Immaculate Grid Cheating Is Out of Control
Immaculate Grid has quickly become everyone’s favorite MLB trivia game. Created by software engineer Brian Minter, the game launched back in April. It has since exploded in popularity with more than 100,000 daily players on the website. This rapid growth led to acquisition by Sports Reference.
For those unfamiliar with the game, here’s how it works. Each day, users get nine guesses to fill nine squares with any player from baseball history. As long as that player meets the two qualifications needed for that square, it keeps the immaculate grid alive. A percentage score indicates how common a given answer is, incentivizing users to come up with obscure picks. The lower the rarity score, the more impressive the grid.
The Blatant Cheating Has to Stop
Someone had to say it, so I’m going to. The cheating on this game is getting out of hand. Take the July 29 grid for example (not the grid pictured). One of the boxes asks the player to name a Chicago White Sox pitcher who won the Cy Young Award. You know how many of those there have been? Three: Early Wynn in 1959, Hoyt Wilhelm in 1983, and Jack McDowell in 1993. I consider myself a pretty knowledgeable baseball fan. Although I’ve heard all of these names before, I would be lying if I claimed to know what teams they played for, or that they were Cy Young winners. I happily accepted my eight correct answers and kept it moving.
However, according to Immaculate Grid’s own stats, 39% of players were able to pull one of those three names. I’m calling big time BS on that one. There’s absolutely zero chance that two of every five players are coming up with one of those guys without cheating.
The other reason I know people cheat at this game is by looking at the daily score distribution. Immaculate Grid provides a graph of how all players scored on a given day. Every single day, without fail, the graph peaks somewhere around 5-7, then sharply peaks again at the perfect score of 9. Nope. Doesn’t make sense. The most common score is a perfect score? On a day where there was a box with just three possible answers, no less? Definitely cheating.
This game is supposed to be a test of someone’s baseball knowledge. If you’re cheating just so you can tell everyone who doesn’t know any better that you always get a perfect score, that’s unbelievably lame. Stop it.
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