Solitaire collection events cheating

I am glad that someone who completed 30 challenges, the FreeCell, in under 30 minutes is joining the conversation.  I have been playing freecell and other card games online since 1988.  Shoot back then we beta'd programs and even took Microsoft to court about providing them with all the needs to create a perfect Office Administrator / Secretary / Managerial / Accounting program suite and then they stopped it on us.  The courts however then created Opensource and Apache has been keeping up with all the free open to the public programs since then.  I know how to look at freecell and tell where the aces are, if there are clusters of a central number stuck up in a few rows.  Thank you for your advice.

I don't see any point in buying a BOT like that either.  Maybe people are challenging each other regarding who can run the BOT the fastest, but that is not playing Solitaire.  

Two thoughts regarding your going from 8 to 34.  Depending on when you finish, in a 4000 point game you will be placed based on those who have already completed all the challenges.  So if there are 15 people who have 4000, they will be the top 15 finishers.  As other people get to 4000 points, the placement of those first 15 will change.  The person in first out of the 15 might not be once 50 or 60 have reached 4000.  I never assume my ranking until the next day.  Some players play some of the challenges and then stop until later when they come back and finish.  In my case, it is because I need to eat dinner or go to an appointment.  I think others do it as a strategy.  They want to see the time of the best finishers and challenge themselves to beat that.  I don't see anything wrong with that, but it means you won't know your true placement until the next day.

The other comment is that with a time of 1 hour 48 minutes, you probably won't end up at 8 unless it is a very complex set of challenges.  In the challenge yesterday, I was first with a time of about 29:57.  Even at that time I was more than 5 minutes out of the top 100.  It was a Freecell challenge which for me is the easiest because you see all the cards and their locations before you start.  I could never achieve that time if it was a Spider challenge since you only see 10 cards at a time.   One of the ways I make Freecell easier is before I make any move, I look at the whole deck and see where the Aces and low cards are, as well as find any easy moves that would uncover Aces.  I don't think the clock starts until your first move so I develop my strategy before I even start playing.

Keep playing and you will find strategies that work for you.  And you will see your best times go down as you intuition improves about which cards to play next.

I am a Paid Member with full access to the entire solitaire collection and the entire word collection.  Some where out there is someone who is selling a BOT that plays the games for you for these challenges.  To me that is like looking at the back of the crossword book for the answers instead of doing the puzzle, researching clues given, etc.  Why pay for the book at all?  They are only cheating themselves.    The other thing is that when we play we are placed into a group of 100 that finished at about the same time, but each getting there through different times.  I finished mine in 1 hour 48 minutes and was automatically shown as 8th in the line up, in the morning I had been moved to position 34 and the badges that were showing for me had changed of course.  SMH....  It is almost as bad as military math towards what percentage a person is disabled.

It is getting idiotic. Yesterday I finished the event and was positioned near the top. Today I get the final results and I am not even on the leader board. I do not think that Microsoft will do anything about the situation, unless they make it a pay for game, and can see that they might make a few more dollars.

You're right.  Perhaps it is possible to finish 30 hard puzzles in 28 minutes or less and maybe with more practice I too will get those elusive badges one day. Thank you.