The plans for the Grading System

[Kevin Thurlow]

"I'd be inclined to suggest that you modernise the system from the 1890s to the 1990s, that players report results by email to a controller."

I'm impressed you know we were founded in 1891, nevertheless not all members have email. And if people don't remember to fill in a crosstable when it's in the same room, they will not remember to email the result later...

[MartinCarpenter]

Well, yes Still, these issues can't be impossible - as I've noted a few times Yorkshire has been doing this (on a daily basis no less) for a few years now.

[Brian Towers]

Well, yes Still, these issues can't be impossible - as I've noted a few times Yorkshire has been doing this (on a daily basis no less) for a few years now.

Some of us hear you loud and clear. Others have their fingers stuffed in their ears and are singing "La, la, la! I can't hear you. La, la, la! I can't hear you."

[Malcolm Peacock]

To what extent can existing League Management systems automatically generate files in the required format?

My LMS generates the spreadsheet form of the grading file for leagues and club championships. A separate file is needed for standard and rapidplay events. Also logically a separate file for each event (although all divisions of a league can be reported together), since the ECF needs to know who to go back to for game fee (or at least a separate file for each organization). I sent 10 files in January. The files are manually emailed, (presumably) manually extracted from the email, fed into the grading system, and any errors or questions (e.g. is this J.Smith the same person as that other J.Smith) emailed back. I'm always scared of doing something stupid like overwriting one file by another. If doing this 12 times instead of twice, I think a bit more automation is needed, to reduce work and scope for error.

[Alison Bexfield]

As a returner to chess after a very long time away I find this whole debate slightly odd and stuck in a time warp. I find it archaic that grades are only updated twice a year and this is a personal disincentive to enter tournaments.
I have spent the intervening years since I last played regular tournament chess (some 25 years ago) playing in numerous Go Tournaments. All events across Europe are sent by each tournament organiser to the grading database as soon as is convenient after the event. They are then input to the database by some team unknown to myself. The grading database updates in real time when a new tournament is validated by the team and added in. This means near instant feedback to regular tournament players following competitive events. For rapidly improving juniors this is addictive and encourages them to enter more tournaments. It also means that when you play someone of nominally similar strength this is indeed likely to be the case. For established players, such as myself, go grades usually fluctuate only a small amount up and down across a season but it is still motivating to me to follow it. For novices, grades can move rapidly up over a season reflecting their progress. There is no issue with tournament grade restrictions - just set a cut off date for these as for age restrictions. (Occasionally grades may be reset for rapid improvers to reflect jumps in grade without the need to play out a large number of tournament games.)
I was really pleased to see that the ECF wants to move to monthly grades. It sounds a great modernising step. My only question is why restrict this ambition to monthly - why not make it real time, updating daily?

[Roger de Coverly]

My only question is why restrict this ambition to monthly - why not make it real time, updating daily?

Impractical. The ECF cannot control the order in which results are reported.

[Mick Norris]

I was really pleased to see that the ECF wants to move to monthly grades. It sounds a great modernising step. My only question is why restrict this ambition to monthly - why not make it real time, updating daily?

Alison

Don't you get this with the Yorkshire system on Chessnuts? Have you looked at that? Not sure where you are geographically

[MartinCarpenter]

Well, yes and no about the issues. Yes you'll get a few results coming in in the 'wrong' order but who cares? The daily nature means that it'll get fixed very shortly anyway Really frequently updated grades are just 'fun' anyway.
(If you were feeling really pedantic you could even recalculate everything for the yearly grades in summer.).

Actually have much less potential impact than with monthly grades where a congress slipping into the wrong month could cause an error to persist in your grade for a whole month.

Yorkshire does do daily grade calculations of course, although we use the yearly grades for stuff like board orders where stability matters.

[Angus French]

Is competitive Go in England comparable to competitive chess in England? Are there leagues for teams of players - with game results graded/rated?

Neill Cooper's suggestion (made to the Graders' Forum) looks interesting:

My view is that I would like monthly grades, but as indicative only. Therefore with no compulsion that all games are submitted.

My junior/school chess club, Castles, had 23 players gain their first ever grading in January.
It would have been nice if they could have had their grade once they had played enough games and I had submitted the results rather than waiting until January.
Similarly, the players would like it if the grades were updated in response to their games in January, rather than half-yearly.

So would it be possible for such indicative grades, (for some players based on a subset of their games), to be produced?

[Roger de Coverly]

Yes you'll get a few results coming in in the 'wrong' order but who cares?

There are two types of daily grades or ratings and perhaps it's important to understand what's being suggested.

Online servers such as ICC will run ratings in real time. So if you are 2000 and lose, so as to drop to 1980, you count as 1980 for the very next opponent. It's my view that such a system is just not feasible for OTB play. On the other hand, there's Yorkshire type systems, that compute a current or year to date grade or rating that has no significance other than being for information. The liveratings site performs a similar function for top International ratings.

On the International system, the order of processing can matter, given that titles are awarded wholly or partly on rating performance. Presumably a Federation would appeal a special case if a player missed out on a title qualification because of a late reported set of results.

[J T Melsom]

I'm still not sure after all these pages exactly what proportion of chess players would benefit from changes to the frequency of publishing grades. So far as I can see, leagues will in the main prefer to determine eligibility at a fixed point and retain that for the duration of the season. So are we actually asking leagues to refine their LMS systems and undertake more regular reporting just for those members who also play congress chess. Had the ECF/BCF been offering a bespoke LMS ten or fifteen years ago, I would have said this was an excellent contribution to supporting local chess, now I'm less convinced that the overarching objective is one that is shared by the majority of players, or that it is a strategic priority for expenditure.

[MartinCarpenter]

Yes you'll get a few results coming in in the 'wrong' order but who cares?

There are two types of daily grades or ratings and perhaps it's important to understand what's being suggested.

Online servers such as ICC will run ratings in real time. So if you are 2000 and lose, so as to drop to 1980, you count as 1980 for the very next opponent. It's my view that such a system is just not feasible for OTB play.

Why ever not? Its what the Yorkshire grading system does. Yes, you can dream up really contrived situations where the results from some congress are delayed then someone plays lots of games and this slightly effects other peoples grades, but they really are contrived
(And much less 'serious' than you get with yearly/six monthly grades.).

If you want a more 'serious' sort of anomoly there's the one that comes from the way this sort of grading system essentially requires everyone to be given a grade almost the moment they start playing. That relatively often leads to people getting quite silly grades. Not allowed to affect other peoples grades much (if at all), so even this is just amusing

Using a fully live sort of grade for congress entries, board orders, team eligibility etc would be another matter and frankly plain annoying.

[Roger de Coverly]

Why ever not? Its what the Yorkshire grading system does.

Can you clarify then how the Yorkshire system works and differs from the ECF system? I was under the impression that it everything was based around the fixed points of July and January grades, but with a weighting factor that discounted past results. So if you played in November 2015 and beat someone who had been 200 in July 2015, you got the points for beating a 200 player, even if their live grade had dropped to 175.

[Alison Bexfield]

I do not see the distinction between league playing and congress playing. You need a defined date to set criteria for entry to any event whether it is a 'league season' or a weekend congress. I am not suggesting updating the grades between rounds of a tournament! With a league you would need to decide on the intervals for submitting results for grading. This might for example be every two or three months. I do not understand (and probably do not want to) why order of submission of events is a concern. Just enter the events in the order they are received. I used to play in several chess leagues some 25 years ago as well as chess congresses. And at that time it was frustrating that grades were so rarely updated. Now I am involved with junior chess and I think it acts as a disincentive. I had one junior recently ask me how he could gain a chess grade. I had to say play in a tournament and then wait for six months. At that age they go off and do something else. Six months is a long time when you are ten years old. But I also had to explain that as the grades are only updated every six months, that many junior grades were misleading as juniors can improve significantly between grade publication intervals (and indeed between graded events).

[MartinCarpenter]

Can you clarify then how the Yorkshire system works and differs from the ECF system?

Here you go: http://www.chessnuts.org.uk/ny5/Rulesof ... ading.html

Its basically ECF but a continuously adjusted exponential sum. You definitely get graded vs peoples live grades though.

You can see it in action by looking at peoples grades over a season. Well worth doing really. People like me without that many Yorkshire graded games jump all over the place, someone like Peter Shaw with a weight (numbers of games in his grade) of 80+ would need to do something quite incredible to move his grade!

This is actually the part of the system I'm much less sure about. The practical aspects seem to work very smoothly.