January 2014 Grades

General discussions about ratings.
Nick Thomas
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Re: January 2014 Grades

Post by Nick Thomas » Mon Jan 27, 2014 8:07 pm

David Blower wrote:My best ever grade of 101! (Finally over 100!)
Made my day, well done mate!

Neill Cooper
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Re: January 2014 Grades

Post by Neill Cooper » Tue Jan 28, 2014 6:52 am

Jonathan Bryant wrote:
Neill Cooper wrote:Thanks to everyone who worked on this to get it out overnight.
Most of my 12 players with their first ever grade will be pleased, and they will now stop hassling me!
They will ... for six months.
In six months time the list comes out in the school holidays so I should be safe! But by then there will be about 70 graded players at the school.

Neill Cooper
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Re: January 2014 Grades

Post by Neill Cooper » Tue Jan 28, 2014 6:54 am

Mike Gunn wrote:Looking up individual grades is OK but trying to produce any sort of list (players in a club, games played) produces that message for me.
You can just click on 'Downloads' and then download the whole lot as a file.
It might not be as easy for listing all players of a club but once downloaded you don't have to use the website.

David Sedgwick
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Re: January 2014 Grades

Post by David Sedgwick » Tue Jan 28, 2014 7:52 am

Sean Hewitt wrote:There are a handful of events each grading list which miss the deadline. When they do eventually get submitted, they go into the next list which, for many players, completely distorts their grade. Any suggestions as to what the ECF should do with late submissions?
This was occasionally a problem in the days of annual grading lists, but I suspect that it occurs more frequently with the January list than with the July one.

I can only repeat my long standing suggestion, which was admittedly originally made for different reasons.

The July list should revert to being a proper annual list, based on all a player's games in the 12 month period (or on the last 30 games if fewer than 30 were played in the 12 months). The January list should be an interim list and its existence should have no bearing on the grade calculations for the July list.

Mike Gunn
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Re: January 2014 Grades

Post by Mike Gunn » Tue Jan 28, 2014 9:48 am

I support David's suggestion. The current system is uneven in its treatment of games played, e.g. for people with category A grades the countback of 30 games method means that games played in the months before the deadlines get extra weighting in the calculation of grades (the results will be used in calculations in both January and July) in contrast to games played earlier in the 6 month periods.

In my opinion this is not logical - Richard Clarke designed a method suited to calculation of grades every year and the current tinkering means that grades are less accurate than they could be.

Angus French
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Re: January 2014 Grades

Post by Angus French » Tue Jan 28, 2014 9:52 am

I agree with David and Mike. I think an 'A' grade should be derived from all the results of the last 12 months, not the most recent 30.

MartinCarpenter
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Re: January 2014 Grades

Post by MartinCarpenter » Tue Jan 28, 2014 10:24 am

Definitely agree with this. Maybe not less accurate in aggregate but it does create a lot of noise which isn't ideal.

Especially for people playing >30 games/year. Their grades should be very stable indeed, but with this throwing away of the 'extra' games they can end up really quite volatile on a 6 monthly basis.

The whole arrangment is of course, not terribly logical. Why are those games being thrown away? They're very logical data points.

The precise game countback thing is something else which I rather suspect is causing random fluctuations rather than anything useful. Very hard to think of an objective reason to use precisely the 5 most recent games rather than 5 games at the average strength of that season.

Trefor Owens
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Re: January 2014 Grades

Post by Trefor Owens » Tue Jan 28, 2014 10:57 am

Angus French wrote:I agree with David and Mike. I think an 'A' grade should be derived from all the results of the last 12 months, not the most recent 30.
I agree too, makes much more sense rather than discarding games that may nave been played only the day before to make the magic 30
Having said that I just achieved my highest ever grade at the age of 54, maybe I can keep on playing at 'my level' for as long as Korchnoi
:)

Kevin Thurlow
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Re: January 2014 Grades

Post by Kevin Thurlow » Tue Jan 28, 2014 12:46 pm

"Richard Clarke designed a method suited to calculation of grades every year and the current tinkering means that grades are less accurate than they could be."

Richard Clarke also said that it was only a guide and it was wrong to take the grades too seriously!

MartinCarpenter
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Re: January 2014 Grades

Post by MartinCarpenter » Tue Jan 28, 2014 1:06 pm

Very wise! Still, the slight worry with the current ECF system is that it looks like a couple of decisions have been made which promote random fluctuations without any corresponding benefits. Worthy of modest questioning.

In fact Jon Griffith (who does the Yorkshire live grades) doesn't really agree with the idea that grades should be as close/stable an estimator of strength as is possible. He thinks the benefits from driving people to take more interest in their grades etc from them changing outweight the extra randomness of the live grades.

That's actually entirely reasonable as an atitude I suppose, although the ECF could only really argue it if there were moving to 3 monthly lists or faster over time. Even then you'd probably want to do fully stable full yearly lists.

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Jon Mahony
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Re: January 2014 Grades

Post by Jon Mahony » Tue Jan 28, 2014 1:53 pm

I certainly prefer my new ECF grade of 140, to my current live YCA grade of 127 - no more near-bottom seed in the Intermediates section, with 3 blacks and playing the top seeds in the first 2 rounds.

Mind you I’ll be bottom seed of the Major in certain congresses now :shock:
"When you see a good move, look for a better one!" - Lasker

Dragoljub Sudar
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Re: January 2014 Grades

Post by Dragoljub Sudar » Tue Jan 28, 2014 7:18 pm

Angus French wrote:I agree with David and Mike. I think an 'A' grade should be derived from all the results of the last 12 months, not the most recent 30.
Totally agree. I want my July grade to reflect all my results from the past 'season'.

The January grades serve no useful purpose. The county championships use the July grades for eligibility. Only 5 players in my club played more than 15 games between July - Dec (8 players played fewer than 10) meaning that the other 20 players have a January grade based on the majority of their games taken from previous periods.

There's a player in my club who's July 2014 grade will not include any of his British Championship results meaning his grade will not reflect his whole season's efforts, and that doesn't make sense.

Alex Holowczak
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Re: January 2014 Grades

Post by Alex Holowczak » Tue Jan 28, 2014 7:27 pm

Dragoljub Sudar wrote:The January grades serve no useful purpose.
Some useful purposes:
(1) "The county championships use the July grades for eligibility." The rules allow captains to use the January grades for board order purposes for specific players within the 10-point rule if needs be. This happened on approximately 30 occasions last year, from memory. I take the counter-argument that the competition survived when you didn't have this option.
(2) The National Club Championship is using the January 2014 grades for meeting the average grade requirement. (So is BUCA for seeding purposes.) I take the counter-argument that the events would be fine if you used the July 2013 grades.
(3) Other Congresses, are using the January 2014 grading list to determine who plays in which section. Blackpool isn't, and I don't understand why. It's generally seen to be favourable.
(4) Many ungraded players who have acquired grades 6 months earlier than they otherwise would have, which is very useful above in (2) and (3) - it saves having to estimate some players. I take the counter-argument, that people will lose grades, but they're less likely to enter the tournaments in (2) and (3) anyway.

Anyway, the above shows four reasons why I find the list has a useful purpose, and why I appreciate it's existence.

Richard Bates
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Re: January 2014 Grades

Post by Richard Bates » Tue Jan 28, 2014 7:34 pm

Alex Holowczak wrote:
Dragoljub Sudar wrote:The January grades serve no useful purpose.
Some useful purposes:
(1) "The county championships use the July grades for eligibility." The rules allow captains to use the January grades for board order purposes for specific players within the 10-point rule if needs be. This happened on approximately 30 occasions last year, from memory. I take the counter-argument that the competition survived when you didn't have this option.
(2) The National Club Championship is using the January 2014 grades for meeting the average grade requirement. (So is BUCA for seeding purposes.) I take the counter-argument that the events would be fine if you used the July 2013 grades.
(3) Other Congresses, are using the January 2014 grading list to determine who plays in which section. Blackpool isn't, and I don't understand why. It's generally seen to be favourable.
(4) Many ungraded players who have acquired grades 6 months earlier than they otherwise would have, which is very useful above in (2) and (3) - it saves having to estimate some players. I take the counter-argument, that people will lose grades, but they're less likely to enter the tournaments in (2) and (3) anyway.

Anyway, the above shows four reasons why I find the list has a useful purpose, and why I appreciate it's existence.
As David says - the January grades can serve a useful purpose as an interim list. The problem is that because of the way the system operates their existence makes the July grades less accurate.

Paul Dargan
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Re: January 2014 Grades

Post by Paul Dargan » Tue Jan 28, 2014 9:33 pm

I was wondering about the countback system and the impact it has today, while walking between offices ...

If people have played 30+ games in the grading period, then I see the benefit of basing their grade on those games only and ignosring older games within the last 12 months.

Where they've played >30 in the season but <30 in the last 6 months could we either (a) use the lot, or; (b) use all from the last 6 months and make-up to 30 with an averge from th previous 6 months? Either approach gets round the 'some reults get counted twice' issue.

I was certainly nervous about creating some bizarre behaviours to make sure you play 30 games to get rid of ome bad results - but actually I think there is more incentive with the current arrangement ot try and manage the number of games that you carry forward?

Paul

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