Post
by Alex Holowczak » Mon Dec 23, 2019 10:23 am
I've had a similar discussion with Keith in the past, and his argument is that he believes he is a better player than he was at his peak rating, but he is now below his peak rating.
If there were deflation in the UK, then whenever UK players play overseas, we would gain rating points. Luckily, there is a very recent tournament we can use as a yardstick - Sitges, in Barcelona, at which a large number of English players were present.
In Group A, English players had the following W-We and Rating Change:
Name W-We Rtg+/-
Gordon, Stephen J 1.02 10
Webb, Laurence E 0.56 11
Trent, Lawrence -1.28 -13
Eggleston, David J -0.77 -8
Kirk, Ezra -1.80 -18
Moreby, James -0.71 -28
Zheng, Harry Z 3.25 130
Dias, Savin -0.64 -26
Overall -0.37, but a rating gain of 58 thanks to Harry Zheng and his k=40! Even with Zheng's performance, that's only an increase of 7 Elo points per player.
In Group B:
Name W-We Rtg+/-
Kumar, Sanjit S 4.34 174
Zheng, Jerry Z 1.36 54
Dias, Ruwan 2.84 114
Moreby, Kurt 0.11 4
Overall +8.65, and a rating gain of 346, 74 per player.
Andrey Pichugov got 4/8 in Group B, and has a performance rating of 1678. A few weeks ago in London, he scored 1.5/4 against a field of 1502 (assuming they were all rated!). He doesn't even an ECF grade yet, and I don't think he will in January either unless he's played some other games in England so far this year (or he's playing LJCC next weekend).
There are regional variations on FIDE ratings, where in certain parts of the world they are better than others. Warwickshire has two juniors whose ability is almost equal; certainly close enough for the purpose of this. One got their first FIDE rating by playing in the European Youth Championship, and came back with a FIDE rating of about 1150. The other got their first FIDE rating by playing in a 9-round late summer tournament in Spain, and got a rating of over 1600. We see that again with Sanjit Kumar, who got his initial rating in a Continental/World event - I forget precisely which - and look at his W-We in Sitges.
What we know about Spain is that they FIDE-rate all of their tournaments. In England, we FIDE-rate some but by all means not all, particularly compared with parts of Eastern Europe. Our FIDE-rating coverage in the lower part of the rating system is particularly poor. So I think "deflation" might be part of this oft-quoted imagined concept of "the FIDE-rating system not working", usually when adults grumble at juniors with FIDE ratings that are much too low. Actually, if we submitted more of our chess for FIDE rating in England, then I think this problem would slowly disappear; so to some extent the same adults who don't want to FIDE-rate more sections are the ones who are helping to cause the problem.
What happened in Sitges is exactly what I would expect to see from English players playing in Spain. Our players at the top are in the right place, but the ratings of players in the 1000-1800 bracket are much higher than English players of a similar standard. So the players at the top scored about par, but the players at the bottom gained lots of rating points.
While 2019 Keith Arkell may be objectively better than 1999 Keith Arkell, lots of people have just gone past Keith in the intervening 20 years. I think that's why his rating isn't as high as it once was.