Grading Statistics

Debate directly related to English Chess Federation matters.
Roger de Coverly
Posts: 21301
Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2008 2:51 pm

Grading Statistics

Post by Roger de Coverly » Mon Sep 08, 2014 1:13 am

The SCCU site has statistics on the number of games played and the number of players.
http://www.sccu.ndo.co.uk/grad.htm

It's known that a few results were missing and it can be supposed that a number of duplicated players had been identified. Thus the conclusion that (to quote the site)
Halfgames up, graded players down!
is a logical consequence of universal membership.

If you match the names on consecutive grading lists or grading files, I believe it an established result that there's around a 15 % to 20 % turnover. The standing observation is that the leavers and joiners are broadly balanced. I'm fairly sure there was a one-off loss of players when the non-member Yorkshire leagues were evicted from the grading list, but I don't know if there's ever been an exact measurement of how many were removed.

There was a "white is black" argument that membership encouraged marginal players to stay within the system. I would have thought it an obvious deduction that would apply only until their membership expired, at which point they failed to renew.

Still it's a policy decision that the ECF would rather take the money by demanding membership when it can, than promote participation.

(That's an admission on the official site from a Director by the way)
FIDE require that all players appearing on the rating list are registered through a national chess federation (Rating regulations 13.1). It is surely implicit in this that such Federation may set reasonable conditions (such as membership) on the players they register.

MSoszynski
Posts: 263
Joined: Thu Apr 05, 2007 4:43 pm

Re: Grading Statistics

Post by MSoszynski » Mon Sep 08, 2014 7:19 am

Roger de Coverly wrote:The SCCU site has statistics on the number of games played and the number of players.
http://www.sccu.ndo.co.uk/grad.htm
Surely something must be amiss when the mean grade of all the published players is 133 for standard play but only 104 for rapid - a scale of difference that goes back years. Note that in many competitions, if the preferred type of grade is unavailable then the other type is used. So it would be interesting to see the averages for players who had both types of grade.

Roger de Coverly
Posts: 21301
Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2008 2:51 pm

Re: Grading Statistics

Post by Roger de Coverly » Mon Sep 08, 2014 8:54 am

MSoszynski wrote: Surely something must be amiss when the mean grade of all the published players is 133 for standard play but only 104 for rapid - a scale of difference that goes back years.
That's usually attributed to the popularity of running Junior events as Rapid Play, so the average standard of players is much lower.

(edit) I downloaded the data and ran the test for myself. I only found 2730 players with published grades in both categories. Averages were 133.7 for the standard play grades and 133.1 for the rapid play. (/edit)

Richard Haddrell

Re: Grading Statistics

Post by Richard Haddrell » Tue Sep 09, 2014 2:33 am

Roger de Coverly wrote:
MSoszynski wrote:Surely something must be amiss when the mean grade of all the published players is 133 for standard play but only 104 for rapid - a scale of difference that goes back years.
That's usually attributed to the popularity of running Junior events as Rapid Play, so the average standard of players is much lower. I downloaded the data and ran the test for myself. I only found 2730 players with published grades in both categories. Averages were 133.7 for the standard play grades and 133.1 for the rapid play.
You get a pretty similar Standard - Rapid equivalence if you look at adults and juniors separately:

Adult (1685 players): average 146 Standard, 143 Rapid
Age unknown (274 players): average 125 Standard, 124 Rapid
Junior (769 players): average 110 Standard, 114 Rapid

"Age unknown" will be mostly adult. If my player-total is 2 less than Roger's, that may be because I used the current database rather than the 24th-August one. Merges strike again?