Chris Majer returns!

[Alex Holowczak]

The problem is that the ECF system as currently constituted needs 6 to 8 weeks of processing time. So with the present 31st May cutoff, the results appear just in time for the British. So a list published on 1st October is a cutoff date of 1st July and mid April is cutoff mid February.

I'm under the impression that the grading enhancements remove the need for the pre-flight checks that currently occur (at least, the part where members get to look at their results before it's released). So if it could be reduced by, say, 3 weeks, then the grades would come out during the British if you pushed the deadlines to June/December. You wouldn't necessarily notice a difference.

There'd need to be a rule for congresses that if results aren't received to be graded by a certain cutoff, then the games will go into the next list.

[Ian Thompson]

The problem is that the ECF system as currently constituted needs 6 to 8 weeks of processing time.

I don't know if the ECF needs this amount of time or not. They certainly take that long currently but FIDE produce their rating list just 7 days after the cut off.

The 6 to 8 weeks processing time includes 1 month for organisers to submit results, so that could be reduced I would have thought.

While FIDE issue their list quickly, they then issue almost daily corrections to it. The ECF chooses to spend time trying to get it right before publication.

[Roger de Coverly]

I'm under the impression that the grading enhancements remove the need for the pre-flight checks that currently occur (at least, the part where members get to look at their results before it's released).

I don't think the precise nature of the grading enhancements have yet been published. If you just publish the detail results for everyone for the previous season, this doesn't really add a great deal. If however, the plan is to emulate FIDE and publish results as received then this should speed things up. You would though have to try to reform league submissions, so that for example results were submitted every week or every month.

As leagues expect to finish by 31st May, a grading deadline of 30th June or 31st May makes little or no difference. 31st December is more sensible for leagues than 30th November because of the natural drop in activity over the Christmas and New Year period. Hastings and the other post Christmas tournaments like the London Junior, you would presumably consider to be the first events of the new grading period.

[Alex Holowczak]

As leagues expect to finish by 31st May, a grading deadline of 30th June or 31st May makes little or no difference. 31st December is more sensible for leagues than 30th November because of the natural drop in activity over the Christmas and New Year period. Hastings and the other post Christmas tournaments like the London Junior, you would presumably consider to be the first events of the new grading period.

This is pretty much aligned with what I think. If a congress - not a league - finishes after the cutoff, then it seems reasonable for them to go in the new list.

[Richard Thursby]

To backtrack several posts up this thread, a grade with an asterisk, (a/an * grade) is an unpublished grade based on too few games to qualify for category E.

[Alex Holowczak]

To backtrack several posts up this thread, a grade with an asterisk, (a/an * grade) is an unpublished grade based on too few games to qualify for category E.

When I said it I was referring to an X grade, but you're absolutely right to say that * does exist.

Does anyone pay much attention to the letters though, really?

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Does anyone pay much attention to the letters though, really?

I do, both for my own games and when looking at grades for sorting out team lists. When someone has a grade based on relatively few recent games, I look up the grades from the previous years for a better idea of their grading history and how the grade is changing over time.

[Roger de Coverly]

To backtrack several posts up this thread, a grade with an asterisk, (a/an * grade) is an unpublished grade based on too few games to qualify for category E.

Also used for juniors where they've been treated as new players.

I played a few * players in 2009-10. I did notice something odd about the relationship between the starred grade and the actual published for August 2010. The adult foreigners usually had a starred grade equal to the their actual E grades, whilst the English juniors differed between the * grade and the "earned" grade by what appeared to be the junior increment, it didn't seem completely consistent with their age.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Posting in this thread to try and work out how things this season (in terms of my grade) might have been affected if there had been two lists published. I'll give a brief run-down of the chess played and the dates.

- June 2010 (6 games)
- September 2010 (6 games)
- October 2010 (10 games)
- November 2010 (10 games)
- December 2010 (16 games)
- January 2011 (17 games)
- February 2011 (6 games)
- March 2011 (11 games)
- April 2011 (9 games so far)

What I'm trying to work out is whether playing the second half of the year with an updated grade will make any difference to the grade published at the end of the season? To calculate this, I need to know where the cut-off point would be, and how league results would be handled (held over until the end of the season, or submitted in two lots?). The calculation won't be exact, as the grades of my opponents in the second half of the season will be what they were this year, rather than what they might have been if updated halfway through the year, but it should give some idea.

As an example, I put the cut-off date after Hastings, and recalculated from there, and there was little change. After Hastings, I had played 57 games for a 'live' rating of 169 (compared to my May 2010 grade of 159). I then used that rating of 169 for my grade for the 34 games I had played since Hastings, and the 'live' rating is 166.89 (using the 169 grade) compared to 166.45 (for the 159 grade), so very little difference. But that is probably because I am playing enough games for the system to be able to produce an accurate average that reflects my actual playing strength.

Interestingly, when I recalculated with higher and lower grades, I found that recalculating at the point where the new grade was at a low point tended to push the subsequent performances down, and when using a higher updated grade, the subsequent performance tended to be higher. I think this is an effect of the 10 games (from around 90) that have been against players who are 40 grading points above or below me. I don't normally play that many ungraded players, or those graded a long way above or below me, and this season has been unusual for that.

[Roger de Coverly]

As an example, I put the cut-off date after Hastings, and recalculated from there, and there was little change

You aren't going to prove that much, unless you have your opponent's recalculated grades as well. So if you played someone at Hastings who was 140 in the actual "as at" 31st May list and who was 160 in a hypothetical "as at" 30th November list, that will make a difference. Obviously a bigger difference for the less active player.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

As an example, I put the cut-off date after Hastings, and recalculated from there, and there was little change

You aren't going to prove that much, unless you have your opponent's recalculated grades as well. So if you played someone at Hastings who was 140 in the actual "as at" 31st May list and who was 160 in a hypothetical "as at" 30th November list, that will make a difference. Obviously a bigger difference for the less active player.

Yeah. I think I get that now. Fiddling with things in spreadsheets is fun, but sometimes you need to stop and think first.

[Sebastian Stone]

As an example, I put the cut-off date after Hastings, and recalculated from there, and there was little change

You aren't going to prove that much, unless you have your opponent's recalculated grades as well. So if you played someone at Hastings who was 140 in the actual "as at" 31st May list and who was 160 in a hypothetical "as at" 30th November list, that will make a difference. Obviously a bigger difference for the less active player.

Yeah. I think I get that now. Fiddling with things in spreadsheets is fun, but sometimes you need to stop and think first.

I wonder how many chess players track their performance through the season this way.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

I wonder how many chess players track their performance through the season this way.

Probably not many. I should spend less time doing that (I only started a few years ago) and more time putting my games in a database so I can analyse them and improve (I used to enter games the same day as playing them, but now only bother to enter about 1 in every 3). One thing that tracking performance does is make clearer which periods of the year you may perform better in, and which events or leagues you may perform better in.

[Sebastian Stone]

I wonder how many chess players track their performance through the season this way.

Probably not many. I should spend less time doing that (I only started a few years ago) and more time putting my games in a database so I can analyse them and improve (I used to enter games the same day as playing them, but now only bother to enter about 1 in every 3). One thing that tracking performance does is make clearer which periods of the year you may perform better in, and which events or leagues you may perform better in.

My spreadsheet tells me to stay away from congresses.

I've just recently found my score book from my first season, so after playing through the games I've been planning gruesome deaths for the muppet who impersonated me 6 years ago.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

I've just recently found my score book from my first season, so after playing through the games I've been planning gruesome deaths for the muppet who impersonated me 6 years ago.

Getting a bit off-topic, but when I sat down one day to see what my past games would tell me about how my play has improved (or not), I made the mistake of starting with my very first games from the very first chess club I joined (this would be nearly 20 years ago now). After playing through 5 or 6 of those games, I was alternately shocked at how poor the play was (on both sides), and how some of the play wasn't that bad after all. But I swiftly concluded that it would be better to concentrate on games from the past ten years, and draw a veil over the first ten years (or maybe 15/5 split).

Incidentally, has any amateur player ever completed what is (for some) the mammoth task of entering all their games into a database from paper scoresheets or books? I keep meaning to do this, but never find the time. I'm sometimes tempted to pay someone to do it for me... I wonder if OCR software has been rejigged to work for reasonably legible scoresheets (trying to forestall here the legion of stories of illegible scoresheets)?