How to Stop Sandbagging and Fake Scores in a Ping Pong League

By the Breakroom Battles team. Every way a ranking gets gamed, and the rule that shuts each one down.

The short answer: a result should not count until the person who lost agrees it happened, and the ranking should weigh every win by who it was against. Those two rules kill fake scores and stat padding. Sandbagging, meaning deliberately playing worse to look weaker, only works when the league hands out a reward for a low rating, so the third fix is to take that reward away.

Nobody starts an office league planning to cheat. But one rival with a suspiciously clean record is enough to start a rumour, and a young league does not survive a rumour that the scores are made up. Here are the five ways a board gets gamed, roughly in the order you will meet them.

1. Phantom results

The simplest cheat: record a win that never happened, or record 3-0 when it was 3-2. On a whiteboard or a shared spreadsheet anyone can write anything, and the only defence is someone noticing and making a fuss, which nobody wants to do to a coworker.

The fix: the loser confirms. One player records the result and the other has to agree before it counts. It costs a few seconds per match, and a fake win now needs the victim to sign off on it, which in practice means it never happens.

This is how Breakroom Battles works. The winner (or either player) records the match, the opponent gets a notification, and they tap confirm or dispute. A disputed match does not touch the rankings until it is sorted out. To stop honest results sitting in limbo forever, a match nobody has disputed gets a reminder after four days and is confirmed as entered after seven. If the score is wrong, dispute it; that is what the button is for.

2. Selective reporting

Subtler than inventing wins: you just never get round to recording your losses. Over a month your record drifts upward without a single false entry.

The fix: the winner records. Make it the house norm that the winner logs the match before leaving the table. Winners never forget to record a win, so every loss gets recorded by the person who wants it on the board, and the loser's only job is to confirm. Put it in your league rules in one line so nobody can say they did not know.

3. Farming weak opponents

The classic. A decent player discovers that the two newest hires are happy to play every lunch, goes 10-0 against them, and parks themselves near the top of a win percentage table above someone who is 5-3 against the best players in the building. Everyone can see it is wrong, including the farmer.

The fix: weigh every win by the opponent. An opponent-weighted rating gives a big reward for beating someone strong and a small one for beating someone weak. We ran the same Power Ranking formula the boards use on a small made-up league to show the size of the effect:

• Alex starts 2-0 against the two weakest players and sits at 0.6289.
• Alex then beats those same two players eight more times. Now 10-0, the rating climbs to 0.6972, a gain of 0.0683 for eight wins.
• Alex then beats Sam, the strongest player on the board, once. That single win adds 0.0517.

One win against the top player is worth almost as much as eight more against the bottom. Farming still nudges you up, because a win is a win, but it runs out of steam fast. The rating systems guide covers why this works; the practical point is that a board weighted this way rewards playing up, which is exactly the behaviour you want in a league anyway.

4. Sandbagging proper

True sandbagging is losing on purpose, or quietly easing off, so your rating drops. Nobody does this for fun. They do it because something rewards a lower number: a bigger head start under a handicap system, a spot in the lower division where the prize is easier, or a soft seed in the next tournament.

The fix: remove the reward. Two rules cover almost every case, and a bonus: in an opponent-weighted system a deliberate loss hands rating to whoever beat you, often a direct rival.

1. Freeze ratings for anything with a cutoff. If a tournament or division is capped by rating, use the rating on the day entries close, announced in advance, or the player's highest rating that season. Tanking the week before then achieves nothing.
2. Keep handicap games off the rankings. A handicap should come from recent straight games, and the handicapped games themselves should not feed the rating. Otherwise a player can lose a few straight games to grow their head start and then cash it in.

5. Dodging

The quietest one. A player near the top simply never plays the one person likely to beat them. No false results, no tanking, just a calendar that is always somehow full.

The fix: challenges with a clock. Let any player challenge any other, and give the challenged player a fixed window to play, say five working days, before the challenger is awarded the match as a forfeit. Combine it with a minimum number of games to hold an official rank. Breakroom Battles uses a games-played threshold for exactly this reason: a player with a tiny, perfect record shows a provisional rating until they reach the league's games-played bar, which rises as everyone else plays more. The ladder guide has more on challenge rules if you run a ladder alongside the board.

What to do when someone is accused

Accusations happen even in an honest league. Answer them with the record, not the mood in the breakroom: who confirmed each result, who the player has been beating, and whether they have dodged open challenges. Usually the suspicious climber just beat two strong players in one good week. If something really is off, the organizer voids those results and says so plainly. Letting a rumour run is worse, because people stop recording matches once they think the board is fake.

Confirm results from your phone

All of this depends on recording being quick enough to do at the table. Breakroom Battles runs on the web and iOS, and the Android app is in Google Play closed testing. Google will not release it publicly until 12 testers have opted in and stayed opted in for 14 days in a row, and we are not there yet.

If you are on Android and willing to help a guy who mostly loses at ping pong, it takes two steps. First join the tester group at groups.google.com/g/brb-android-testers. Then opt in at play.google.com/apps/testing/com.breakroombattles.league, install it, and leave it installed. Confirming one match is plenty of testing. Step-by-step help is on the tester page.

Frequently asked questions

What is sandbagging in ping pong?

Playing below your level, or hiding results, so you look weaker than you are. It is done to win a bigger handicap, an easier division or a softer seed, so the fix is to stop rewarding a low rating.

How do you stop fake scores?

Require the loser to confirm every result before it counts. A fake win then needs the victim's approval, and a wrong score gets disputed rather than quietly accepted.

Can you climb the board by only playing weak players?

On win percentage, easily. On an opponent-weighted rating, each win against the bottom of the board is worth little, so a long streak against beginners gains about as much as one win against the top player.

What about players who avoid certain opponents?

Put a clock on challenges. If a challenged player does not play within the agreed window, the challenger takes the match as a forfeit, and dodging costs more than losing.

Related: how to start an office league, points systems and tiebreakers, and why leagues die in month three.