Report: European Go Congress 2011

[hyperpape]

Self-promotion is a good thing. In the AGA, you can rate club games, so long as participants agree and you either do not use time limits or use appropriate time limits (much like the Congress self-paired games). I've always thought that more people should make use of that option, rather than just playing two tournaments a year.

[Laman]

HermanHiddema: thank you, your answer sounds reasonable and not like a flamewar i was afraid of starting

Agree with whom? Not me!
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So the EGF rating systems inventors might have claimed. I don't.
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It fails in many respects, see earlier discussions elsewhere.

i meant to agree with tapir, who wrote "but a good measure could be the willingness of the higher rated player to play tournaments with full handicap. i predict it would be considerably lower in the countries with artificially deflated kyu ranks." in post #9. i haven't seen a proof, but i assumed that handicap system changes strength difference between players as it should, which would allow us to measure distance between ranks. handicap system might not work, so my argument my argument might not be correct

i meant all ratings altogether, that they should make possible a reliable comparison of different rated subjects

i didn't mean that GoR failed, but that EGF failed

obviously there are ratings in the Netherlands. that is why andre could compare the predictive performance of self assigned kyu ranks with ratings w/ the known results. w/o self assigned ranks you obviously can't compare but just show the predictive performance of rating based kyu ranks

although there are ratings in Netherlands, due to more frequent rating resets there are more points injected into the local system, so i think the ratings has different dynamics. for this reason i doubted the study results' aplicability elsewhere. i could be wrong

enforcing an unified rigidly rating based system in the kyu ranks when you have some growing, some shrinking national populations without much interactions but an even input of new rating points per game (epsilon) (with no or very low additional input by resets) will lead to disaster. you will have an unified system. but finnish, english, french players will still not be evenly matched.

i agree that different populations may diverge with unified rating. that is certainly a system flaw. but what bothers me is that with self-assigned ranks there is also absolutely nothing preventing ranks from diverging, so while it may work fine locally, globally it solves nothing.

i actually had an idea that the epsilon constant may not be same for all, but different for different countries and (automatically) adjusted according to results of international matches

PS: i am not against self promotion, if it is reasoned

[LR24]

Self-promotion is a good thing. In the AGA, you can rate club games, so long as participants agree and you either do not use time limits or use appropriate time limits (much like the Congress self-paired games). I've always thought that more people should make use of that option, rather than just playing two tournaments a year.

This is actually a pretty cool thing, I didn't know it exists. This would make for some more-serious games at your local club, too. The only problem I can find with it is too many games against the same person. The ratings wouldn't be too much accurate when compared from one club to another then. Not idea how it works out in practice though.

[gaius]

I don't think I would like regular rated games at my club. I like to play club games casually (I go there for fun), and I don’t care too much about lost games. I do play tournament games at maximum focus though, so I like that EGF rating is determined by those. For me, the situation in Utrecht perfect: only the yearly club championship games and inter-club-league games are EGF rated. Other games at the club are not EGF rated but count only for the "club rating". At the same time, there are very many tournaments every year within 2-3 hours traveling distance where you can play for EGF rating. Excellent!

The situation will be different in more isolated regions though...

[xed_over]

In the AGA, you can rate club games, so long as participants agree and you either do not use time limits or use appropriate time limits (much like the Congress self-paired games). I've always thought that more people should make use of that option, rather than just playing two tournaments a year.

have you seen the AGA's top ten list of rated games? http://www.usgo.org/ratings/
I know someone in our local club who takes full advantage of this

[Matti]

PS: it sounds really surprising to me that you want to unify European rankings by abandoning ( / not using) a rating system. i was under impression that ratings were invented for this very purpose and that it was the reason why EGF adopted GoR. it only failed in the following step - to enforce use of the unified rank/rating policy in member countries. current situation of inconsistent policies in different countries further hurts good comparison of both ranks and ratings

If the EGF had wanted to unify the rank it would have created a ranking system instead of a rating system. The rating system was created for the purpose of being able to form the super group for the European Championship. Assuming other purposes sometimes harms the original purpose.

Matti Siivola

[tapir]

Basically, I feel very much like John, Herman, Robert regarding rating for kyu ranks even though I brought forward mainly technicalities to doubt their value.

Handicap and rank

As far as I understand the ratings are based on the rank / handicap system in the way that they are aligned to multiples of hundred supposed to represent a handicap stone. However there are far more handicap games played locally, which will never make it to EGD (and need not to). But if you use self-assigned ranks it usually are these games or the server games which are the base of self-assigned ranks. E.g. I had a long running kadoban style match with the local 2 dan. The handicap in that match gave me a much better measure of my current strength than the rare tournaments I played.

i agree that different populations may diverge with unified rating. that is certainly a system flaw. but what bothers me is that with self-assigned ranks there is also absolutely nothing preventing ranks from diverging, so while it may work fine locally, globally it solves nothing.

Self-assigned kyu ranks do not necessarily lead to totally unrelated rank regimes in different subpopulations, because self assignation of kyu ranks in the dutch style is retaining a sort of rating or ranking system for the dan ranks and would implicitly assign kyu ranks by comparison to those dan ranks or in comparison to a server rank... and this approach can cope with population dynamics (we have countries whose player population tripled within some years and other where it shrinked about 50%)much better than rating based systems that currently have no real means to assure the rating point input equals the overall strength increase (or loss). But this is only one reason, the obvious lack of data points for kyu players, thus the lack of confidence for kyu ratings etc. are others.

Social consequences of rating obsession

But the most important argument to me is that rating obsession fuelled by providing ratings for the whole kyu range has bad side effects. Some are well known, some rather speculative.

1) Tournaments that are not visited because you can't win enough rating points there or potentially lose a lot - tournaments in underrated region or a region where you are near the top already (Some writers on L19 admitted to this, you mave heard similar opinion from players around you.)

2) Making 14k 9k 5k 1k an aim instead of a transitionary stage. An achievement instead of a tool to make even pairings. You need to listen beginners talking about their rating (instead of the game) to understand how detrimental that can be.

3) Desperate play (to preserve the rating) - I don't mind ppl playing on when behind as long as they still have a plan. I may do so myself. But I have seen an astonishing amount of desperate play by players who are hopelessly behind, with only one result: It enforces bad habits.

4) Meta gaming - he forgot to push the button on the clock, let us use all his time... (unfortunately this seems more common in the higher levels). I don't mind losing that way too much, but it makes me uncomfortable to think that i am around such scoundrels in my favourite hobby.

5) Disallowing improving players to reset their ranks, leading to mismatched pairings. Mismatched pairings may damage tournament participation. Also often enough you end with a young improving player highly frustrated and fed up with the established go scene. Some player may be lost to OTB play or Go altogether.

[Laman]

If the EGF had wanted to unify the rank it would have created a ranking system instead of a rating system. The rating system was created for the purpose of being able to form the super group for the European Championship. Assuming other purposes sometimes harms the original purpose.

thank you, i wasn't aware of this at all. then we might settle with that there is nothing wrong with different ranks across Europe, as there is no system to reliably compare playing strength in the kyu region

tapir:
Herman and others convinced me that your opinion is as valid and respectable as mine. therefore i wouldn't mind to end this discussion. but your arguments feel just wrong...

ad not enough rated games: i don't know, from my experience it is true that most go players don't play enough tournaments for a reliable rating. but most people at any tournament do

ad rank from friendly games: i can't really disagree with this, but it shows how our situation is different - i don't have many opportunities to visit a go club, so i rarely play on-the-board friendly games. on the other hand, i attend about 8 tournaments a year, 5 games each, and i feel that i am not too active tournament player. when i do play friendly, i don't play nearly as serious as at tournaments and based on my performance i would consider myself about 2 stones weaker than in tournament play (ie. i lose friendly games to people i beat at tournaments)

ad rating obsession: your most important argument seems the most off to me

1. in an underrated region you can just register with lower rank, some people do that. when you are near the top, you can compete for prizes (better motivation than rating). for other cases - if half players can win, half has to lose. when player feels he is about to move from the winner half to the loser half, he may quit or just reevaluate his reasons to attend tourneys and realise he plays more for the joy of the game itself (and to meet the people and to get smashed on Saturday's night) than for rating. if he decides to quit, i think it is because he gets frustrated by his inability to get better or to win games. rating only measures his strength
2. yes, people shouldn't care too much about their rank. but it is not rating's fault, but people's. just as this can fuel frustration or bad habits with rating, it can fuel rank inflation with self-ranking
3., 4. players who are selfish enough to do this for rating will probably do it anyway just for winning itself. when i am losing i don't feel bad for rating i lose (not during the game). i feel frustrated for how badly i failed and how i let my opponent to crush me so terribly. rating won't change it
5. i already agreed that for fast improving or infrequently playing players, rank resetting is appropriate. (i think that young improving players are more likely to leave not when crushing weaker opponents but after hitting their 'real' rank, when they are not sandbagged anymore and their win ratio suddenly starts dropping to 50%.) but one way or another, this note doesn't matter and my sentence about resetting applies