Creating a chess ladder

[FireAndIce]

Greetings. I help run the Brandywine chess club, http://www.brandywinechess.com. We started as a club back in 2013 with 5-10 players. In Oct 2014 with about 10-20 active members we started a chess ladder. The ladder calculates a chess ranking like chess.com or the USCF. It uses the Glicko ranking system created by Mark Glickman. Just like USCF and chess.com, if you win, your ranking goes up. If you win against a stronger player, it goes up even more!

I don’t know if it is a result of the ladder, but we now have 30-40 players showing up every week. Last week we had 36 ladder matches! And, when we mention the ladder at other clubs we attend, we find that players are very interested. The ladder adds another level of competition and fun. And, we use the club ladder to select our top players and their position of play when we play another club.

The hardest work in maintaining the ladder is just entering the matches, as some of the hand writing on the results sheet is really bad . When a match is done, the players simply write the results down on a results paper, one result per line. We end up with several pages! We tried having an individual paper submitted per match, but that didn’t work. The simple solution of just writing down on a common piece of paper at the front of the room was best.

All the work to do the calculations and to create the web pages for the ladder is done by the free excel add-in, the Chess Ranking Assistant. It is found at https://www.add-ins.com/free-products/chess-ranking-assistant.htm. It lets you enter new players, edit player names, enter matches, and then with a click, it updates all the results. Another click publishes to a folder on your PC the ladder results. You just then upload those pages. We did find that the time of a match, although required by the Chess Ranking Assistant is not critical. One just enters each match with a slightly different time and in the right order. You do need Excel 2007-2013 or Office 365 and for a Windows PC. It doesn’t work on the Mac. If someone wants to develop for the Mac, I’ll be glad to help (I’m the author)

If you go to http://www.brandywinechess.com/ladder.htm you will find a link to our club’s ladder pages. We have results in many ways and list each player’s matches. We even have a what if link on that page that shows what will happen if you play and win against another player.

When we started the ladder we decided not to make everyone start with the same ranking. Instead, for the members who have a USCF rating, we use their official rating at the time of joining the club ladder. For players without a USCF rating, we judge how strong they are and how they play against other club members and set their initial ranking that way. Strong players typically get a ranking of 1400 or 1600. Average players about 1200. Novice players from 800 to a 1000. We did this because we wanted some accuracy in the rankings at the start. It was well received.

I encourage you to consider creating a chess ladder at your club. I know it has helped our club grow to the largest in Delaware.

Bob Flanagan

[wzim]

Very Impressive. I can see that someone really worked at it.

Here in Peoria, Illinois we have had an active Ladder since 1998. I believe years ago there probably in the Sixties there was some form of Ladder.

Our Ladder initially began as two Ladders, basically a speed Ladder and a slow Ladder.

After a few years they were merged into one unit with weighted K factors. Here is the basic description of our Ladder currently.

Ladder ratings start fresh at the beginning of each calendar year. Players enter the Ladder with a rating of 1600. Ladder games are weighted so that games with time controls up to Game 20 are rated normally. Between Game 20 and up to 40 are double weighted. Between Game 40 and 60 are triple weighted. All time controls over game 60 will be 4 times the regular weight. There will be no double or nothing play. Players who participate in the majority of the evenings scheduled event or at least the equivalent of 4 speed games shall receive a bonus 15 points added to their Ladder rating after that event has been calculated.

Our system has a bit of deliberate inflation built in. We also reset the Ladder every January and declare a Ladder winner every year.

We include a mix of rated and unrated games.

Newcomers get a chance for organized play and often move on to USCF membership and rated play.

We meet on Mondays, because of a over Sixty year inertia. Although we also have a separate Kids club that meets on Friday nights. This works out well because it gives the kids a chance to play amongst themselves without the distraction of us silly adults. We do end up getting the more serious kids playing on Monday nights,
We actually had one them become City Champion two years running.

We use a computer and Swiss-Sys to do pairings. We don’t normally bring a printer, we just announce the pairings from the computer or let the players see them from the computer etc.

With unrated play I can output the results the club file to then be loaded into a Visual Basic program to generate the bonus points automatically and then export the HTML for the web page. We don’t have as fancy of a list of who played who but we usually have posted those results separately anyway.

We actually use the Ladder ratings for pairing when playing not rated events. So when we play rated events using the USCF ratings I have to use the VB program to enter results, which isn’t too difficult because usually that will only be one round of play. (unfortunately the VB program never quite achieved the ability to share around, although years ago I attempted to do so)

On the main page we have the current Ladder with link there to a version that shows the current and previous weeks results so one can see how much the have gained or lost.

We use the old USCF rating formula which is pretty straight forward.
Here is a link to our current Ladder.
gpcf.net/ladder/ladder15.htm

[wzim]

The hardest work in maintaining the ladder is just entering the matches, as some of the hand writing on the results sheet is really bad . When a match is done, the players simply write the results down on a results paper, one result per line. We end up with several pages! We tried having an individual paper submitted per match, but that didn’t work. The simple solution of just writing down on a common piece of paper at the front of the room was best.

How difficult would it be to write a simple program that the players could fill out on a laptop themselves?
Depending on how one could even create a dropdown list with the players names. It they aren’t on the list then they would add their name and then in the future would be on the drop down list.
So they choose the white player and black player and input a result etc and no more hand writing problems.