The first article looks into junior average gain/loss of rating points at World Youth Chess Championships.
The findings are partially as expected, and partially surprising:
As expected for countries like India, China, Iran or Turkey, and a bit surprising for countries like Russia which I thought were usually under-rated. It could be because in the age group I am familiar with, Russian juniors have few Fide games, while as they get older they are pushed to play in more Fide rated tournaments.
Also of interest is England, showing as not gaining nor losing points. This is quite a surprise, given the general anecdotal consensus that English players give loads of points in these events.
Again, maybe 2 factors explain this: the ones complaining are usually the ones that have higher fide ratings and hence have been playing more often. Their point losses could be balanced by the English players with less games that are more underrated. Another reason could be that while English players do not lose points on average, we can still consider them as underrated if we consider countries like Germany, France, Spain and Russia to be sufficiently calibrated. i.e. England being underrated would gain points against the aforementioned countries, but lose an equal amount against the severely under-rated countries like India.
This article then piggy-backs onto another that looks at a deflation of ratings past the top 1000 (which are witnessing a rating inflation). It's a long article, but their conclusion is that it is linked to the number of juniors in a federation that tend to drive down average ratings.
Not sure how England fits in that logic, with a ridiculously low number of Fide rated juniors
Only 358 juniors (361 according to my own dataset).
One of their recommendations is to change the K for junior so that a junior vs junior game is inflationary (lower K for the loser than the winner). It would be actually interesting to see how the ECF's take on rating will work (juniors that lose ratings in a month have their K halved)
From my side, I compared FIDE ratings to the ECF ratings. Given that the conversion formula between the old grade and the new rating was supposed to mimic closely FIDE ratings , you'd expect little variance.
In reality, I found an average gap of FIDE rating of 225 points, with some age group as high a a 259 point gap. Additionally, that gap does not reduce with time as 17 yo juniors still have a 215 gap.
Only 4 juniors have higher fide than ECF, while it's not uncommon to find gaps of 400 points for strong players.
This proves how underrated England Juniors are, though not as severely as countries like China or India.
The solution is something we all know: organise more FIDE rated tournaments, with loads of adults. Junior FIDE rated tournaments are a waste of time (from a rating perspective), it will keep the average gap at 225 and simply reshuffle points around.
I even suspect that this rating gap also translates into lower opportunities which in turn translate into less Title potential for England:
Looking at the table below, you can see how England compares to other countries:
My understanding is that this is driven by:
- The lack of FIDE rated opportunities against adults
- The fact that many continental tournaments are not truly open: they often have minimum rating requirements, which limit English juniors to the weaker sections, which wile still challenging, do not provide the same learning opportunities provided by playing stronger players.
Sources:
https://en.chessbase.com/post/why-do-so ... ing-points
https://en.chessbase.com/post/problems- ... or-players