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Ratings

Posted By: Rich Munitz
Date: Friday, 9 October 2009, at 7:37 p.m.

In Response To: Ratings (W Womack)

There has already been much discussion on stats, ratings, etc. And it will happen to some extent for US events.

However, I believe that you have a misconception:

"The problem right now is getting to a consistent rating, and if you play online every group/server/etc has a different rating."

It is true that the ratings may be very different, but the rating formulas are usually not.

Most online sites use the exact same rating formula to compute their ratings. The problem is that the ratings produced are a result of the players that play on the site. For example, if they all say "all new players start at 1500", and then only beginners play on the site, you'll get the same ratings spread as you would on another site where only Open players played. It is not the rating formula, but the playing population. A rating merely tells you how you rate in skill relative to the other players you are being compared with.

This exact problem is faced in live BG tournaments. There are two divisions so that only Open players only play each other and only Intermediate players only play each other. There is very little mixing between the two groups. You can have a player in each division with a 40-win,25-loss record at the end of the first year ratings are computed. You'd imagine both players will wind up with similar ratings given similar records. But clearly, the Open player is much stronger than the intermediate player. That is the problem. And it is why we must maintain separate ratings for the two groups. We can artificially attempt to normalize to make the two separate sets of numbers line up to what you might expect (i.e. Open players have higher ratings than Intermediates) by doing things like starting new Open players 100 points higher than new Intermediates, but that only gives the illusion of a standard uniform metric of skill.

Sorry, but our reality is not always so simple.

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