Like it or not, trash talk has always been a part of chess. Anyone who’s ever dabbled in casual online games has surely encountered plenty of bad sports spouting put-downs and insults. However, some of these epithets are far from obvious—so let’s dive into a few and find out what they mean!
Sandbagger
A sandbagger is a player who intentionally loses rated tournament games in order to lower their listed rating, with the end goal of later entering a lower-rated category, which they will then win easily.
Rated chess tournaments are often divided into sections by rating, where a player can only enter if they are within a certain Elo range, such as an Elo of 1200-1399. Sandbaggers might lower their rating to win prize money, which is often awarded to the top prize in each section of a rated tournament.
Sandbagging is considered a form of rating manipulation and is therefore deemed illegal in both online and tournament chess, and in most countries’ national chess federations, as well as FIDE, the worldwide chess federation.
You can also use sandbag as a verb to refer to the act of purposely throwing games to lower your rating, only to emerge as the “underdog” in your next rated event.
Example sentence: Lucy kept losing to 900s last week, but she beat three 1800 players today—I’m pretty sure she’s a sandbagger!
Patzer
A patzer refers to a weak or incompetent chess player. This term originates from the German patzen, which means to bungle—so this term can be thought of as one who makes a lot of blunders!
This insult is synonymous with fish.
Example sentence: Oscar kept calling me a patzer until I beat him twice in a row!
Fish
Like patzer, a fish is a poor chess player. However, this term is relative: It entirely depends on who is weaker than you, and there is no specific Elo range associated with this term.
The origin of fish is unclear, but it may come from the image of a player who can be easily brought down with a simple trap used as bait.
Fun fact: Some of the world’s strongest chess engines incorporate “fish” in their names, presumably as a clever nod to this famous chess term. Stockfish and Rybka (rybka is the diminutive form of the word fish in many Slavic languages) are two famous examples.
Example sentence: I can’t believe I just lost to this fish!
Woodpusher
A woodpusher refers to a weak player who pushes their pieces around the board without much thought or effort. The reference to wood comes from the popular wooden chess sets of the past!
Example sentence: Don’t worry, your next opponent is just a woodpusher; she doesn’t really understand the nuances of the Caro-Kann.
Flagger
A flagger is a player who makes objectively poor moves with the express goal of flagging the opponent: which is winning on time, not through checkmate. This usually occurs at near the end of a game, once time is low on at least one player’s clock. The player trying to flag will then speed up their moves, perhaps even throwing in cheapos or sacrificing pieces in an unsound fashion, striving to complicate the position as much as possible in an attempt to run down the opponent’s clock.
Although entirely legal, many players look down on this sort of behavior as vaguely unethical, because it takes the focus away from usual chess strategy and becomes a game of speed, in which non-optimal strategies succeed where they otherwise wouldn’t.
Example sentence: I only had 3 seconds left on the clock, so Eddy kept shuffling his pieces around until I lost on time—what a flagger!
It’s a pawn-eat-pawn world out there!
Now that you know these common chess insults, you’ll be better prepared to face the world of casual chess. Brush off any terms that don’t apply, and don’t take online trolls’ words to heart!