ECF Grading Proposals

[Paul Buswell]

Assuming the same process as last year, ECF will be invoicing leagues and clubs (for clubs' internal results) for players who (a) played more games than permitted for a non-member; (b) were not ECF members at (Junior) Bronze or higher.
Invoicing should start as soon as possible after the grading team close results for the July 2019 list, and will be based on membership status as at 30 June 2019.
'More games than permitted' will be calculated separately within each league or club, and will not be aggregated across them; the converse will apply.
Invoices will be between the ECF and the league or club concerned, as it will have been that league or club that submitted results for grading.

[Mike Truran]

More detailed consultation results by age band and membership category now on the ECF website.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Link: https://www.englishchess.org.uk/grading ... n-results/

What were the overall results of the consultation (i.e. overall percentages)?

Links to earlier ECF website posts (might be helpful):

https://www.englishchess.org.uk/monthly ... -proposal/
https://www.englishchess.org.uk/propose ... n-grading/

(Is there any way to browse the ECF news posts, or can you only see the first page and have to search to get beyond that?)

[Mike Truran]

Errr......

The overall results are in the same post.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

I can't see them. What I see is this text:

"The Grading Consultation closed last Saturday morning, and there were more than 900 responses to the consultation overall. The questions were —

1) Do you agree with the Board’s decision to move to monthly grading?
2) Do you agree with the Board’s proposal to use a four-figure Elo style system?

Detailed results were as follows —"

And then a table of the break-down of the detailed results (five age ranges, four membership levels; yes/no for monthly grading and yes/no for four-figure number as percentages for both sets). Can't see any overall results.

[Mike Truran]

Ah, the totals seem to have been removed when the post was updated. Anyway, 72% in favour of monthly grading, 80% in favour of four figures.

[John Swain]

This survey is based on more than 900 responses, which seems to be a healthy sample size.

However, it would be helpful and usual to see the sample sizes for each group displayed alongside the percentages. It would also be helpful to have the number of ECF members in each category to see what proportion has responded.

[Ian Thompson]

More detailed consultation results by age band and membership category now on the ECF website.

It's a bit late now, I know, but it would be interesting to see a breakdown by activity as well. Is there a correlation between number of games played per year and preference for monthly grading? I'd guess there is. The follow-on question is then whether the 900 respondents are skewed towards more active players.

[David Robertson]

You'd think the over-65s would be mad keen on monthly grades. After all, you wouldn't want to go on the Big Check Out without knowing your final grade

[Kevin Thurlow]

"You'd think the over-65s would be mad keen on monthly grades. After all, you wouldn't want to go on the Big Check Out without knowing your final grade"

A good point - the former Chairman of Redhill Chess Club (Peter Burrows) was usually graded at 140ish in his early 80s, he then had a battle with cancer, which he won, but his grade dropped to 120ish, not surprisingly. For all the next season, he got good match results, partly as Surrey used a "10-point rule" to decide board orders, so he was playing too low in the team. He was playing better in the internal competitions as well. As the season ended, he died suddenly of a heart attack, so never saw his final published grading of 140ish. He must have known he was doing well again of course.

I doubt he would have cared much about the grade, he just played chess, but others do care...

[Nick Grey]

it was nice to play a game of chess this week - so i'm 2-0 up on the season in games v joint u160 captains. then again he was ok for board 6
With 2 games this w/e with opponents likely to be more than 60 points higher.

I know and knew a lot of o-65s that do not care at all for monthly grading & i'm not going to volunteer to assist.

[Gavin Hughes]

My 2ps worth on this is i think monthly is good because over 6 months at any age form can vary radically. The problem will be how do league managements cope? Some leagues are thorough, updated quickly, others a bit more lackadaisical mainly due to the organisers wider commitments and compunction. These will need support.

[Kevin Thurlow]

"The problem will be how do league managements cope?"

And tournaments, and players. You enter a tournament as you just qualify for a lower section, then go up two points, so you have to play in a higher section. The tournament organizers have to check all the gradings when a new list comes out, and players find they either have to go up a section, or could have entered a lower section. It's more work and running tournaments is hard enough already.

The easiest way is to say for an October tournament, we will use the August list. But then that rather renders the later list(s) redundant. How often will the latest list be used?

[Roger de Coverly]

How often will the latest list be used?

Tournament organisers in the context of monthly lists will have to define which list or lists they use for eligibility and whether they will use the same list for pairings and grading prize eligibility. Kidlington, for example, which takes place early February uses the list from the previous year for everything except grading in the next list, rather the most recently published January one.

Those running FIDE rated tournaments already have the problem of dealing with monthly changes.

The ECF seem to be steaming ahead with the proposal. Having neglected to put it on the agenda for discussion at the April Council meeting, it's only not going to happen if or when it fails. But arguably the July/August traditional list will be produced as usual and can be used for six months or even a year if nothing else comes out.

This is what the Board are saying in their February minutes.

https://www.englishchess.org.uk/wp-cont ... y-2019.pdf

9.2. Update on consultations with other UK chess associations (DT))
The ICU have responded to DT's request for information, and have indicated that their system is based on public domain software and that an implementation would require 3 roles:
a.Ruby on Rails Programmer
b.Unix Sysadmin
c.Requirements/ product manager
We can identify volunteers for roles a and b. DT is planning to contact UKCC to identify volunteers with Ruby on Rails experience.
9.3. Progress with regard to monthly grading
As above the proposed approach is to implement a version of the ICU system based on the MIT public domain software and with an implementation team as above.

"Ruby on Rails" may not be a familiar name in programming, system or database languages.
Here's the wiki about it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_on_Rails

ICU is Irish Chess Union, so the ECF is proposing to adapt or adopt the Irish rating system.

[Alex Holowczak]

And tournaments, and players. You enter a tournament as you just qualify for a lower section, then go up two points, so you have to play in a higher section. The tournament organizers have to check all the gradings when a new list comes out, and players find they either have to go up a section, or could have entered a lower section. It's more work and running tournaments is hard enough already.

Every FIDE-rated event in England with FIDE-rated lower sections and their entrants seem to cope with this major crisis befalling them.

If you're using a good pairings program, it's trivial for the organiser to update the ratings every month because the feature is built in.

If organisers are still shuffling cards around, then they're already making it more difficult for themselves to run the tournament efficiently, so you'll forgive me if I can't muster much sympathy for them.