Rating obsession

[RobertJasiek]

German players in the kyu ranks are about half a stone weaker than the rest of Europe.

Evidence?

I can give you tons of examples of players who are ranked much above their ability and their win ratio is very low

"Tons of examples" amount to which overall percentage of players?

[karaklis]

Evidence?

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=3015&start=0

"Tons of examples" amount to which overall percentage of players?

10-15%

[RobertJasiek]

http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=3015&start=0

This is exactly no evidence for German ranks being weaker than most other European countries' ranks. In that thread your claim is only repeated. No evidence is given.

[Phelan]

What is actually the problem?

That people look at a registration list and think about their rating. Then they go to a tournament and talk about ratings. Then they come back and write a blog post about the rating of their opponents. Then they meet a beginner and tell him about the beauty of different rating systems. And in the evening they sit together and make rating humour.

I immediately googled "rating humour" and was severely disappointed.

As for the obsession, I've heard about a group of people that love to look at rectangular bits of wood with pebbles on them for hours on end, can't wait to tell beginners about all the different types of wood and pebble placement, and then go home and make wood and pebble humour.

Any obsession can be bad, but I've seen relatively few examples of the one you speak of. Even if it is widespread, it's more of a personal problem than a public one, no?

[RobertJasiek]

And those advocating ratings have the greater rating obsession anyway...

[karaklis]

This is exactly no evidence for German ranks being weaker than most other European countries' ranks. In that thread your claim is only repeated. No evidence is given.

Have you looked at the sources given in that thread?

[tapir]

This is exactly no evidence for German ranks being weaker than most other European countries' ranks. In that thread your claim is only repeated. No evidence is given.

Have you looked at the sources given in that thread?

Oh yes, let us talk about ratings in thread which tried to discourage this very talk:

The best evidence (largest sample) is probably this: http://www.europeangodatabase.eu/EGD/Stats_Country.php (the game comparison)

Overall 19598 wins, 21654 losses for Germany in international games, but the margin is widening over the years (2011: 1064 to 1334). However with countries as France scoring 1708 to 1147 last year, there seem to be bigger problems elsewhere. (Correcting them would obviously even the balance for the other countries somewhat.) As far as I know France is the only country having such a ridiculous high winning rate consistently, which indicates their rating practice is off. Poland had similar results in 2011 but this seems to be mainly the result from Irish and Lithuanian players meeting Polish players the first time

Please answer elsewhere, if you want to talk about rating comparison.

[RobertJasiek]

Links to links to links are not helpful. Please provide facts, which you want to use, here! It is also not so meaningful to make general statements for all ranks of a country; at least there should be different figures of dan, SKD, DDK.

[daniel_the_smith]

Tapir, is that the right page? I don't see win/loss figures there, am I blind?

[walpurgis]

German players in the kyu ranks are about half a stone weaker than the rest of Europe.

Evidence?

Provide evidence to the contrary!

Btw, you need to navigate to the correct page yourself in Tapir's link (Select Germany -> Submit, then scroll down a bit and click on "Switch to games list" and you'll see the charts.)

[daniel_the_smith]

Ah, with that it does seem clear that Germany loses slightly more than it wins, but that still doesn't tell us that they're overranked, for that we'd also need to know that all games are properly handicapped.

Also the effect is not large, Germany's win ratio is 47%; that sounds pretty acceptable to me, but of course since it's an average of all games, some ranks might be very far off but in opposite directions (kyus could be vastly overranked and dans slightly underranked, for example)... You'd need a table of win/loss by rank in order to figure that out.

[Laman]

I am not french, so I don't really know what french people talk at tournaments. Their system might well be broken for a longer time. The tournament talk point is based on experience in Germany and Switzerland and it tires me endlessly, I mean just take a look on some European go blogs... there are blogs who seemingly don't talk anything else but rating, changes in rating and how others don't deserve their rank because of their rating.

i always advocate rating in such discussions, but this i honestly don't understand - why are Germans obsessed with rating when they use self-ranking? it doesn't make any sense to me

if Germans, Swiss and others are like this, they most enjoy the thing that i don't consider so important on go. i am happy that i haven't observed the same issue on Czech tournaments

and for differences between countries, they surely exist and stem from the different systems in use. you want us to use self-ranking, we want you to use rating, neither side is clearly wrong, EGF is silent, so any discussions are probably no-go

Btw, you need to navigate to the correct page yourself in Tapir's link (Select Germany -> Submit, then scroll down a bit and click on "Switch to games list" and you'll see the charts.)

cool, never saw that one. thank you

[RobertJasiek]

Provide evidence to the contrary!

For 3d to 7d players, I have some experience from tournaments:

- French ranks are about 1/3 stronger than German ranks.
- Czech ranks are about 1 stronger than German ranks.
- Polish, Finnish ranks are about 0.8 stronger than German ranks.

For all of these countries, there are players that do not fit into the pattern and are similar or even slightly weaker than German ranks.

- Almost all other countries: similar to or weaker than German ranks.

Again there are exceptions: Some players are about equal to German ranks.

[tapir]

The eagerness with which people jump on this is pretty much an illustration of the problem...

[karaklis]

Oh yes, let us talk about ratings in thread which tried to discourage this very talk

The eagerness with which people jump on this is pretty much an illustration of the problem...

Not sure about that. For some time I followed a thread about that topic in the german forum. It was one of the longest threads there (over 700 postings iirc), and it was obvious that the eagerness of those who endorsed self-ranking was the same as those who endorsed ranking by rating. It rather seems to be an ideological question.

So as you brought up that topic, it's not a surprise that it being discussed exactly the way you can find in this very thread.