2021 Rating and rank adjustments

Thanks for replying, Zbingu. Has your claim been tested? I don’t think so, but in fairness, yours may well be a majority view.

My response is the rating system is designed to handle this issue, provided there are no artificial ratings floors. There’s nothing special about a 9-stone handicap on a 19x19 board. More than 9 can be allowed. Make the handicap large enough on a 19x19 or 9x9 board, and you can make the game 50-50. That’s obvious, I would think.

I would rather give players an approximately 50-50 shot than to force new players to get destroyed over and over to no purpose or benefit or reason.

So what if an estimate of 42 kyu is inexact? It is surely more accurate than to pretend he’s 25 kyu.

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the reason for the floor is handicap, anoek reported that based on his data it isn’t meaningful below that floor. While I question the decision, I don’t have any particular complaints (except for the previous 25k hell).

As for the ceiling, the answer is tradition. 9th heaven is the highest heaven, 9 dan is reserved for the best players, 9 is a special number for the things that are the most of something. Now, normally what I would do is adjust the ranks to make sure that it’s reserved exactly for those within 1 stone of the best human, but it’s much easier to just cap it off, and I haven’t seen complaints about it from 9ds

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Are there plans to update deviation between games? Would be somewhat helpful to see if the ranks for certain boards sizes are out of date. If it’s at all possible, of course.

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I don’t have any data on that, just anecdotal experience from live clubs.

If you are going to have a ranking system with a step of one, than, by induction, one stone has to be a meaningful difference between ranks such that the win rate between 2 players one rank appart goes to 50-50 with the proper handicap.

Well, my way would obviously get rid of the 25k hell. No need for any 30k or 35k hell either. etc. No artificially caused hell/purgataory of any kind.

I’m thinking of trying shogi. If I’m 72k at first, terrific. I can try to improve and measure my progress.

If you make the floor for go 25k, then some 25k’s will be much much stronger than others. Let’s use the rating system to let all 25k-or-lower players have interesting, relatively even-probability games.

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Thanks. That’s fine to me as a first approximation. There is an issue of transitivity to larger gaps in rank and larger handicaps. But I’m sure that equal players giving each other 9-stone handicaps will find their probabilities of winning will depend on who has black.

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Well, I’d like to see the quote from anoek, but I can state some general principles: It is now becoming more and more clear in stochastic inference that classical null-hypothesis significance testing (NHST) is questionable as decent science. NHST is likely not what anoek engaged in, and even if it was, it seems not relevant here.

I would let anoek’s good model play out both above and below 25k. If all 25 kyu players win half the time against other 25 kyu players, there is no reason to change anoek’s floor of 25k. All of these players will remain 25k.

On the other hand, if some 25k players win 1/4 their games against other “25k” players, they should be maybe 27k or similar. If some “25k” player win 1/10 of their games against the top 25k players, they are probably 29k or lower. I don’t know anoek’s exact general algorithm for handling this, but 25k is too high for the moment for players that generally lose against other 25k’s. I want all “25k” players to find players at a similar level, or an approximately equalizing handicap against stronger players.

In other words, there is no reason for anoek or anyone else to worry about formal statistical significance. What he already has in place for 15 kyus is great when compared to assuming that all “25k”'s have equal playing strength.

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Do you have 25k friends or something? How do you know how it is down there?

[duplicated post removed]

S_Alexander asked,

“Do you have 25k friends or something? How do you know how it is down there?”

I’m trying to benefit all current 25k players. That’s my primary goal here. If you have a category of player that you think will lose out in any way in my proposal, please let us know.

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Probably could be its own thread, but I also do not understand the 25k “floor” heh. I doubt it matters though since anyone who plays enough to get an accurate rank will inevitably be stronger than 25k…

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I’m not completely following all this but doesn’t this mean that 25k’s are also generally winning against 25k’s?

But also discussion here:

And here:

Although I suppose these have been over taken by events somewhat

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Thank’s a lot !
Nice game !
Maybe it’s time to me to give money.
I’m a debt for all those beautiful things. I’m passed long and Great time in OGS.
long life for OGS

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25 posts were split to a new topic: A separate ranking pool for children?

I like rank clipped to 9d and 25k because it’s pretty.

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I have split part of the discussion from here into: A separate ranking pool for children?

As it seemed to deserve its own topic.

This thread is already massive enough, please try to stay on topic and consider creating a new thread if you have any related idea.

If I have moved or deteled something you think belongs here, I appologize, please simply repeat your point again.

Many thanks.

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Does anyone have a good idea why ratings changed? Ranks are understandable. But I lost 150 rating points, maybe. Is it because ratings are more stable (fixed volatility bug), and now they don’t push each other apart as much, so they bunched up towards average a little?

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my suspicion is exactly that, a bit like cooling down a fluid: when all the particles/players are moving less quickly and bumping into each other less the volume contracts

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Hi, this may no longer be an issue, but I thought I’ll ask to get a confirmation, just to be sure.
btw, This is not a big deal, no urgency whatsoever. I do hope this gets cleared up eventually.

on the first day when this adjustment came live, I “created” a custom game, and restricted my opponent’s ranking. say, I only wanted to play with one of the 12k players, I specified the min and max rankings in the set up. To my surprise, a 6k was able to accept it. I suppose there’s a logical explanation for that, but it’s a bit confusing. I haven’t tried it since, so I don’t know if a 6k can still accept a 12k game, I hope not.

could you please advise what is the proper way to set up these rank-restriction games under the new system? Thanks.

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But those other dan players will also have had their ranks similarly changed, so if they were 1d when you were 4k and you are now 1d, they will be (around) 5d, so they will still have to give you handicap stones and still find it (approximately) just as hard to beat you.

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