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December 09, 2004
You serve. I deserve.
I played some excellent chess the other day. But my rating didn't show much improvement. As a matter of fact, it suffered a little. The people don't even know how to play chess (actually it was losers) and still manage to beat me once in while. Well, I don't like that. I am supposed to beat them everytime. You serve. I deserve.
The rating system works in the following way. If you win against a player of equal rating, you gain 16 points and if you lose, well you lose 16 points. Of course, ratings are seldom equal, so there is a little adjustment. If the rating difference is d = opponent rating - your rating, you gain d / 25 points (could be negative). If the rating difference is really high, it is treated as 350.
So if a strong player plays a very weak player, he would gain +2 if he wins, -14 in case of a draw, and -30 if he loses. We shall denote it with (+2 -30) notation. This means he must win 7 in order to draw 1 (to break even).
Now suppose you are in a tournament and you are the only strong player (2150) and the rest are pretty weak (1900 avg). Even if its (+6 -26), you must win 5 games to afford to lose 1. And then you still only gained like what? 4 points?
But wait, it gets worse. After +6+6+6+6, my rating improved, and then it became (+5 -27), so +5-27 (I lost last round). This means I only gained 2 points. Bummer.
Posted by Oleg Ivrii at December 9, 2004 10:16 AM
Comments
Wow, thats a tough life on the battlefield...
Posted by: Bucky at December 15, 2004 04:45 PM
if you never lose you have nothing to worry about.
Posted by: Jmy at December 15, 2004 04:46 PM