English Chess Forum

I rarely play in open events especially around london due to their being so many players whose rating could put them in the bottom
Tournament at most. This means i basically get very few games of value.

Hence it is a breath of fresh air to sea an organiser adding a minimum rating band in an u2300 event of 2000

The event is below https://chess-results.com/tnr882587.aspx?lan=1.

I wish all organisers would do the same. I feel this would do the following

1) more stronger players would play knowing they would get better games

2) the massively underrating juniors would have to play in their graded section and if they are that underrated they will gain lots of points and have a more realistic grade when they get to the open events.

As i am an ECF director i wont reply to any posts, keen to hear views

Open for discussion

RobWillmoth wrote: ↑

Mon Feb 19, 2024 7:48 pm

The event is below https://chess-results.com/tnr882587.aspx?lan=1.

The experiment doesn't appear to have been a great success. I'm not surprised.

I think this is a fantastic idea, right now the grading limit of a 2000 minimum might be just too high because somewhere like 90% of the players in the country are sub 2000 these days. after the rating fix comes and there are a few more points back in the pool i could see it being really popular and a fine incentive for lower rated players to push for those higher numbers if they want to play opens, not simply treat them as an entirely risk free points farm..

RobWillmoth wrote: ↑

Mon Feb 19, 2024 7:48 pm

Hence it is a breath of fresh air to sea an organiser adding a minimum rating band in an u2300 event of 2000

Outside the London area, there aren't really enough players over 2000 to make such events financially viable. Take the new Wells Congress.
https://wellschess.co.uk/entry-tables/

That currently has 27 entries in the Open where players would need to be under1900 to play in the Major. Only 9 are above 2000. If you imposed a 2300 upper limit as well, that reduces to 8.

Tournaments where only the top section is FIDE rated can act as an incentive for lower rated players to enter the Open.

NickFaulks wrote: ↑

Tue Feb 20, 2024 12:13 am

RobWillmoth wrote: ↑

Mon Feb 19, 2024 7:48 pm

The event is below https://chess-results.com/tnr882587.aspx?lan=1.

The experiment doesn't appear to have been a great success. I'm not surprised.

Without the rating limit we might not have seen the rare spectacle of the top seed finishing last and the 9th seed (out of 10) finishing 1st=

RobWillmoth wrote: ↑

Mon Feb 19, 2024 7:48 pm

...2) the massively underrating juniors would have to play in their graded section and if they are that underrated they will gain lots of points and have a more realistic grade when they get to the open events...

Except this doesn't really work out that way. Not unless you have the time and wilingness to put your kid in 40-50 tournament games per year all the while avoiding playing other underrated juniors. For reference my eldest played around 24 classical rated games last year. Twelve against mostly other underrated kids with a performance around 1550. And twelve against adults with a performance of around 1850. Ending the year with a rating of 1700. But their current performance level versus adults is now probably closer to 1950. As such I am going to put them in the few tournaments they play a year in the section where the average player is around 1950 otherwise I am just wasting their time and quite frankly the time of their opponents (if the opponents care more about the quality of the game than their rating). At some point that is going to mean placing my child in the Open Section. That is not to say I don't feel your pain but your pain is felt by everyone who has to face underrated juniors including juniors themselves. The ELO system itself just isn't functional for the predicament we find ourselves currently in.

"(if the opponents care more about the quality of the game than their rating)"

I suspect the former are a small minority. I don't care about ratings any more. I even celebrated when Danny Gormally published annotations of his win against me at Guernsey, as I felt it was a compliment.

As I have said many times before, ratings don't really mean much, and I doubt the ECF system is any worse than other systems.

You are right that ratings don't mean anything in the wider context of life but for the 99% of players who never actually make any money from chess their rating is the only thing they ever have to show for their toils so you can kind of see why that arbitrary figure can be so highly prized and people annoyed at being put into no win situations by massively underrated opponents.

A chess rating is not a measure of strength. It is a way of comparing players at a point in time.

Therefore, it is equally valid to say that juniors are not under-rated but the players complaining about them are, in fact, over-rated!!

At this point I duck and log out!

Alex, the juniors already believe that - but there's a third possibility, that juniors are on average under-rated and adults are on average over-rated, which is more statistically consistent.

Coming back to this wouldn't having some modified accelerated pairing process for the Open section solve some of the issues associated with large variations of playing strength. For a common 5 round tournament it would seem like an added point for the first round, and a half point for the second round, and then regular pairings after that would work reasonably well.

Brian Beattie wrote: Coming back to this wouldn't having some modified accelerated pairing process for the Open section solve some of the issues associated with large variations of playing strength. For a common 5 round tournament it would seem like an added point for the first round, and a half point for the second round, and then regular pairings after that would work reasonably well.

FIDE came up with what was called the "Baku method" which was somewhat similar. You only need to use it in a 5 round tournament when the count exceeds 32. In practice, because of half point byes, you can go a bit further without acceleration. Arguably this should prevent the problem of two players scoring 100%.

Players in an Open should arguably anticipate meeting players over 400 points above them. Equally if they are the titled players, they run the risk of playing someone 400 points below or more when there's no minimum rating.

We have yet to find out whether the FIDE revaluation of adding 400 points at 1000 rating and proportionate changes all the way to 2000 will reduce or eliminate rating mismatches.

If you want to run over 2000 events, fine but please call the section O2000 not "Open".