Solitaire collection events cheating

Still going on no matter what anyone says.

I play the games when they come online. I am a normal retired person and I can finish the set of games somewhere from 1 1/2 hours to 3 hours:  If I play constantly. Which is what I usually do. I don't understand how I end up in the top 30 most of the time with 100,000+ people playing either. But, it does make me feel good.

I played yesterday and when I finished, I was in third place in my group at around 1 hour and 8 minutes for 30 challenges.  Both of the people ahead of me came in with a time of 45-48 minutes, both in the top 100 at that point.  I eventually ended up in 4th when another player finished in 1 hour and 7 minutes.  But when you get those people with the super low times in your group, you won't finish first.  Luckily, there are so many groups that the odds are often with you.  To improve your placement, you need to have a strategy for each of the 5 challenge types, and refine that strategy over time by figuring out where you get stuck or lose time, and trying to come up with a way to avoid those.  Sometimes, challenges are unusually hard, but finding strategies to refine your play will bring up your placement with practice. 

I have no idea what the additional 15 seconds is from.  I never check my times til all the challenges are complete so not sure if it happening to me or not.

I have noticed that my group of players almost never reach 100 no matter what time of the day I start playing.  It usually ends up with about 97 players on average.  I also notice that 15 seconds is added to every game that I play.  I will play the first game in 30 seconds for example.  I immediately show the leader board and it shows my time as 45 seconds.  I have seen the top player of the top 100 list is usually around 10 minutes for 30 games.  This is not possible.  I was thinking it might be players with gaming machines where they can under clock their CPU which would make the game slower.  I didn't see the cheater posts until today.  I have one #1 finish about five 2nd and 3rd place finishes.  My #1 finish was over an hour.  I guess that I got lucky and player with non cheaters in my group of 100 players.  I'm trying to get my second #1 finish and it is getting harder.  My averge finish is 16th place and my average time is about 2.5 hours.  I keep my statistics in a spreadsheet.  I have several long duration times as I have fallen asleep while playing several times and end up with times of 8 or 9 hours which drives up my average time.

You guys should google "Microsoft Solitaire Collection Events" cheats, codes and hacks. There are even videos on youtube for every single one of the games an today's event.  Yep, there is definitely some cheating going on.

I don't doubt at all that there is cheating.  And your response is correct in that there is "some cheating." My response was to the comment that 30 challenges could not be done in less than an hour without cheating.  I have done it myself without cheating, though it is unusual, at least for me.  And I am a good deal faster now than I was when I began playing the collections. 

Doing them in less than a half hour (or even 10 minutes) is a totally different issue.  As others have said, I have no interest in learning those techniques because it would ruin the game for me.

I also wanted to make the point that others made.  Don't worry about cheats, have fun and do your best.