Actually with the game i just played, my rank jumped to 0.4k, so im now closer than ever before! \o/
(also not resigning on any of my corrs in few weeks might have help!)
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Unfortunate quirk of the rankings is that to be stable 1d you need to be at least 2d strength.
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Whatâs with that one game you played as a 1d in 2019?
It was actually 2d.
I participated in the London Open a few months before covid. At the time my rating (under the old EGD system, which may have been a bit deflated) had just dropped a bit under the 3d threshold at 2246, while the threshold is at 2250.
Because of that, the organisers entered me as a 2d. I didnât object. Itâs their rules.
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My kyu reading skills clearly apply to graph axis too 
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While I could understand why they entered me as a 2d, there was another thing they decided that seemed weirder to me: A participant from China entered as 5d and this was his 1st tournament in Europe. His results were not very good and when I got to play him, I beat him quite easily.
But then after the tournament had finished, the organisers changed his declared rank to 1d and thatâs what they sent to the EGD. So my win against him was greatly devaluated.
I guess their actions made some sense, but Iâm not used to this amount of meddling with declared ranks.
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I guess their actions made some sense, but Iâm not used to this amount of meddling with declared ranks.
It seems to make sense to me, since the point of ranking is to reflect your true level. If this guy was clearly not 5D, then you did not beat a 5D, regardless of what he called himself.
Otherwise my new week-end hobby will be to enter tournaments as 9D and throw mayhem in the rankings!
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Yes. You know at least what is to work, and my comment was to clarify for others that it is not a small task to claim for highest levels (not any doubt on your own perspective). Thanks for sharing.
I get that pleasure but you ll feel more great when you will play as a stable 1dâŠ
Between a 50% winrate, another nice feature is to beat a few higher dans from time to times.
I donât think that would work.
If you are an unknown player trying to register as 9d (or some other very high dan rank), organisers would ask for some evidence. The higher the declared rank, the more they would scrutinise it.
And any initial registration above 7d would only be accepted if youâre known to be a strong professional player (and thus somewhat famous and easy to verify). Even strong Korean amateurs (former yunguseng) would not be allowed to start higher than 7d and need to work their way up through the EGF rating system.
In the case of the London Open, I assume that the player really had a 5d rank somewhere in China that he was able to show to the organisers, or someone else vouched for him. Itâs just that Chinese 5d ranks nowadays donât have the same consistency as EGF 5d ranks.
And if you somehow succeed in registering with a much higher dan rank than your actual level, organisers from following tournaments can check the EGD for your previous results. If there is a large discrepancy, they may enter you at a lower rank.
There is one infamous example of a player from Azerbaijan who registered as 6d many times (mostly in international amateur tournaments in the Far East), while his actual level is probably closer to 1k EGF.
The only EGF event he participated in (as a 6d) was the 2011 EGC, where he scored 2 out of 10, losing even against some ~2k opponents.
If I remember correctly, his case was discussed in the EGF. I suppose they would register him as ~1k if he were to participate in an EGF event again.
There have also been a few instances of fake organisers sending fake tournament results to the EGD, artificially inflating the EGF ratings of some players. But at some point they were reported and that fake data was purged from the EGD.
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So his 2k opponents got their ranks artificially inflated after they won against him. To avoid this, the rank of the Azerbaijani player should have been reset to 1k a posteriori. The FFG rating system has an algorithm which does that automatically for players registering to a FFG tournament for the first time. See Fédération Française de Go
Lâalgorithme dâajustement : Un calcul complet est fait. Puis, pour tous les joueurs dont la variation delta dĂ©passe le seuil, le niveau de dĂ©part est corrigĂ© de delta-seuil. Cet algorithme est Ă©ventuellement rĂ©pĂ©tĂ© jusquâĂ convergence. Cette convergence est rĂ©putĂ©e atteinte lorsque les variations entre deux itĂ©rations successives des niveaux calculĂ©s restent en deça de 0,1 (ou aprĂšs 100 itĂ©rations).
Explanation: suppose a player registers with a rating -1950 < r < 675, and suppose that the player loses p rating points after the tournament.
If p > (6200-4r)/350 then reset r to r-p+(6200-4r)/350. Repeat the process until p - (6200-4r)/350 < 0.1 (or after 100 iterations).
So roughly speaking, the playerâs rating before the tournament is reset to a value r such that the rating after the tournament râ is approximately equal to r- (6200-4r)/350.
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It is possible to do that in the EGD, but it involves some manual work by the EGD administrator and I donât think the EGF has a clear policy in place for such cases.
But I suppose these cases are rare enough to not bother much about it. Itâs only a few games, so the overall effect is quite negligable in the long run, temporarily inflating the ratings of a handful of players by some 10 points, out of a total population of 50,000 players.
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I remember that case. Lukas Podpera 7d was also annoyed as his 1d girlfriend Adriana beat him and then didnât get much rating boost for it. I think not entering him as 5d was reasonable, though based on watching his games and pairings as a 5d I would have used 2d not 1d (he definitely knew things most British 1d donât). New Chinese 5ds are tricky, sometimes they are EGF 6d (one of them beat Lukas), sometimes 1d.
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Thatâs impressive! Congratulations for such a long and strong career.
Plateauing like a boss! 
How rude!!!
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There is always someone better (many, many more than one actually). The recent Dutch championship was mostly dominated by players who play a decade or more longer than me and ~3 ranks stronger than me. I started and finished as #16.
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Your opponents do it for you. How we call that? Delegation?
Itâs very rare to find a player who didnât benefit from some go theory.
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In Kaoru Iwamotoâs Go for beginners it is written somewhere (read the book 30 years ago) that if you practice playing go a lot you will soon (within a few months I think) become a first kyu.
So there was (early nineties) a player who read the book, played a few games and assumed he was a first kyu. Entered our club competition. Played a few games, lost all of them in a really big way, left the club never to be seen again.
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If that may reconfort you, there are usually much less difficulties to go 1d to 3d.
How Incredible, in our small world. How could they hope not being discovered.
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