English Chess Forum

Got a bit bored of the funding arguments, to be honest, so I thought I'd ask another question!

I'd rather this didn't turn into some 50-page debate - regular forumites will already be well-versed in the arguments - but I wondered what a straw poll would reveal.

This is nothing official! It's merely a question to see what the consensus is. I'm not interested in issues regarding implementation, technical/IT aspects...

Simply, which method do you prefer?

You do realised you immediately posted in the funding argument thread after posting: "got a bit bored of the funding arguments"?

Christopher Kreuzer wrote:You do realised you immediately posted in the funding argument thread after posting: "got a bit bored of the funding arguments"?

Yep. My posting there doesn't make me any less bored of them.

The poll's a bit misleading. Elo is a calculation method, mentioning FIDE muddies the waters. You would have both a national Elo and an international Elo which would probably differ.

Although not a constitutional issue, were the ECF ever to propose this, I would hope it would insist on a 75% vote in favour before it changed.

Roger de Coverly wrote:Although not a constitutional issue, were the ECF ever to propose this, I would hope it would insist on a 75% vote in favour before it changed.

Why? If the rules say they need a simple majority, a simple majority is what they'll ask for. They can't make up rules on voting percentages on the hoof just because they want to.

Alex Holowczak wrote: Why? If the rules say they need a simple majority, a simple majority is what they'll ask for. They can't make up rules on voting percentages on the hoof just because they want to.

You ask for a vote on whether to proceed with a project to make the change, with the caveat that if it doesn't get 75% support, you drop the project. Pretty essential on something that everyone has an opinion on, like grading.

Roger de Coverly wrote:You ask for a vote on whether to proceed with a project to make the change, with the caveat that if it doesn't get 75% support, you drop the project. Pretty essential on something that everyone has an opinion on, like grading.

No Roger, you do what the rules say you have to do, rather than make up your own.

Anyway, I'm not interested in that argument.

Results are interesting so far...

The ECF grading and ELO rating systems are so different, I'm not quite sure why replacing one with the other would be considered. Just as you said that different congresses provide different things for players, so different rating and grading systems also provide different things.

Roger de Coverly wrote:The poll's a bit misleading. Elo is a calculation method, mentioning FIDE muddies the waters. You would have both a national Elo and an international Elo which would probably differ.

Not necessarily, you could just drop the ECF rating and promote FIDE Elo rating. If the FIDE Elo rating covers the vast majority of chess players in the country, you dont need a national rating anymore. So the ECF rating could actually be replaced the the FIDE Elo rating.

Paolo Casaschi wrote:

Roger de Coverly wrote:The poll's a bit misleading. Elo is a calculation method, mentioning FIDE muddies the waters. You would have both a national Elo and an international Elo which would probably differ.

Not necessarily, you could just drop the ECF rating and promote FIDE Elo rating. If the FIDE Elo rating covers the vast majority of chess players in the country, you dont need a national rating anymore. So the ECF rating could actually be replaced the the FIDE Elo rating.

Presumably it would be possible to predict whether grades would inflate or deflate if English chess was solely internationally rated. Anyone have a steer as to which way it would go?

Paul Sanders wrote:

Paolo Casaschi wrote:

Roger de Coverly wrote:The poll's a bit misleading. Elo is a calculation method, mentioning FIDE muddies the waters. You would have both a national Elo and an international Elo which would probably differ.

Not necessarily, you could just drop the ECF rating and promote FIDE Elo rating. If the FIDE Elo rating covers the vast majority of chess players in the country, you dont need a national rating anymore. So the ECF rating could actually be replaced the the FIDE Elo rating.

Presumably it would be possible to predict whether grades would inflate or deflate if English chess was solely internationally rated. Anyone have a steer as to which way it would go?

I'll go with deflate. The ECF grading system has a built-in mechanism for ensuring improving juniors don't deflate the rest of the country too much, whereas the FIDE rating system does not.

Paolo Casaschi wrote:

Roger de Coverly wrote:The poll's a bit misleading. Elo is a calculation method, mentioning FIDE muddies the waters. You would have both a national Elo and an international Elo which would probably differ.

Not necessarily, you could just drop the ECF rating and promote FIDE Elo rating. If the FIDE Elo rating covers the vast majority of chess players in the country, you dont need a national rating anymore. So the ECF rating could actually be replaced the the FIDE Elo rating.

You can't quite do that. Games would need to fit to certain time parameters (e.g. 40 moves in the first time period, minimum 4 hours for players above 2200). Very few leagues in England do that.

Paolo Casaschi wrote: Not necessarily, you could just drop the ECF rating and promote FIDE Elo rating. If the FIDE Elo rating covers the vast majority of chess players in the country, you dont need a national rating anymore. So the ECF rating could actually be replaced the the FIDE Elo rating.

This isn't possible in England because FIDE regulations require a minimum four hour session for most practical purposes.

If you don't have evening leagues or tournaments with sessions of less than four hours, then it is possible, as France and others have demonstrated. There's a downside, that it leaves you vulnerable should FIDE decide to quadruple the price.

Christopher Kreuzer wrote:The ECF grading and ELO rating systems are so different, I'm not quite sure why replacing one with the other would be considered.

I'm just on about replacing the algorithm with which we calculate our national system. We'd still have national/international ratings, but the national ones would be calculated differently.

Alex Holowczak wrote:

Christopher Kreuzer wrote:The ECF grading and ELO rating systems are so different, I'm not quite sure why replacing one with the other would be considered.

I'm just on about replacing the algorithm with which we calculate our national system. We'd still have national/international ratings, but the national ones would be calculated differently.

Yeah, that's why I said ELO, rather than FIDE. But the Clarke system and the ELO system do different things, so why ask people to replace one with the other?