FIDE Rating Consultation

[Ian Jamieson]

team captains and the leagues recognise that the ratings are not that accurate even if some players and graders/administrators insist they are.

There are often reasons why captains may not wish to put their players in order of "strength", even if that nebulous concept could be assessed with complete accuracy. Competitions strike a balance between allowing them to do this and stopping them from taking liberties for tactical reasons.

Regarding these graders / administrators you mention, can you give any names? I don't believe I have ever met one. I believe it is generally understood that a rating can at any time only be a best estimate plus a random error.

By the way, the fact that, since data is finite, the random error will always exist is not an argument against making the best estimate as good as possible.

Richard Haddrell
Dave Welch

N.B. I just said I corresponded with them - I didn’t say how much or whether or not they agreed with my views which I can’t remember

Geurt Gjissen
Stewart Reuben

although with these two it was probably more about the rules of chess than ratings.

[Ian Jamieson]

You can still run Swiss pairings with 1A etc and run team matches.

How would you do that, assuming you are using deterministic rules for pairings and board orders which rely on being able to rank players one by one?

I not sure I see what the problem is.

You might have to randomly order all the players in the same group but this would be a fairly trivial change to modern pairing programs.

[Roger de Coverly]

I suspect pressure from players (it was before I was born but I have done some reading on the subject and corresponded with one or two people, sadly now dead, around the subject of grades.) and in my opinion the pressure should have been resisted.

I was there, sort of, playing my first graded tournament in 1967. Grading numbers have always existed from my perspective and grade letters were an historic curiosity. Changes then surrounded the introduction of the 40 point rule and a fixed increment for junior players. Both were in response to a gradual decline in the headcount of players in the national lists. It might have been that British chess at the top was getting weaker, but the finger could also be pointed at top players losing points even when they won and having their points taken away by improving juniors.

[Roger de Coverly]

You might have to randomly order all the players in the same group but this would be a fairly trivial change to modern pairing programs.

Unless you could guarantee the same "random" order every time, it would be a major change to the current principles of Swiss pairing, That is that for a declared set of pairing rules, any arbiter can download the data and reproduce the published pairings,

[NickFaulks]

Richard Haddrell
Dave Welch

N.B. I just said I corresponded with them - I didn’t say how much or whether or not they agreed with my views which I can’t remember

Geurt Gjissen
Stewart Reuben

although with these two it was probably more about the rules of chess than ratings.

I would be amazed if any one of these gentlemen ever had a shred of sympathy with the view you describe.

Stewart, are you there?

[Brian Valentine]

I would be amazed if any one of these gentlemen ever had a shred of sympathy with the view you describe.

I agree!

I think Ian needs to recollect the discussions. There is a difference between affirming the accuracy of the calculation and to whether this number is the precise measure of strength.

[Ian Thompson]

You might have to randomly order all the players in the same group but this would be a fairly trivial change to modern pairing programs.

Unless you could guarantee the same "random" order every time, it would be a major change to the current principles of Swiss pairing, That is that for a declared set of pairing rules, any arbiter can download the data and reproduce the published pairings,

You could deal with that, within the current rules, by making the "random" element dependent on some known quantity. Obviously, it wouldn't then be truly random, but it would vary in a deterministic, and reproducible way. You could, for example, seed your random order generator with the date and time the tournament starts, so you get a different order for every tournament. That might be a good thing to do now, so unrated players aren't always seeded in alphabetical order.

[Brian Valentine]

Also we should not forget that the ECF felt it had to do a compression exercise long before the FIDE investigation.

What do we think the ECF problem was? The claim that the BCF/ECF grades had deflated by 1 point a year was nonsence. Had it been so, players who had been 170 BCF and above in the early 1970s would have been 130 or 140s by the 2000s.

I would point the finger at the practice of estimating new players purely by reference to existing players. This came in with centralised grading in the late 1990s and shortly afterwards the first negative grades started to appear. When the initial estimate for a new player was done by hand, the local graders either officially or unofficially would apply a default mimimum. For adults and teenagers I believe it was 100 BCF but lower for those younger.

A Sonas style solution ( adding 400 Elo points to the base equivalent to around 50 ECF) would have been a lot less trouble, So add 50 points to 0 grades and 0 to 175 (or wherever) grades imposing a minimum new grade of 50 Whether treating juniors as new players every year was really necessary particularly for the established higher graded one is perhaps still debatable.

At the time I was not convinced the ECF had a problem! My issue was that the solution was wrong (something that Sonas proposes replicating for FIDE)!

I have learnt a little since 2009 and now accept that there was too wide a gap. Part of that gap re-emerged very quickly as several of us predicted but levelled out below the pre change level.

The then new junior method may well have fixed the process over time. Recycling is very powerful (except in an epidemic!) and preferable to sudden jumps. One point is the the junior algorithm tended to be anti-stretch. Sonas' new player proposal is also anti-stretch, but at the expense of seeding most new players above their true station.

[Ian Jamieson]

Richard Haddrell
Dave Welch

N.B. I just said I corresponded with them - I didn’t say how much or whether or not they agreed with my views which I can’t remember

Geurt Gjissen
Stewart Reuben

although with these two it was probably more about the rules of chess than ratings.

I would be amazed if any one of these gentlemen ever had a shred of sympathy with the view you describe.

Stewart, are you there?

I have never said they did although from memory they were not as opposed to my view as you think. Given Richard and Dave are both dead however we can’t ask either of them.

I’ve also said from the start of my posting on this thread that I accept I am in a minority and I have no expectation of things being changed to my view.

Fortunately this means that these days I pay little or no attention to my ratings and would struggle to tell you what they are leaving that to my team captains. As a result I am able to do what a previous captain recommended - concentrate on your chess and the rating will come - not that you’d notice from my results although I have not been playing much since Covid.

[Ian Jamieson]

I used to live in Scotland which has had 4 figure ratings for as long as I can remember.

For years however my rating either stayed the same or moved up or down 5 points despite or possibly because i was reasonably active (>30 games per season)

It may also however have been due to various stabilisers built into the Scottish rating system.

[Kevin Thurlow]

I think the last digit in Elo ratings is useful for an organizer, to have maybe three people rated 1866, 1865 and 1864, whereas if they are all 1865, the person beginning with W is treated as the lowest. Obviously the last digit doesn't mean anything, accuracy wise.