6 monthly grades

General discussions about ratings.
Richard Haddrell

Re: 6 monthly grades

Post by Richard Haddrell » Sun Dec 05, 2010 12:55 pm

Brian Valentine and Sean Hewitt wrote:How and when do you expect the decision to be taken on these items of detail? And when do we expect a Manager of Grading to be appointed (assuming that these changes are difficult if not impossible to implement without one)?
Pass, on the whens. I believe the plan was to appoint a Manager at the last Management Board meeting on 1st November, but there were no applicants for the job. I don’t know if anyone has applied since or, for that matter, when the next Board meeting is.

On the how, I would expect discussion to involve the Manager; Howard Grist as programmer; the Home Director ex officio; me as the non-mathematician of the outfit; and anyone else the Manager chose to involve. But it’s hard to hard to say how the Manager will see things till we’ve got one. If no applicant emerged? We’d muddle through.

Roger de Coverly
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Re: 6 monthly grades

Post by Roger de Coverly » Sun Dec 05, 2010 3:08 pm

Richard Haddrell wrote:. The good news is, the number of leagues that don’t date their games is down to half a dozen or so, and dwindling. The bad news is, I can’t say the same for club internal. Club internal is now the bigger problem. Reporting in two instalments will help, and maybe adjusting the game dates so they all come in the middle of a period rather than at one end of it. But I doubt if there’s a complete solution.
It is I suppose a data quality issue. At the very least you should be able to get an indication of which grading half year a game belonged to. If you cannot get the date, presumably the month could be a decent proxy. It might just be that it's never been put to clubs (and counties running individual "play when you like" championships) that they should record not just the players and the result but also the playing date.

On a marginally different topic, is there a convention for dating games where the result isn't known when play in the first session ceases? The obvious examples are adjudications and adjournments but could also include disputes and 10.2's under "no arbiter present" playing conditions. Again this is an issue which comes more into focus when you consider the implementation of more frequent grading calculations.

Alex Holowczak
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Re: 6 monthly grades

Post by Alex Holowczak » Sun Dec 05, 2010 3:55 pm

Roger de Coverly wrote:On a marginally different topic, is there a convention for dating games where the result isn't known when play in the first session ceases? The obvious examples are adjudications and adjournments but could also include disputes and 10.2's under "no arbiter present" playing conditions. Again this is an issue which comes more into focus when you consider the implementation of more frequent grading calculations.
As far as the Laws are concerned, with a 10.2 with no arbiter present, the game is deemed to have ended. The practical implication of this is that if there was an illegal move on move 21, then tough. With adjournments, the game is clearly still in progress. With adjudications, I don't know - they were taken out of the FIDE Laws before I ever read them. Logically, it would seem to me that the game is deemed to have ended.

So those should be included in the grading list, and obviously not the adjourned one that hasn't. I.e. any game finished by whatever the cut-off point is gets counted.

Roger de Coverly
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Re: 6 monthly grades

Post by Roger de Coverly » Sun Dec 05, 2010 4:06 pm

Alex Holowczak wrote: So those should be included in the grading list, and obviously not the adjourned one that hasn't. I.e. any game finished by whatever the cut-off point is gets counted.

You cannot grade a game for which you do not have a result. This practical difficultly ranks above whatever the laws of chess may say about game completion. If you have a result, then you can (and probably should) backdate for the purposes of grading sequence. If you are designing a download process for a league, you need to be aware of this little quirk.

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Gavin Strachan
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Re: 6 monthly grades

Post by Gavin Strachan » Tue Jan 25, 2011 3:47 pm

All now can ask Mr Majer as he is the manager in the role.

Richard Bates
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Re: 6 monthly grades

Post by Richard Bates » Wed Jan 26, 2011 9:23 am

It seems to me that the starting point should be that each "six monthly list" should cover the previous year, regardless of the number of games played, for the following reasons:

1) issues about reporting dates won't be quite so crucial, since the july list will remain broadly consistent with what we have at the moment
2) under the ECF system reducing (on average halving) the number of games to be included will simply increase the volatility and therefore accuracy of the list
3) 30 games is a lot of games to play in 6 months. Consequently, if each 6 month period were graded in isolation, taking games from a prior period will become the norm - which in turn will mean that games played late in a period will have far greater weighting than those played at the beginning. eg. British Championship games will usually only get inclusion in the January list, December games will count towards both January and June lists.
4) For many the types of chess they play in the two halves of the year are often different. If you perform at consistently different standards at say evening league chess vs FIDE rated tournaments, and you say play more of the former in Jul-Dec and more of the latter in Jan-Jun then you will more often find yourself playing with an inappropriate grade. The ECF system, unlike the FIDE system is more suited to a yearly cycle.

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Re: 6 monthly grades

Post by Roger de Coverly » Wed Jan 26, 2011 9:53 am

Richard Bates wrote:It seems to me that the starting point should be that each "six monthly list" should cover the previous year, regardless of the number of games played, for the following reasons:
There were contradictory messages emerging from the ECF. The Chief Exec seemed to imply this would be the case whilst the Manager of Grading thought you would run it like the rapid-play list with distinct six month periods.


Richard Bates wrote:The ECF system, unlike the FIDE system is more suited to a yearly cycle.
For more frequent grades or ratings, I suspect it is necessary to bite the bullet and convert to an Elo style method of calculation. You could introduce a novel feature which is to compute two values. The first value is an Elo measure of strength, this changes at the pace dictated by the K-factor. The second value is a performance measure calculated over perhaps a year. Yes they are different and it is telling the player that they are (or were) 2100 standard but they only performed at 2000 over the previous year. The second value is equivalent to the current ECF method so offers a transition device.

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Re: 6 monthly grades

Post by Alex Holowczak » Wed Jan 26, 2011 10:25 am

Roger de Coverly wrote:
Richard Bates wrote:The ECF system, unlike the FIDE system is more suited to a yearly cycle.
For more frequent grades or ratings, I suspect it is necessary to bite the bullet and convert to an Elo style method of calculation. You could introduce a novel feature which is to compute two values. The first value is an Elo measure of strength, this changes at the pace dictated by the K-factor. The second value is a performance measure calculated over perhaps a year. Yes they are different and it is telling the player that they are (or were) 2100 standard but they only performed at 2000 over the previous year. The second value is equivalent to the current ECF method so offers a transition device.
I think this is a really good idea. I'd be in favour of the National list being Elo regardless of the two different lists.

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Re: 6 monthly grades

Post by Steve Rooney » Wed Jan 26, 2011 10:43 am

And I'd second that, it can't make sense to fiddle around further with the ECF grading system when there is a perfectly good international standard that we could change to. (But I seem to recall reading about issued with some league time controls?)

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IM Jack Rudd
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Re: 6 monthly grades

Post by IM Jack Rudd » Wed Jan 26, 2011 10:53 am

Evening leagues of G/90 or equivalent are not eligible for FIDE ratings (unless they are restricted to players rated under 2200). There's no such restriction on national Elo systems, however.

Sean Hewitt

Re: 6 monthly grades

Post by Sean Hewitt » Wed Jan 26, 2011 10:56 am

Steve Rooney wrote:And I'd second that, it can't make sense to fiddle around further with the ECF grading system when there is a perfectly good international standard that we could change to. (But I seem to recall reading about issued with some league time controls?)
The issue around league time controls means that FIDE won't rate such events. But, that does not prevent the ECF from swiching it's grading system form the Clarke system to an ELO based methodology. It just means that players will have two ratings as now ; one from FIDE and and one from the ECF, but the ECF one will also be a four digit ELO number.

Roger de Coverly
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Re: 6 monthly grades

Post by Roger de Coverly » Wed Jan 26, 2011 11:02 am

Steve Rooney wrote:And I'd second that, it can't make sense to fiddle around further with the ECF grading system when there is a perfectly good international standard that we could change to. (But I seem to recall reading about issued with some league time controls?)
Two issues being confused here.

You could, as the French do, rate all domestic chess on the International FIDE system. Except you can't because unlike the French, most domestic chess is played at too fast a move rate. The French don't have evening leagues and weekend congresses to the same extent.

What you can do, as many well-established federations do, is to adopt Elo style calculations for your domestic rating system. So international players will have both a domestic rating and an international one.

The international system is well-established and you could take its rules and establish a domestic English equivalent. There's a caveat though that with the extension of the ratings down to 1000, as to whether the K=15/K=30 structure can react quickly enough to improving players where the improving players don't play that many rated games.

Richard Bates
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Re: 6 monthly grades

Post by Richard Bates » Wed Jan 26, 2011 11:05 am

Sean Hewitt wrote:
Steve Rooney wrote:And I'd second that, it can't make sense to fiddle around further with the ECF grading system when there is a perfectly good international standard that we could change to. (But I seem to recall reading about issued with some league time controls?)
The issue around league time controls means that FIDE won't rate such events. But, that does not prevent the ECF from swiching it's grading system form the Clarke system to an ELO based methodology. It just means that players will have two ratings as now ; one from FIDE and and one from the ECF, but the ECF one will also be a four digit ELO number.
I doubt replacing the ECF system with an ELO system is simply a matter of 'borrowing' FIDE's methodology, without any extra research. The effects of the FIDE system on a player pool stretching down to near beginner level is still developing and unknown. It is by no means certain that FIDE's K-factors would be at all appropriate to England where people in general play far more games. And it certainly wouldn't stop people complaining about the "under-rated juniors" problem!

Richard Bates
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Re: 6 monthly grades

Post by Richard Bates » Wed Jan 26, 2011 11:10 am

Roger de Coverly wrote:
The international system is well-established and you could take its rules and establish a domestic English equivalent. There's a caveat though that with the extension of the ratings down to 1000, as to whether the K=15/K=30 structure can react quickly enough to improving players where the improving players don't play that many rated games.
And if you set a K-factor too high whilst maintaining 6 monthly lists, you risk "improving players" becoming massively over-rated by playing too many games (although you could introduce a hybrid whereby rating changes are limited in some way by performance over the rating period).

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Re: 6 monthly grades

Post by Steve Rooney » Wed Jan 26, 2011 11:19 am

Thanks for the clarifications, guys. I will try to pay more attention in future! Having two ratings based on the same (or very similar methodology) still seems preferable. What players are interested in is equivalence which is much easier to assess if both are 4-number ELO grades.

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