Automatic handicap set by "Overal" rank

[amodeo]

I have only recently started playing on OGS, and I like it, but there was one thing that surprised me that I don’t like.

When I offer to play a game, I always choose automatic handicap, so the game will more likely be a challenge for both players. I am often surprised with the result. Wouldn’t it be better to set an automatic handicap based on our ranks the type of game we are playing, rather than by our “overall” ranks?

I just play what OGS calls “live.” I don’t play blitz or handicap. Some of my opponents have a big difference between their live rank and their overall rank. They might be about as strong as I am in non-blitz non-correspondence games, but play very much worse or very much better than that at blitz and/or correspondence games. Wouldn’t it be much better in such cases to play without a handicap?

Of course it works the other way around, too. If I play a game that is not blitz or correspondence, and my opponent and I have the same “overall” rank, but one of us is quite a bit stronger than the other in non-blitz, non-correspondence games, then wouldn’t a handicap based on our “live” ranks be more likely to make the game challenging for both of us than if we played without a handicap?

[mlopezviedma]

Hi, @amodeo, welcome to OGS!

As experience has shown with more than a year of using this system, the overall rank is the most representative of a player’s rank. Moreover, right now the developers are working on changing the way ranks are shown, and the overall rank is going to be the only one used in these calculations.

In an ideal world, you are right. But in practise, most of the users don’t play every time control. So you’ll see that most folks have only one rank that is following his/her overall rank in a quick pace, and the other two get stuck near their initial rank (most of the times 25k). This is why we mods need to constantly update those ranks when we find them, and this mostly happens when they are reported, so we usually fix it one or two games late. Fortunately, with the avobe mentioned rank update we won’t need to do this anymore.