Re: Hastings

Dear Andy,

ECF have agreed to be interviewed by Chessville - would you like to compose
a question based on what follows, that I can present to them in your name?

I do, as an aside, credit David with some sense that there are more GMs in
the pool now, and this would therefore stabilise or substantialise the
high-end of the pool against statistical-widow data.

Cordially, Phil Innes

"Andy Walker" <anw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:flh7qd$acc$1$8300dec7@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In article <knB*XjU3r@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
David Richerby <davidr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
... the increase in standards, as measured by ratings and by numbers
of titled players...
Except that neither ratings nor the number of titled players lets you
measure an increase in standards. Ratings are only valid for
comparison within the pool of players in which they're measured

Yes; nevertheless, you hear players saying "I played well
last season, and my rating has gone up, but the way I'm playing now,
it'll go back down again", and such like. A rating system is really
not much use unless it has a certain stability. Not just between
the players in one club or one league over one season, but across
a country or the world, and over at least several years, preferably
several decades. Otherwise, rating-limited tournaments, grading
prizes and the like are a nonsense [even more so than logically
they are in the first place], and when a player joins your club
after moving from far away or after not playing for a few years,
you cannot get any idea from his distant or ancient rating what
his standard might be. [Admittedly, in such a case, there is the
method we always *used* to use in pre-grading days, of actually
giving the chap a game, and observing how well he plays.]

That is actually what we had, across the world and the
decades. There are players in my team who stayed at, say, 150
[BCF/ECF, 1800 FIDE], give or take a few points, for 30+ years,
until they decayed away; and for decades, 2600 FIDE was the sign
of a "super GM", one of the *handful* of players likely to get
into the Candidates' Tournament and perhaps challenge for the
world title.

It's all changed in the last few years. ECF grades below
200 [2200] have deflated badly, by around 20 or 30 ECF points
[160-240 Elo points in old currency, 100-150 after the frantic
efforts to realign ECF with FIDE]. Meanwhile, FIDE ratings have
[it seems to me] inflated badly, so that even 2700 is no longer
the mark of a top-10 player, and there are well over a hundred
players over 2600. [I happen to have the 1994 FIDE list around
-- only 14 years ago! -- and it shows five players (Karpov, Anand,
Ivanchuk, Kramnik, Shirov) above 2700 and 54 above 2600; but even
that was a big advance on a few years earlier.] Something Must Be
Done! [I could/might expound further, but I don't think it's
relevant to the Hastings question.]

and
the increase in the number of titled players is surely to a large
extent because more people are trying to achieve titles.

Not sure I believe this. It's much easier to get lots of
titled players if the absolute standard needed to become a GM is
declining ....

It is certain that those GMs rated 2600+ at Hastings are
strong players; it's much less clear that they are the peers of
the half-dozen or so strongest players of 1950, or 1936, or 1895.
Nor that they outclass the Birds and Albins to the extent that
they would expect to win *every* game.

--
Andy Walker
Nottingham


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Hastings
    ... from FIDE to ECF were due to anomalies in the ECF grading system. ... The actual performance of players did not appear to correspond to the ... calibration of ECF ratings, and many questions cannot therefore be answered ... popularity of tournament chess can place players within the same ...
    (rec.games.chess.misc)
  • Re: Recommendation for repetoire book(s)
    ... This is mostly due to how modern tournaments and other rated things in chess are set up. ... Back in the day, I would consider ratings much more reliable, as almost all the old classic tournaments were round-robins, to my knowledge they didn't normally have sections (for non-invitational tournaments, there was Open and there was ... Significant inflation at the top - Top players end up mainly playing in sections that consist mostly/completely of top players. ...
    (rec.games.chess.analysis)
  • Re: Kicker ratings
    ... These are the rankings not the ratings per se. ... The players ... who are top of these lists do not necessarly have the best average ...
    (rec.sport.soccer)
  • Re: Rankig of Vtes Debate
    ... >>> I don't think the ratings are totally bogus. ... >>> good players are, because good players win tournaments (and that's most ... And that makes them totally invalid as a description of skill. ...
    (rec.games.trading-cards.jyhad)
  • Sample Bridge Rating System- Australia
    ... Step 1: Initilialization of player ratings ... the top x players have ratings. ... Bonus + for winning a tournament ... My proposed model is to create a recursive model of Step 2. ...
    (rec.games.bridge)