Clock-move and capture-the-king should never be allowed, even as variations. And that should remain true even if a separate blitz rating system is established.
As for no-delay, that’s already permitted, even in regular- and quick-rated events, as long as it’s announced in all pre-event publicity. That policy should apply to blitz also.
Bill Smythe
The standard USCF rules for blitz chess are: touch move, illegal move loses (i.e. capture-the-king), no delay. Since these are the standard rules they shouldn’t have to be announced in advance. In the 5th edition rulebook a two second delay was standard but in the revised blitz rules it’s a variation and has to be announced in advance.
If someone wants to change those rules he or she is of course to free to submit an ADM, but I’ll vote against it. The current USCF blitz rules are essentially the same as the WBCA rules, which are, in effect, the rules I’ve used for almost every blitz tournament that I’ve directed.
To prevent these variations would be contrary to rules 26A and 26B. I see no reason why if the variations are announced in advance they still shouldn’t be allowed. Every player has the option to pick and choose the events he will play in based on that knowledge.
The FIDE rule in blitz is that capturing the king loses because it is an illegal move. I look at capturing the king as an exceptionally aggressive way of claiming an illegal move.
Alex Relyea
In accordance with the new wording in my revised proposal for rule 5C:
In Rule 5F, change the sentence “For Quick Chess (G/10 to G/29) the standard delay is three seconds, and for Blitz Chess (G/5) two seconds.” to read:
“For Quick Chess (G/6 to G/29) the standard delay is three seconds. For Blitz Chess the standard time control is G/5 with no delay.”
That’s pretty good, as long as you insist on no delay being the blitz standard (and apparently a lot of people like that idea). I’m wondering, though, if the divide between blitz and quick should be between G/9 and G/10, rather than between G/5 and G/6. (Or maybe somewhere in the middle, such as between G/7 and G/8.)
Bill Smythe
At the Philadelphia Open there were two G/8 d2 side events which used quick rules. Is there really a demand for blitz chess being anything slower than G/5, with or without delay? I like the simplicity of blitz being restricted to G/5 only, with anything slower than that being quick or regular.
What’s the point of rating any game at all?
Come up with an answer to that, then answer why G/5 games should be singled out and not rated.
They were G/7 d2.
Oops, you’re right. I should have checked.
Most of the time quick ratings are ignored and tournaments are administered with regular ratings only. I have a feeling that if blitz games are submitted for rating they just end up being submitted for quick rating because players and some TDs don’t really understand the difference - or don’t care.
Adding more ratings seems to me to just increase confusion for very little value.
IF you want to create a blitz league and a national blitz group, wihtin or without the USCF, you are looking to climb a mighty big hill.
I think we need to spend time and money to improve the reporting is our present rating system, rather than add new systems.
Adding a separate rating system for blitz might be a good idea, but it’s not necessary right away.
It is important to recognize that differences between quick and blitz rules need not be reflected in differences between quick and blitz ratings. As soon as the smoke clears and it becomes clear what the rule differences are, one can begin the debate about whether there should be separate rating systems as well. But one does not follow automatically from the other.
Bill Smythe
Yes, G/5 quick is not exactly the same game as G/5 blitz, but the two are quite similar and should not be rated under different systems. G/5 quick is a lot more like G/5 blitz than it is like G/29 quick, yet both are rated under the same system. And G/61 differs greatly from 40/2, SD/1, yet both are regular rated only.
Although many players are probably stronger (or weaker) at G/90 than G/61, and G/2 than G/90, and 40/2 than G/2, etc. this does not justify the use of many different rating systems for these various controls, as many of the ratings that would be created would be inaccurate due to a small sample of recent play. We already have that problem having only two systems, regular and quick. Many players, especially juniors, have quick ratings that are hundreds of points below regular- not because they are stronger at slow time limits, but because they have too small a sample of recent quick games.
An extreme example of this problem is FIDE Master Michael Lee, who has a regular rating of 2437 and a quick rating of 1356. But check any “top 100” junior list, compare the regular ratings to the quick for the same players, and you will find many other large differences.
If we create additional rating systems, we will increase the number of players who have obviously inaccurate ratings in some of these systems, due to insufficient recent play under that system. At least, we should fix the problem with quick ratings first, before we think about adding more rating systems.
Bill Goichberg
That’s for sure – but where’s the progress on this “fixing” front? Every suggestion to do something about it is met with responses like “we can’t really figure out how the big discrepancies happened in the first place, so we can’t fix it because we don’t know whether the fix would fix it, since we don’t even really know what the problem is”, etc.
Bill Smythe
There are two separate issues here. Issue #1 is the one I referred to in my last post, and we know exactly how these big discrepancies happen- players show strong improvement at all time controls, the regular system reflects their improvement because they play many regular games, and the quick system does not adequately show their improvement because they play few or no quick games.
Issue #2 is that even though the two systems were started on the same scale and regular ratings are still used to initialize quick ratings, the quick system has become quite deflated compared to the regular. When you hear someone say “we don’t know what the problem is,” they are talking about the overall issue of deflation, issue #2, rather than the improving players issue.
In 2006, the Ratings Committee attempted to fix issue #1 by recommending replacement of the quick system with a universal system for all time controls. This would have ended the improving player problem, but we would no longer have had a quick system. A lengthy discussion on the USCF Issues Forum followed, and revealed that virtually no one knew what the universal rating was supposed to represent or had any interest in it. The EB then asked the Ratings Committee for another suggestion that would maintain a quick system but make it more accurate.
Subsequently, Ratings Chair Mark Glickman suggested a quick system that would rate all time controls, but with quick chess at full K and regular at a reduced K. Testing was done on quick 100% K, regular 50% K, and after looking over some player lists to see what their quick ratings would be had we been using this new method, Mark and I seemed to agree that the results were an improvement but still not good enough. I then suggested that as not enough quick activity was occurring, we look into weighting quick as over 100%, and also use a three step scale in which G/30-G/60 would count less heavily than G/5-G/29 but be weighted more than slow controls.
At its November 2009 meeting, the EB passed the following motion:
EB10-014 (Goichberg) The Executive Board is concerned about the following problems with the Quick Rating System:
Some players who have improved substantially in regular rated play while playing little or no quick chess are very underrated, sometimes by as many as 1000 points.
It appears that most players who are rated in both the quick and regular systems, by a substantial margin, have quick ratings that are lower than regular. It would be ideal if the number of players whose quick is lower than regular was about the same as the number whose quick is higher than regular.
To address problem #1, we request that testing be conducted on methods involving rating all time controls in the quick system and varying the K factor based on time control, such as the following:
a.) G/5-G/29 150%K, G/30-G/60 110%K, slower than G/60 70%K
b.) G/5-G/29 150%K, G/30-G/60 115%K, slower than G/60 80%K
To address problem #2, we request that the Ratings Committee recommend an accelerated bonus schedule or other method for inflating the quick rating pool so that quick about regular occurs with about the same frequency as quick below regular, and a method for then approximately maintaining this relationship between the two systems.
Passed 4-0
Since that motion, the office has not done the requested testing, and I have complained about this at every board meeting. There have been various explanations: insufficient available server time, priority given to other testing, and lack of clear instructions (though the above seemed clear enough to me).
At our Feb 2011 telephone meeting, the Board discussed this issue with Mark Glickman and Mike Nolan and all seemed to agree that testing would begin soon, however the Board felt that other testing (adjusting K factors in the regular rating system) was more urgent and should have priority. By now I would have expected that the other testing would have been completed, but as far as I know it has not even started, so who knows how long it will take before the suggested new quick methods are tested.
Regarding issue #2 (deflation), I’m not aware of any suggestions from the Ratings Committee. I believe the quick system is deflated compared to regular because many fewer games are played, so fewer bonus points enter the quick pool. Also, a higher percentage of quick players are provisional, and provisionals obtain no bonus points at all. Increasing the quick K factor to 150% for G/5-G/29 should greatly increase bonus points, and the same testing the Board requested in 2009 should also indicate if this change will be sufficient to combat deflation in general.
Bill Goichberg
If the quick rating is supposed to be highly correlated with the regular rating, else we become concerned, why bother with two different systems? Why not just have one rating system that rates all tournament games?
The answer is that the two rating systems are not really statistical frameworks for predicting performance in the minds of the players, but rather meta-tournaments in which the players’ scores are their ratings. For many, perhaps most, players the only trophy which matters is their rating. We publish lists of “Top Rated” players, and players’ positions on these lists are more important than their result in any one tournament, including state and national championships. Tournaments are significant competitively only as an opportunity to play some more rounds in the rating meta-tournament (and, for some players, to win some money.)
Nobody cares about being the “Massachusetts Open Champion” for the next year. The “real” Massachusetts Champion is the player from MA with the highest “regular” rating. So it is with almost every other tournament. They don’t mean anything, with the possible exceptions of the US Championship and some of the state and national scholastic championships. (But even those are debatable. One might ask: why would anybody want to sponsor a meaningless tournament which is really just some more rounds in a meta-tournament? But that would be a digression.)
The players like having two of these meta-tournaments – a “serious” one where they closely watch their current “score” (i.e. rating), and a not-so-serious/casual one where players don’t mind games being rated because nobody pays attention to the ratings. Players want to be able to control when they put their ratings “at risk”. A player’s rating is not merely a predictor of the player’s results in current tournament games, but an achievement, a measure of what the player has accomplished. Players want floors so that they do not lose the trophy of achievement which their rating represents to them.
Players want to be able to play games which count for the “casual” meta-tournament without having those games count for the “serious” meta tournament. In particular, most players apparently want “quick” games to be in the “casual” meta-tournament and not in the “serious” meta-tournament. Quick equates to casual. Slow equates to serious. G/30 to G/60 are in the dual-rated muddled middle ground. They are “serious” in that players are willing to put their “regular” rating on the line, but they are played at a time control also used for “casual” games, putting the games also in the “Quick” system. Probably, a high percentage of the games played in both systems were actually dual-rated, further muddling the distinction between “Quick” and “Regular”. That is certainly the case with Massachusetts scholastic players.
All this, while perfectly human and unsurprising, is actually a bit incoherent. So it is no surprise that there are ongoing issues and confusions regarding the “Quick” rating system.
Very few people would support rating blitz in the regular rating system, or anything faster than G/30.
The quick rating is not “supposed to be highly correlated with the regular rating.” It’s supposed to show how good the player is at fast time controls, and many players are significantly (but not enormously) stronger or weaker at such controls compared to slow controls.
I think many players are 50 or 100 points stronger or weaker in quick compared to regular, and a few are 150 or 200 points stronger or weaker, or in rare cases maybe 300.
If the quick system is working perfectly, and we look at a list such as Top 100 Juniors, we should expect to see a few players 100-200 below regular, but also a few 100-200 above regular. We should expect to see many more players 50-100 below regular and above regular, and most players 0-50 below and above regular.
Instead, what we see is about 98% of the players with lower quick than regular, many 200-300 points below, some 500-1000 points below, and never anyone who is 200 or more points higher in quick than regular. And when we look at the history of the players with the large differences, rarely do we find an adequate recent sample of quick games, rather their quick ratings are based mainly on quick events they played in when their regular ratings were much lower than they are today.
A lot of players would disagree with you and would not consider tournament titles, including not only the US Championship and the national and state scholastics but also state championships, club championships, and traditional open Swisses, to be meaningless. If player A narrowly edges out player B to win a state title, that has more significance to most people than if A is rated 2401 and B is 2400.
And no one would refer to the highest rated player in a state as the state champion if that player has never won the state championship tournament. Hikaru Nakamura has not played in the Missouri Open, so he is not called the Missouri state champion. He’s not the “real” Missouri Champion, he’s the best player who lives in Missouri, which is a completely different thing.
The team that wins the Super Bowl is considered the best football team in the US, but that doesn’t make them the “real” champions of college football, because they don’t play in that “tournament.”
Bill Goichberg
The quick vs regular activity issue may be the most significant.
One example that I know well shows that the ratings may stay similar if there is a lot of activity in both systems. It looks like there was a slightly lower rating level in the quick system as opposed to the regular system, but the ratings stayed fairly close during a regular rating increase from 472 to 956 (456 valley, 999 peak).
main.uschess.org/assets/msa_joom … p?13008826
Sup Date Regular minus Quick
02/2006 18
04/06 17
06/06 05
10/06 10
02/07 23
03/07 20
04/07 15
05/07 07
06/07 07
07/07 08
09/07 18
01/08 19
04/08 20
05/08 20
08/08 30
09/08 32
02/09 17
03/09 -04
04/09 02
05/09 02
06/09 05
01/10 04
02/10 05
04/10 09
05/10 08
08/10 -45
09/10 -36
11/10 -21
12/10 -09
02/11 -03
Here is my proposed ADM again, this time with a rationale. If I submit the ADM I’ll include the rationale as part of it.
Standard delay times. Rule 5F.
In Rule 5F, change the sentence “For Quick Chess (G/10 to G/29) the standard delay is three seconds, and for Blitz Chess (G/5) two seconds.” to read:
“For Quick Chess (G/6 to G/29) the standard delay is three seconds. For Blitz Chess the standard time control is G/5 with no delay.”
RATIONALE: This amendment reflects changes previously made to Rule 5C (Quick Chess) and Chapter 11 (Blitz Chess), with the added assumption that Rule 5C will be amended to make the fastest time control which can be played under Quick Chess rules G/6 instead of G/5.
I’ve decided not to submit this ADM. Rules Committee Chairman David Kuhns said in an email: “Thanks for pointing out the 2 second mention for blitz. That was supposed to have been changed when we published the rules changes. It will be corrected on the next revision.” Since an ADM isn’t necessary to make rule 5F consistent with motions that have already been passed by the delegates and I’ve decided not to submit ADMs to make G/5 blitz only and G/6 to G/29 quick chess only, there’s no need for this ADM.