Life In 19x19

hyperpape wrote:About DDK players: the old-timers are mistaken in this case. The EGF and AGA offer plenty of evidence that ranks below 10k can offer meaningful information.

I am not sure anybody said otherwise.
Personally, I think that of course such ranks offer meaningful information.
Part of this information is, for example: "my rank can fluctuate by 2-3 stones during the progress of a single game, and the closer I am to 20k the bigger this variance and the more its probability." I certainly find that meaningful.

From my perspective, Go is a much harder game to learn especially at first. In other words, the basics of Chess are, well, basic. So far, I've found nothing "basic" about Go with the exception of the rules themselves. Now I haven't reached a note-worthy rank in Go, however, if you tell me that you're a 1750 Chess player, I'm about as impressed as someone telling me that they're 5 kyu. One thing to remember about both ranking systems is that the ranks become significantly harder to reach the higher you get.

fanfan wrote:Hello,

2000 +/-50 ELO for a 1d, 2800 ELO +/-50 for a 9d, 100 ELO per dan: simple and probably closed to the reality.

Indeed.. if you watch the graphs of both FIDE ratings distribution and EGF rating distribution you notice that the peak of the normal distribution is around 2100 ELO or for go around 1D so I guess this is pretty accurate.

Looking at the rank histograms, I first see that the histograms are clearly skewed, not normal curves. I would use the cumulative distribution curves and make the comparison by matching percentiles. I think there used to be a graph on Sensei's like this: http://senseis.xmp.net/?RatingHistogramComparisons