging a recurring concern for organisers and the chess community.
Sandbagging manipulates the fairness of competitive chess, making it challenging for tournament organisers to ensure equal competition due to the difficulty of detection. The practice exploits flaws in the Elo rating system—introduced in the 1960s—and remains difficult to completely eradicate as of 2025, according to recent chess federation reports and tournament analyses.
As of August 2025, the chess community has witnessed one of the most prominent sanctions for sandbagging at the international level, when the FIDE Ethics & Disciplinary Commission imposed a six-month ban on Li Haoyu, a former Chinese chess prodigy.
Such disciplinary action marks a significant move towards upholding integrity, as formal punishments for sandbagging by chess’s governing body have been exceedingly rare until this case.
In response to concerns, major chess platforms like Chess.com have implemented detection algorithms and account oversight mechanisms to identify and deter rating manipulation, including sandbagging. The United States Chess Federation (USCF) applies minimum entry ratings based on previous high ratings or prize winnings to counter sandbagging’s impact on tournament qualification.
Community forums frequently discuss the ethics and detection challenges of sandbagging, noting that although technical solutions help, the volume of games and subtlety of manipulative intent complicate full eradication.
While sandbagging is less commonly sanctioned than engine-based cheating, growing attention is prompting stricter oversight as of 2025.
FIDE’s Anti-Cheating Regulations, updated in 2024, explicitly define sandbagging as a punishable offence, with penalties ranging from temporary bans to permanent exclusion from official events. The 2024 revision introduced Article 11.9, which mandates that any player found deliberately manipulating their rating faces a minimum three-month suspension.
The USCF also amended its Code of Ethics in 2023 to include sandbagging as a form of unethical conduct, allowing for disqualification and forfeiture of prizes. These regulatory changes followed a surge in reported sandbagging cases, with FIDE documenting a 27 percent increase in related disciplinary actions between 2022 and 2024.
Online chess has contributed to an upsurge in both sandbagging and other cheating behaviors, such as engine use, account sharing, and collusion.
The relative anonymity and accessibility of online play make it easier for players to evade detection, despite the efforts of platforms to deploy advanced anti-cheat systems.
These measures include behavioral analysis and pattern recognition to flag suspicious rating drops and anomalous gameplay. The escalation of such practices undermines fair play and has led chess organisations globally to adopt multi-layered investigative approaches, though the problem persists, according to FIDE and Chess.com reports.
Since 2023, Chess.com has reported a fifteen percent annual increase in accounts flagged for sandbagging, with over fifty thousand accounts closed for rating manipulation in 2024 alone. The platform’s Fair Play team uses a combination of machine learning and manual review, with some cases requiring up to forty hours of investigation before a final decision.
In India, the All India Chess Federation began collaborating with online platforms in early 2024 to share data on suspicious rating changes, aiming to prevent sandbaggers from entering national qualifiers.
Meanwhile, the European Chess Union launched a pilot project in 2025 to cross-check online and over-the-board ratings, targeting players with discrepancies greater than three hundred Elo points.
Historical examples of sandbagging and related manipulations include the case of Claude Bloodgood in 1996, who was accused of exploiting small closed player pools to inflate his USCF rating above two thousand seven hundred, then the second highest in the United States.
Reports of rating distortions in Myanmar during the late 1990s further illustrate the persistent challenges of ensuring rating integrity in chess competitions worldwide, as documented by chess historians and federation records.
Haoyu’s case in China highlights sandbagging at prestigious tournaments with international scrutiny, reflecting a shift in how governing bodies address such infractions.