Six monthly grades

General discussions about ratings.
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Adam Raoof
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Re: Six monthly grades

Post by Adam Raoof » Thu Jul 14, 2011 10:51 pm

The grading list is due (provisionally) 23rd - 24th July

Statis in halfgames from Richard Haddrell: -

2009-10 2010-11
league 120,458 / 121,354
congress 110,784 / 116,866
club internal 29,490 / 29,268
tournaments 10,896 / 12,872
oddments 1,558 / 1,042
DMs 139 / 302
Total 273,325 / 281,704

Chess in England is growing!
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Paul Cooksey

Re: Six monthly grades

Post by Paul Cooksey » Thu Jul 14, 2011 10:52 pm

Alex Holowczak wrote:
Paul Cooksey wrote:I assume ECF is more volatile than Elo for more frequent lists. Has this been discussed already?
Alex Holowczak wrote:By whom?
I meant on the forum, I was inviting a link to a previous thread if there was one.
Alex Holowczak wrote:It has been discussed by the grading team. They're aware of these issues.
Did they publish their thinking? I'm not complaining, I'm just interested.
Alex Holowczak wrote:What I don't understand is why there was barely a murmur when this was up for vote at Council, yet now the decision has been made there's a lot more fuss about it.
Are you seriously opening the "is the ECF accountable and democratic" can here? :)

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Christopher Kreuzer
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Re: Six monthly grades

Post by Christopher Kreuzer » Thu Jul 14, 2011 10:54 pm

Adam Raoof wrote:Chess in England is growing!
I make that around a 3% increase. Can that be compared to previous years for long-term trends over (say) a decade? Also, what is the change in the number of players? i.e. Is it the same number of players playing more games, or more people playing less games each?

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Re: Six monthly grades

Post by Alex Holowczak » Thu Jul 14, 2011 10:59 pm

Paul Cooksey wrote:
Alex Holowczak wrote:By whom?
I meant on the forum, I was inviting a link to a previous thread if there was one.
Oh, that I don't know. Probably, but I don't know where...
Paul Cooksey wrote:
Alex Holowczak wrote:It has been discussed by the grading team. They're aware of these issues.
Did they publish their thinking? I'm not complaining, I'm just interested.
No, but I'm sure you could fire off an e-mail to Howard Grist if you wanted to know. He's usually very helpful. You could also e-mail Richard Haddrell, but it might be best to leave it until the grades are published...
Paul Cooksey wrote:
Alex Holowczak wrote:What I don't understand is why there was barely a murmur when this was up for vote at Council, yet now the decision has been made there's a lot more fuss about it.
Are you seriously opening the "is the ECF accountable and democratic" can here? :)
No, I'm wondering why there are questions about it at all. Given Council voted in favour of having more lists almost unanimously - I can't recall anyone being against - it does seem strange to me that it's being challenged. Whether you think the current structure is democratic or not, the decision was as near unanimous as makes no difference...

Ah well. :)

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Re: Six monthly grades

Post by Alex Holowczak » Thu Jul 14, 2011 11:02 pm

Adam Raoof wrote:The grading list is due (provisionally) 23rd - 24th July

Statis in halfgames from Richard Haddrell: -

2009-10 2010-11
league 120,458 / 121,354
congress 110,784 / 116,866
club internal 29,490 / 29,268
tournaments 10,896 / 12,872
oddments 1,558 / 1,042
DMs 139 / 302
Total 273,325 / 281,704

Chess in England is growing!
That's all well and good ... but do we have a raw number of total players? I'd be interested to know whether fewer players are playing more games, or whether more players are playing the same number of games each.

Paul Cooksey

Re: Six monthly grades

Post by Paul Cooksey » Thu Jul 14, 2011 11:13 pm

Alex Holowczak wrote:I'm wondering why there are questions about it at all
I can only speak for myself. On hearing this was happening, I was quite pleased. I like the idea of more responsive grading, and hope six monthly is a stepping stone to monthly. I imagine grading is quicker and easier than it has ever been and continues to improve.

But I do have some doubts about whether ECF could handle monthly, if it needs a 30 game period for reasonable accuracy. If it can great, otherwise there is Elo. I'll concede it is not a discussion likely to fascinate the average man in the street. But I though on a chess forum in a thread about grading it might be worth talking about.

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Re: Six monthly grades

Post by Alex Holowczak » Thu Jul 14, 2011 11:30 pm

Paul Cooksey wrote:
Alex Holowczak wrote:I'm wondering why there are questions about it at all
I can only speak for myself. On hearing this was happening, I was quite pleased. I like the idea of more responsive grading, and hope six monthly is a stepping stone to monthly. I imagine grading is quicker and easier than it has ever been and continues to improve.

But I do have some doubts about whether ECF could handle monthly, if it needs a 30 game period for reasonable accuracy. If it can great, otherwise there is Elo. I'll concede it is not a discussion likely to fascinate the average man in the street. But I though on a chess forum in a thread about grading it might be worth talking about.
That's probably fair enough. I'm just used to several people questioning why we're having it, when the time to do so was 12 months ago...

You're right that the grading system works better when it has more games per player in it. Grades are a mean, so this is fairly intuitive.

You don't need 30 games in the period; you can go back over previous periods to get to 30. You can theoretically have games rolling in and out as months go by if we have monthly grading lists.

Some graders don't publish the dates of games, or if they do they get the wrong dates. I suspect there will be complaints when all the information is published online on July 23/24, assuming this will have the new layout with more information on it provided by Carl. There will be questions along the lines of why their league games don't have colours when their congresses do. The reason of course is that the grader hasn't supplied them, which is possibly because he wasn't supplied that information in the first place.

My personal preference is that we switch to an Elo-based system.

Paul Cooksey

Re: Six monthly grades

Post by Paul Cooksey » Thu Jul 14, 2011 11:46 pm

Alex Holowczak wrote:You don't need 30 games in the period; you can go back over previous periods to get to 30. You can theoretically have games rolling in and out as months go by if we have monthly grading lists..
This is at the heart of the point about volatility. Replacing a single game can give a 6 point shift in ECF. Most players are inconsistent, so a 15 point swing when a good tournament replaces a bad one in the rolling period might not be uncommon.

There seems to be wailing and gnashing of teeth if a junior suspected to be 125 is in the under 120. So if more regular lists are an aim, Elo might be necessary.

In passing, I do not see anything about grading in the ECF strategy in Chessmoves. Which is odd, because it seems to be a thing everyone values.

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Re: Six monthly grades

Post by Alex Holowczak » Fri Jul 15, 2011 12:06 am

Paul Cooksey wrote:In passing, I do not see anything about grading in the ECF strategy in Chessmoves. Which is odd, because it seems to be a thing everyone values.
At the moment, I suspect this is because the likely authors of such a piece are otherwise occupied.

What would you like to know? Perhaps I could put the questions to the grading team, and send it on as a Graders Q & A for the next ChessMoves.

Roger de Coverly
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Re: Six monthly grades

Post by Roger de Coverly » Fri Jul 15, 2011 12:10 am

Alex Holowczak wrote: No, I'm wondering why there are questions about it at all. Given Council voted in favour of having more lists almost unanimously - I can't recall anyone being against - it does seem strange to me that it's being challenged. Whether you think the current structure is democratic or not, the decision was as near unanimous as makes no difference...
Council was prepared to vote in favour of six monthly grading as a strategic direction with the tactical details to be worked out later. I think we are still waiting for the tactical analysis. Feedback loops between Council representatives and the bodies they represent are not what they might be. I would imagine a Facebook page per rep explaining to anyone who cared to read it, where the ECF was going and why, would be the exception rather than the rule.

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Re: Six monthly grades

Post by Roger de Coverly » Fri Jul 15, 2011 12:16 am

Alex Holowczak wrote:What would you like to know? Perhaps I could put the questions to the grading team, and send it on as a Graders Q & A for the next ChessMoves.
If the system had been in place for January 2011,
(a) what would the January 2011 grades have been?
(b) what would the July 2011 grades be?

From that, spreadsheet hackers can deduce whether there are significant individual changes and whether overall the changes are deflationary, neutral or inflationary.

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Re: Six monthly grades

Post by Alex Holowczak » Fri Jul 15, 2011 9:47 am

Bob Clark wrote:
Adam Raoof wrote:The grading list is due (provisionally) 23rd - 24th July

Statis in halfgames from Richard Haddrell: -

2009-10 2010-11
league 120,458 / 121,354
congress 110,784 / 116,866
club internal 29,490 / 29,268
tournaments 10,896 / 12,872
oddments 1,558 / 1,042
DMs 139 / 302
Total 273,325 / 281,704

Chess in England is growing!
I see a decline in internal club games, when we move to a membership scheme there should be an increase in these games
A decline of 222 games out of 29,490 is about a 0.75% decrease, so while it is a decline, it's as near as makes no difference. I agree with you, though.

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Re: Six monthly grades

Post by Roger de Coverly » Fri Jul 15, 2011 9:58 am

Adam Raoof wrote: congress 110,784 / 116,866

This year has seen the cancellation of a Congress (Ilford) which has been running in the same area and same time slot for fifty years. So the raw net numbers must be obscuring a pattern of both growth and decline. One cut would be between Fide rated and not, another would be geographic, a third would be Bank Holiday v ordinary weekend, yet another would be domestic players v international.

John Charman
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Re: Six monthly grades

Post by John Charman » Fri Jul 15, 2011 10:35 am

Warren Kingston wrote:
John Charman wrote:Here in Norfolk we have taken the decision that the July grades will be used for any Norfolk competitions for the whole year where grading is used as eligibility for entry to a particular section of a tournament or to select board order in a match etc.
Jaycee, is this Jan to Dec, AGM to AGM?
Our competitions year runs from 1st September one year to 30th June the next.

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Adam Raoof
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Re: Six monthly grades

Post by Adam Raoof » Fri Jul 15, 2011 10:57 am

I was, as usual, too eager to post to the Forum. Those were provisional figures, and Richard Haddrell will provide more detail when the list is out.

See the bottom half of http://www.sccu.ndo.co.uk/grad.htm, which when updated with this year's figures will answer some of the detailed questions people are asking here.

You can identify new events and events which have disappeared by comparing

Events Received for Grading 2009-10 - http://www.sccu.ndo.co.uk/events0910.htm

and

Events Received for Grading 2010-11 - http://www.sccu.ndo.co.uk/events1011.htm

"Earlier years also provided" (RJH)
Adam Raoof IA, IO
Chess England Events - https://chessengland.com/
The Chess Circuit - https://chesscircuit.substack.com/
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