More specifically, I was musing whether it would be possible in non-junior FIDE Swiss tournaments to prevent juniors being paired against each others.
Whilst I do appreciate the differences in opinion as to whether English juniors are under or over graded, observations lead me to believe that they are indeed under-graded (compared to countries like France, Spain, Germany, etc... not compared to Russia/India), and the main reasons are
- the lack of Fide rated standard tournaments
- if they perform poorly in the first 2 rounds of an open, which tends to happen given their seeding, they just end up playing each others.
The top U11 ECF:
- the top 5 have an ECF average of 156, and FIDE of 1656. This is 200 ELO under the ECF conversion formula. Even using a more realistic (by looking at the correlation between ECF and FIDE grades, both sets publicly available) 7.5 x ECF + 600 would still indicate an under-grading of about 100.
- the following 5 have an average of 145 ECF and 1480 FIDE. This is 300 under the ECF conversion. Also, compared to the above group, they are 11 ECF points behind, but a whopping 176 ELO behind.
- the following 5 have an average of 136 ECF and 1357 FIDE. This is about 360 behind the ECF conversion rule. Compared to the above group, they are 8 ECF points behind and 123 ELO behind.
- If you look at the third group vs the first one, ELO would suggest the first group would have an 85% win ratio!!! This is extremely unlikely for a difference of only 20 ECF points.
- These 5 had an average ELO of 1530. Given their level was more likely around 1600-1700+, they would have been expected to get a good increase in points. collectively, they only won 44 points.
- Excluding games against other juniors (some outside this group of 5), they would have won 83 points.
- Now, assuming that instead of playing 18 out 43 games against juniors, they played them against adults, they could have won 143 points collectively using a linear calculation. Obviously, this last step is a crude simplification and ignores the subtleties of pairings, and the variance in performance. But it still shows that the junior pool could have been 100 point richer, had they not played each other.
- A couple of them had 5/9 games against juniors, with very lopsided risk/gain ratios.
In my opinion, as long as we don't have every tournament FIDE rated, we will keep having these rating discrepancies until the late teens of players. Given that the root cause is slow to change, are there therefore any method, FIDE compatible, that would allow the junior pool to converge to their truer rating (e.g. maybe preventing them from playing each others in non-junior tournaments)?
