A couple of questions about handicap and rating

[shinuito]

@Regenwasser

Allegedly. They neither published the data nor did they make it available via the API.

I don’t really understand the scepticism.

I feel like anoek has been fairly open to discussing any aspect of the data analysis

2021 Rating and rank adjustments

I’m referring to the data from Winning Statistics | E.G.D. - European Go Database which as I understand it, is still the soon to be old ratings? The decrease I’m referring too, if I’m understanding things correctly, is that decreasing trend of the top most numbers, the 42%, 39%…32%, 28%. One of the primary things I was optimizing for was to get those values to all be similar, so more’less 43% accross the board (with the inevitable exceptions). Statistics of Handicap Games - stron…

and previously

@anoek

2. Does it make sense to continue counting 9x9, 13x13, and 19x19 games toward the same overall rank like we do?

and you can even download a big batch of games and the rating system code

GitHub - online-go/goratings: This repository contains the (future) official...

You can do your own experiments with that.

@xela

OK, that’s surprising and interesting! Can anyone easily dig out a link to the threads where this was discussed?

But specifically

@anoek

From this data there’s two things to note:

1. Using a combined rating works quite well, certainly comparable or better than looking at per-size strengths by themselves. It seems to me like it makes sense to keep using it.
2. Using overall ratings to predict 9x9 games works pretty good at HC 0 and at HC 1, indicating to me that the strength bands are pretty compatible with 19x19 or just “go ranks” in general. However, going beyond HC 1, predictions start to get bad pretty quick. I believe this is an indication that the “Old Japanese Recommendation” is not so great for us, and that we should strongly consider figuring out what the best 9x9 (and probably 13x13) handicap setup should be.

EDIT: The question arose about considering blitz vs live vs correspondence ranks, here’s the data from that, which I believe is still very supportive of using an overall rank for picking handicap.

Etc.