Board Game Arena

Most games, there is someone playing whose username is just a string of 8 or 9 numbers and who is from China. I do not seem to see them in other games, only in poker. This seems extremely strange. Anyone know what the deal is with these accounts? Do the numbers have some kind of meaning? If not, why should there be large numbers of people choosing random numerical usernames?

Another strange pattern - I've seen at least six Chinese accounts in recent days with names of the form [adjective]-[animal][2-3 digit number]. They play mostly poker, and sometimes play at the same tables but not with such overlap that I would suspect game-rigging. If they were cheating you'd think they would not choose obviously similar names to do it, anyway, so as with the numbers accounts, I wonder what is going on?

That was discussed in another thread recently: [adjective]-[animal][2-3 digit number] is proposed to you by BGA if you open a new account.

I have not verified it but it explains why this pattern is so common. Especially if you just want to play some games and do not care about your user-name at all...

Aha OK, thanks for that info. That pattern makes sense at least then!