An interesting and unusual thought. Usually players are encouraged to play in higher rated sections because it’s a better learning experience. As Pink Floyd says in “Wish You were Here”:
I enjoyed playing in open sections, when I didn’t have to, because of the challenge. It woke me up. Playing in a class section I would have been bored and played worse. I suspect that people who go in trying to win their class section are taking their eye off the ball. They are focusing on the result rather than the playing. I’m not surprised that they lose unless they are unusually good competitors.
You think that it’s easier to gain rating points against higher rated players. I don’t know if that is generally true. The rating system with its implied assignment of winning probabilities to rating differences in games should even that out. If what you say is generally true, that assignment scheme within the rating system should be modified.
Artichoke has the right idea. You should choose your section based on how much fun you’ll have and how much it’ll improve your play, not based on a desire to manipulate your rating.
If you manipulate your rating upward 50 points, without a corresponding increase in playing strength, you’ll simply be 50 points over-rated. Then those 50 points will come crashing down to 0 in your next tournament or two.
I think it would take somewhere between 20 and 50 games to attenuate out a 50 point error or manipulation. That’s based on my recollection of some correction situations after rerating subsequent events and some testing that Jerry Nash and I did of players with large gains from match play.
It would be interesting (but time-consuming) to test that.
Here’s a theoretical approach. I remember the old rating formula for under 2100 rating:
Rn = Ro + 16 (W-L) - .04 sum(D)
where
Rn = your new rating
Ro = your old rating
D = Ro - Ropponent
(Disclaimers: I think this has been replaced by something more complicated but this one is what I remember and it’s simple, so I will use it. Assume that expected rating outcomes are the same whether you play “up” or “down” or against equally rated opponents, and for simplicity assume you play a sequence of opponents just as strong as you are. So if you’re overrated by one point, your rating is one point higher than theirs. Everything would take twice as long for players over 2100 because the .04 becomes .02 .)
It means that if you play in a one-game tournament and you are 1 point over-rated, you’ll expect to lose .04 rating points. Your expected result is 50% so W-L=0, and you’ll decay based on the .04 sum(D) term. So after that tournament, 0.96 of your rating point is left.
If you played in a single m-game tournament, you would expect to lose the full .04 in each of m games. so (1 - .04m) of the rating point would be left. If it were a 25 game tournament you would expect to lose it all in that one tournament, because (1 - .04 x 25) = 0.
After n one-game tournaments, (1 - .04) ^ n of the rating point is left. You lose it slower in separate tournaments, because you go into the next tournament less overrated and so D doesn’t hurt you as much. After 25 tournaments, you would have left (1 - .04) ^ 25 = 0.36 of the extra point. After 50 such one-game tournaments, you would have (1 - .04) ^ 50 = 0.13 of the point left; basically it would be all gone.
If you play in n m-game tournaments you would expect to have (1 - .04m) ^ n of the point left. For a given number of total games m x n , the result will be in between the above two polar cases.
Everything I said above is scalable. It makes no difference whether the overrating is 1 point or 50 points or 500 points, or negative (i.e. an underrating). The rating error goes away in the same number of games. If the rating error is bigger, the points are corrected proportionately faster.
So a rating error is expected to be all gone after 25 - 50 games. This confirms nolan’s experience with the rerating.
The actual rating formula is more complicated than the one you used, but your basic logic is absolutely correct.
The moral: Don’t try to gain rating points by choosing your tournaments, or your opponents. Instead, study rook endings – that’ll add 100 points to your playing strength, which will eventually add 100 points to your rating. And, you won’t be over-rated, so you’ll hold onto your new rating longer.
Being politically incorrect by nature, I have to tell the following story.
Of course studying endgames will improve most players’ understanding and results. Studying patterns of a few pieces helps understanding what goes on with a lot of pieces. You can also kill lots of people in the endgame if they escape in the earlier parts of the game. This is great advice.
But being overrated (by some significant amount) is a nice opportunity if someone is eager to learn. It lets you play higher rated opponents and they may play you differently. It gives you a head start on actually having that rating level.
I vaguely remember some guy about 20 years ago (does anyone remember his name? I don’t.) who anti-sandbagged: he reported fraudulent match results where he was beating strong players. He paid them off to agree to this, at least in some cases.
So here was this guy, who had recently been around 1400, holding a 2300 rating. And then it seemed that after a while he didn’t have to make up match results any more! His results in open tournaments started to catch up with the rating. He may not have settled as high as 2300 but it seemed that he was solidly in class A at least, after a thrilling run. I’m sure he could not have learned that fast if he hadn’t “tried out” a higher rating.
But it was only worth it for him because he took the “express elevator” and reported massively fraudulent results for rating. It would not have been worth it at all, for him to get a sacrifice learning for a measly rating gain of 50 or 100 points via choosing weaker tournaments or opponents.
Interesting post, artichoke. That guy who paid for phony matches to inflate his rating in order to get the opportunity to play regularly against strong players, need not resort to such methods today if he was a) female, or b) teenaged or younger.
I’ve always resented the free ride that people in those two chess-affirmative-action groups get, being seeded on the basis of gender and/or age into all manner of strong tournaments they otherwise wouldn’t qualify for.
Sometimes they (the kids at least) also are given free or reduced entry – YET REMAIN ELIGIBLE FOR FULL PRIZE MONEY! Legalized theft if ever I saw it. That is doubly true for those special cases where a kid who DOES qualify based on his or her strength, and is rated high enough that they stand a strong chance of winning a prize, is still given free entry. There are plenty of 2300, 2400 and even 2500-rated teenagers around. I’ve played my fair share of them, and sometimes wonder if I am competing with them for a prize pool that they paid into and I didn’t. Kinda like if I arm-wrestled a woman professional weightlifter, and the organizer said I had to start with my hand halfway down because I’m wrestling a woman.
But that side of my gripe only concerns money. I hadn’t thought as much about the way this same system also unfairly redistributes opportunity on the basis of youth and gender.
The last story quoted by Artichoke, about the guy who quickly improved (his true strength, not his manipulated rating) from 1400 to 1900 thanks to the opportunities he created for himself by “buying” a 2300 rating, really made this facet hit home for me.
Guess I must have missed it. Here I am a woman and assumed that I had the same chances as men to earn the same rating points and the same prize money. I just thought that if you wanted to play someone rated higher, you simply entered into open sections of tournaments. And in order to improve one’s rating, I thought all you need do is spend the 15 to 20 minutes after the game going over the game with someone rated higher (your opponent is best so you know what they were thinking during the game), but anyone higher rated is fine so that you get a different view of the game.
Then if you really wanted to improve your game, you would start to figure out where your weaknesses were - opening, middle game or endgame and then spend the time on trying to minimize those weaknesses.
Course I’m not rated 2500. Probably because I like chess as a pastime and don’t want to take the time to read any chess books or actually study and of the parts of the game.
Just two cents from that “other” gender. The one that you wonder about why you can’t get more of them to play chess and stick with it.
You have to pay to learn. That is a conclusion I’ve drawn from my life experience.
Having the opportunity to play someone 300 points or more above your rating is a treasure. It’s hard to get pairings like this. It can really expose your weaknesses, giving a more objective view of your game that you can get otherwise. There’s also the opportunity to step up and draw or win the game – a thrill worth fighting for!
I disagree that playing anyone with a higher rating is about the same. Someone within 100 points knows about what you do. 200 points, they know clearly more but you may still have some relative strengths over them. 300 points or more, their skill is uniformly better than yours and they are starting to play chess a different way. This is the opportunity to identify your “paradigm weaknesses” and work on modification.
Learning opportunities appear to have gotten better due to the internet. For modest cost one can get the IM or GM of one’s choice to give lessons over the internet. One can get all the world’s opening knowledge for a few hundred bucks with Chessbase or Bookup. When I was a kid the GM’s were up in NY city, too far away, and I could buy MCO-10 for more (constant dollars) than Chessbase costs today.
I didn’t know that juniors got seeded into high rated sections (other than junior tournaments) that adults needed a higher rating to enter. Maybe that’s a new thing. I started chess as a junior player so I guess I saved a little on some entry fees. But not a heck of a lot. It was not an expensive hobby, except if I had to travel and stay in a hotel for an out of town tournament. I did that only two or three times (plus a couple trips with my college team) in my life.
Females who are good get a lot of attention. If they can be on the US Olympic Team or qualify for the US Women’s Championship tournament, or the Polgar tournament as girls, they get interesting opportunities that males would have to be much much stronger to get. They may get additional benefits that are not publicized. I know the US Women’s Champion of 25 years ago got regular lessons from a coach (Jack Peters) paid-for by the USCF. I know this because Jack told me. It wasn’t commonly known. The USCF wasn’t bulging with money then either.
Females of more average strength don’t seem to have such a disproportionate advantage. They can play in certain women’s tournaments, but unless it’s a big national or state tournament who really cares?
Donna your post doesn’t actually seem particularly gender specific. Personally I am not in favor of giving more resources to females than males; a member of either gender is equally valuable to me and I don’t see a reason to strive for an equal number of men and women members. The goal is both unattainable and unimportant as far as I am concerned. Maybe you agree with me; it must be annoying to think people are paying so much special attention and you just like playing a game of chess now and then.
LOL, yeah a game of chess every now and then. I play on the internet about 15-20 games a day for at least an hour a day, run an adult chess club so play weekly, run a high school chess club during the school year, run sporadic weekend events, and travel around the country to play in money tournaments when I’m not up playing Magic the Gathering.
Still I consider this to be a pastime as in not something that I want to study up on and become one of those grandmaster millionaires you see all over the place.
I personally am not in favor of special favors to women chessplayers. I personally don’t need them or want them and don’t agree with the logic that we need to be treated “special”. However, that being said, if an organizer chooses to offer an incentive to get more women to enter his tournaments and someone chooses to take advantage of that incentive whether it be free entry or a tournament that a male would not qualify for, I don’t find it particularly sporting for other chessplayers to say that’s not fair. Same with entries for kids. It is a choice of the organizer. If you don’t think it’s fair, then don’t enter the event.
There are a lot of discussions about how to get more women and kids to play chess and stick with it. Then when organizers offer incentives to women and kids, some players slam them for it saying that it’s not fair.
What I find particularly peculiar is the idea that a chessplayer entering a tournament thinks that he should have some control as to how the prizes should be allocated. I don’t know any other sport, game of chance, or business where one would even be concerned about paying money into a pool and not getting back a “fair share”. When one buys a lottery ticket, I don’t think you hear any complaints about how many free tickets the lottery commission gives out to players around the holiday to get more people to buy tickets. When one goes to a casino, I don’t think you hear complaints about why the casino gives free rooms to some players and not other players when they are all spending money. When I enter a Magic tournament, it never occurs to me to think gee, the organizer is making x dollars so I should get more prize money - or if he gives free entry to friends, that it wasn’t fair to me somehow.
This is the only pastime I know where a free entry to someone else is some kind of disservice to the other players. In the end, the player with the free entry still has to win the games in order to attain the prizes whether they be male, female, kid or martian.
Out of my 100 posts or so, this will be the first where I won’t hold back from giving a frank judgment of the quality of thought that went into another commenter’s argument.
DACP, the degree of economic ignorance shown by your last comment borders on the Feingold-esque. You’re saying that people (customers) in any field, whether competitive recreation or business, don’t pay attention to whether they’re getting a fair shake financially, and don’t complain if they are forced to subsidize someone else who didn’t earn it? Can we fellow readers of this forum believe our eyes that an organizer would make such a statement in public?
Readers puzzled by the Ben Feingold reference, by the way, should Google an appropriate phrase and find the Daily Dirt thread where the esteemed IM/almost-GM showed himself up as a laughable ignoramus on real-world matters, by stating (and these are close to his exact words) he didn’t see how class sections in an event like the World Open subsidize the prizes in the top section.
Yeah, I know, DACP, you didn’t say we should just grin and bear it. You simply advised us active adult competitors – who pay the bulk of USCF membership dues and probably pay the bulk of the sum total of all entry fees at all tournaments – if we prefer to CHOOSE whether or not to donate money to support chess for kids rather than being forced to subsidize them through entry fees, you simply said we should stop complaining and vote with our feet.
OK, I’ll start with tournaments you organize. Any other organizers here care to cast their vote with DACP, by asking me and other active players who feel as I do, to shut up and vote with our feet?
$653,044 or 36.8% of the dues payments came from youth or scholastic memberships. (It could be argued that the nearly $60,000 from family membership plans should be included in this total, especially the $23,405 in FM2 plans, since those only include family members under 20.)
Nearly $200,000 was received for economy scholastic memberships, with no magazine benefits.
(Note, the data shown above was taken from membership transaction records and will not match up precisely with revenue as shown on the financial statements, for a variety of reasons.)
I am not just an organizer but a player as well. My point is that when one of my players comes to one of my events and I decide to give him a free entry either because he is a grandmaster, because I don’t think he can financially afford to pay the full entry fee, or because he is visiting from another country and I think it’s too much for him to pay the entry fee as well as the USCF dues and would like him to play in one of my events, then that is my right as an organizer to do so. I don’t see that choice as impeding your right to a fair share of the entry fees.
Of course, what you do not know is that my events have prizes that are 100% guaranteed ALWAYS. You know what your entry fee is and you know what your prize will be if you win it…no matter how many people enter and who got what for free entries.
And I do realize you are talking about other events. The point I’m making is that the organizer who puts his money on the line to promote the event and put the event forth is the one who has the right to choose what he wants to set up as the prize structure and what incentives he chooses to offer in order to get attendance of those folks. It’s published ahead of time and you in turn have the right to not attend if you feel that this is a personal disservice to you.
For years the Massachusetts chess association offered free entries to grandmasters, family discounts when more than one player attended from a family, etc. It was done to encourage those groups of folks to attend. Whether I agreed with it or not was up to me by choosing to attend those events or not.
I think instead you might consider placing the emphasis on the idea that organizers offer prizes that are not entry based and half your issue disappears.
The other half is about women being offered slots in major events that they might not otherwise qualify for. Well, a women playing for a major championship will attract publicity for that event and it may not be “fair” to the males so instead perhaps it could be considered that the 8 original slots are the real ones and the other slot is an extra. Again, I’m not advocating for the slots for women since I personally do not accept those slots. I will not accept discounts for women. I will not enter women only events. But I will also not disparage other women who seek to take the incentives offered them by organizers for whatever they’re reasons may be.
Donna, thank you for being an organizer and director, first of all. That’s a big service. Furthermore I appreciate that you want to be treated straight-up with the men. Really. And when you said chess was a pastime, I didn’t know you passed 6 hours a day on it!
Entry fees never seemed like the major expense of playing chess, but if they loom large for someone I hope that they (even if an adult) could get a discount here and there. Kids can’t really earn money so they often need to pay less. Probably they still pay more than their expected incremental cost (including the expected amount of prize money they will win.) Donna what’s your experience with the latter point; how many entries do you accept (whether a regular discount for kids, special case-by-case discount, or whatever) where you expect to lose money on the participant?
Kids with 2300+ ratings … they do exist but anyway should not bother anyone who doesn’t have that high a rating him- or herself, because they will not be in contention for the same prizes.
If a GM needs a free entry to come to Podunkville to play in a local tournament, it’s more a question of whether people want the GM or a better chance at winning the top prizes themselves. When I was playing I never hoped to make money from it, so I preferred the GM; maybe I would get lucky and get paired! Besides these enormously skilled players don’t make much money and we get to see all their games for free. They don’t own intellectual rights to their own creations (tournament games) and get no royalties. So I don’t mind bleeding a little cash to them. I’m glad they exist, and they have chosen a hard life.
Donna is right that individual organizers can do what they want. Susan Polgar puts on a girls’ tournament; good for her. Maybe some other organizer will put on a boys’ tournament. If nobody does, that’s life. But the USCF answers to all of us, so we can (try to) tell it what to do. And that’s where we can expect fairness and balanced treatment in the way USCF sponsors tournaments and supports players.
Thanks Mike for the letting me know about the delegate win. Means a lot to me.
To Artichoke: Thanks for the kind words. I’m not the conventional organizer. I don’t “plan to lose money” on my events. I do it naturally. Maybe when USCF finds a way to get me insurance lower than $1100 per year, that won’t be such a natural occurence.
I have very few kids enter my events. The club events on Thursday nights start at 7:30 p.m. and last player tends to leave close to midnight…that’s a bit late for most kids. The club at the school is free and informal - not rated chess and none of the kids are USCF members.
The weekend events have an open section and class prizes so it tends to attract higher rated players. Only the kids that are experienced tournament players tend to enter.
The events I’ve run for kids have been targeted with lower entry fees and trophy prizes so there’s actually no money loss there.
Grandmasters do not get free entries to my personal events. (I’ve been a TD for another organization where they did.) My personal belief is that since they have a better than average chance of winning the prize money, they can afford to take the chance more than most to pay the entry fee. Just another way that I try to treat everyone equally in my events.
I try to set the prize fund based on number of entries so that for every 3-5 players, there is a prize. In this way, it’s not so skewed that the top players will take all the money. Also, anyone winning a prize in one of my events will never get back less than what they paid for an entry fee.
Again, this is my personal philosophy and it’s based upon the things that I look for when I’m searching for places to play out of my local area. Course because of this philosophy I tend to lose money as an organizer but over time my hope is that the events will continue to grow and eventually all will be well.
I’ve played in tournaments for 33 years, and I think I got 1 reduced entry fee fror being female, and another reduced entry fee for playing up a section. The latter was something Bill Goichberg tried one year at the World Open, but decided it wasn’t attracting signicantly more players who wouldn’t normally had played up. He went to the system he currently uses.
