BGonline.org Forums

Ratings and isolated populations

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Thursday, 14 July 2011, at 1:17 a.m.

Until just now, I overlooked Leo's question about whether chess suffers from the problem of isolated populations getting out of sync. The answer is that it does happen; perhaps Claude Bloodgood is the most famous example. Bloodgood was incarcerated and therefore played only in prison tournaments, and his rating rose to be the second highest in the U.S.

However, there is enough mixing in the chess world that this sort of situation is rare, and doesn't cause problems. It's less clear that there is "enough" mixing in backgammon, especially since the luck factor in backgammon creates so much noise in the ratings.