Does anyone have the Harkness rating system, published in the ‘Official Blue Book and Encyclopedia of Chess’ published 1956. There is one player at my club wanting a ladder event format, and the only ladder rating system I can recall was the one at the Jackson Chess Club. It has been over twenty-years a ladder event taking place at that club. Very sure nobody has a copy of the Harkness rating tables at the Jackson Chess Club, this is the reason for asking if anyone has a copy they are willing to post.
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It’s already done, Doug - they’re at:
uschess.org/scholastic/2003SCguide.pdf
pp 10-11.
Or go to the USCF web page; click on Scholastics in the second horizontal menu; and then go down and click on “A Guide to Scholastic Chess in pdf. format”
It’s 42 pages so it may take a while on a dialup …
Apparently you are looking for an oversimplified way to compute ratings, so that somebody in the back room can do it with pencil and paper, or a hand calculator.
Just pick one of the tables in the ratings chapter of the 5th edition rulebook, and stick to it. The one for K-factor 30 is probably as good as any. That one looks like this:
rtg dif H D L
0-11 15 0 15
12-34 14 1 16
35-58 13 2 17
59-82 12 3 18
83-107 11 4 19
108-133 10 5 20
134-161 9 6 21
162-190 8 7 22
191-223 7 8 23
224-259 6 9 24
260-301 5 10 25
302-351 4 11 26
352-416 3 12 27
417-511 2 13 28
512-708 1 14 29
709- 0 15 30It gives the rating change per player per game, as a function of rating difference. Use column H if the higher-rated player wins, D if the game is drawn, or L if the lower-rated wins. The winner gains points, the loser drops. If the game is drawn, the lower-rated gains points, the higher-rated drops.
Bill Smythe
Thanks’ Bill, I do like the tables you have shown than the Harkness tables. The problem with the Harkness tables, if the players were the same or only a few points off – the change in rating was fifty points. The Harkness tables did have wild swings in ratings, it was acceptable in the 1950’s but not in our current era.
The problem with ladder events with ratings, would be the assignment of the rating. At the Jackson Chess Club, everyone was given an assignment rating of 1500. This has been an ethical problem, as it does not show the players’ age or skills. As a scholastic player and a master having the rating of 1500 at the start of the first game. It would not be a problem to have the players USCF rating be equal to the ladders rating, at the start of the first game. This now would only be a problem with the assignment of a rating, if the player has never been a USCF member, or a USCF member without any rating. Not in the mood to be like the Jackson Chess Club, granting new players the assignment rating of 1500. Not all new players are Class C players, this would only have the ladder ratings being over-rated in time.
Doug,
The issues you mention (how to start new players, inflation / deflation, etc) are some of the reasons USCF has a complicated rating system instead of a simple table. If, at your club, you want to grapple with these issues succesfully, you’ll need a complicated system, too.
Incidentally, the publisher messed up the tables, big-time, in the 5th edition rulebook (pages 266-268). The ends of some tables got cut off and added to the ends of other tables, etc. Each table, in the H column, should go from K/2 down to 0 in the H column, from 0 up to K/2 in the D column, and from K/2 up to K in the L column. Any table that doesn’t do this is either missing some lines at the end, or has some extra lines added. Lotsa luck to anybody trying to figure out what should have been where.
Bill Smythe
I don’t have my copy of the rule book in front of me at the moment, but I did figure out what went wrong in those tables. Basically, “longer” tables (tables with more rows) are on the right side of the page. But the extra rows got pushed over toward the left margin. That is, after the tables in the left column finish (the last row has 1 point for the higher-rated player winning), the additional rows don’t belong to that table but to the one to the right.
Yeah, I know that’s a really crappy explanation. I’ll add a much better explanation later when I’m home and I have the rule book in front of me. I remember I marked up my copy by putting a square bracket on the right side of the offending rows along with an arrow to show which table they belong to.
Bill:
That is the problem with ladder events, as the ladder with USCF ratings has not been equal to each other. With a very small pool of players in any average club, repeated games against each other will be inflationary. The ladder events (Jackson Chess Club) back in the 1980’s, were one or two game match events, just a shift of ratings back and forth. The players that did not understand or have the skills of a true 1500 player, as all new players started out at 1500, would only give inflation to the regulars.
Looking at ladder ratings, with the USCF quick ratings of the members of the club. With the repeated games with each other, would in my judgment have been inflationary to all the members. The goal was to replace the ladder ratings with a more respected rating, the rating of the USCF. If there are more USCF members, the pool of players would also grow. Just having a small pool of players, would over time become as inflationary as the inflation of a ladder event.
The change of having ladder events replaced with USCF events, it is fair to say the ratings of the club have been inflationary. As some of the members of the club will have over 100 rated quick games during this year, with myself now over 300 rated games since January. Having a small pool of players in the ladder events are inflationary. The replacement to USCF events with the same small pool of players is just as inflationary
Doug, if you don’t like the Harkness system, why on earth did you ask if anyone had it available?
There is this local master that comes to the club. He has been talking the talk about having ladder events at the club. Told him if he wants to have ladder events, then he should be in charge of the events. There are inflationary problems with any ladder events over time. The problems with assignment of a rating for a new player, is a problem of long term inflation or deflation.
The good point of having a ladder event, it could make some of the non-USCF members have an idea about the norms of rated games. It can give the players some foundation about scoresheets, touch-move, time management skills. Even if they do not cross over to be USCF members, they will have some skills they have learned to better communicate with other players.
It makes no difference whether a closed pool rating system like a club ladder system is inflationary or not. It will be self-correcting within the pool, and it isn’t intended to be comparable with the USCF rating system.
If you want club ratings to be comparable with USCF ratings, run USCF-rated events.
Over the years my club has tried three different types of ladders.
One is with ratings as was first asked about. Our club used this in the sixties and seventies. Whether the ladder will be inflationary or deflationary will depend on whether the initial rating is set higher or lower than the average strength of the occasional or temporary players. Ratings can be recalculated after every game (requiring times to be reported with the game results) or after every meeting. A number of calculations are required to maintain the ladder. One risk underrated players have is that other players will be hesitant to play a rated game against them. Overrated players might feel like plump sheep being surrounded by wolves hungry for those rating points.
A second is having a pyramid. We started this in the early eighties. One person was on the top level, two on the second, three on the third, etc. We made the seventh level of infinite width to encompass everybody after the top 21. You can challenge up one level and switch places with a win. At the end of the club year the top people on the ladder qualified for a round robin with a traveling trophy and then the players were inverted to start the next ladder year. Rules have to be made so that players in the middle neither spend every club night defending against challenges from below nor spend every club night challenging up and ignoring potential challengers. If a player gets higher on the pyramid than expected then the player may end up being the subject of repeated challenges by stronger players that are lower.
A third (our current incarnation of the ladder) is to have a simple scoring system with one serious ladder game per club night (our meeting duration precludes more than one), and to have a win get a point, a draw a half point and a loss zero, with ties decided in favor of the player with the most ladder games. We switched to this in the late eighties. The tiebreak promotes participation, and could also be done by making a win worth 1.01, a draw worth .51 and a loss worth .01, and not bothering to otherwise track the number of games.
We do our ladder pairings as 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, etc., have the players always draw for colors, require four different opponents before getting paired with the same player again, have the top eight qualify for a round robin with a traveling trophy, and restart each club year with everyone having zero ladder points. This varies each person’s opponents while somewhat reducing the gross mismatches. One drawback is that a player starting in mid-year has a lot of ground to make up to get to the top, and if the player starts late in the year then even winning every game may not be enough to qualify for the round robin (a 12-0 record over the final twelve weeks for a late starter is way behind a player who was 9-15 and then went 5-7 over those same twelve weeks). That drawback has not been onerous for us, but might be for a different club.
When we recently entered a league we counted a player’s games in a home match as also counting for the ladder. That way nobody felt like they were losing ground by defending the club’s honor. The pyramid form of the ladder is not as easy to deal with regarding league matches.
Would have to say the club ratings have been inflationary. This is with the USCF ratings, as the inflationary force is the rating floor. With any quick events, players do not play all the time at their peak level from one day to the next, or from afternoon to late at night. If someone with a rating floor does not play well, or is below their rating floor performance because of being tired, deflation and inflationary will happen. The player can see deflation to there rating floor, inflation for the others. Rated blitz games at that time will be inflationary to one of the players or more. If the player does get a rating floor, the next event the players meet up again, the players can have different results.
Mike, have run quick events, have run a number of club rated events, take a look at the clubs’ record. As of today, have sent in 56 events this year. If my rate stays the same this year, at years’ end should have among 80 - 100 events. Just having a small pool of players play rated games so much, has been inflationary. It was not the goal to have inflation in the ratings, it was to have a balance.
Fixing the typographical errors in the rating tables on pages 266-268 of the 5th edition of the rulebook
Well, this will probably be lost in this thread (or anywhere else), but here’s the better explanation I promised.
Page 266: The first 9 rows are correct. Move rows 10 and 11 over one column, so that the “437-666” and “667-” figures are in the “For K-factor 20” table and “308-373” and “374-470” are in the “For K-factor 24” table. Move the last two rows over two columns so that “471-668” and “669-” are under the “For K-factor 24” table.
Page 267: The first 16 rows are correct. Move the next seven rows over to the right by one column. This means the last three rows of “For K-factor 36” should be “451-544”, “545-740”, “741-”, and the last seven rows of “For K-factor 44” should be “305-338”, “339-377”, “378-425”, “426-488”, “489-580”, “581-775”, and “776-”.
Page 268: Shift the last six rows of the middle table right by one column. The last row of the “For K-factor 64” table should be “842-”. The last rows of the “For K-factor 76” table should be “444-480”, “481-526”, “527-587”, “588-678”, “678-871”, and “872-”.
Discussions about the inflationary aspect of the ratings system would be better in a separate thread. I would also suggest people read the ratings committee reports in the last several Delegate Calls.
Nope, it’s a great explanation – and your follow-up is even better.
I hadn’t realized that’s what happened, though it’s obvious now.
As a member of the 5th edition rulebook revision committee, I was the one who calculated and furnished those tables to the 5th edition editor (and, therefore, indirectly to the publisher). I’m pretty sure the version I furnished wasn’t messed up when it left my hands. Microsoft Word can do some strange things, especially if somebody else’s software later tries to read a Word file.
Most likely, I furnished the tables in 1-across format, and the publisher took it on himself to spread them 3-across.
Bill Smythe
If you want a Harkness system, take a look at:
calcpage.tripod.com/bhcc/ladderrules.htm
I too had misplaced my Harkness tables when I tried to set up a Ladder Board at my club, so I made one up!
HTH,
AJG
Sorry, the link I gave above is correct, but the file was corrupted. I have since uploaded a corrected file if anyone is interested!
BTW, you might as well take a look at my club’s entire website:
Regards,
AJG
We have embraced the inflationary component in the Peoria, Il chess club ladder. Here is the basic setup we have used for the last 8 years.
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.
Almost every thing we do throughout the year is reflected in the ladder, even USCF rated events.