Hello. This is not for support but to bring up ranging. In the KGS I am 14k at the moment. Here at the OGS I am 24k. How can be such big difference in ranking? Have anyone else noticed this?
I have also played on KGS though not recently. My ranks are very similar there and here. Your OGS rank seems reasonably well established. ie. ± is below 100pts. TPK (Twenty Plus Kyu) ranks are notoriously volatile though.
I am wondering how reliable your KGS rank is? How firmly established?
Second theory. KGS is desperate to flatter players. 
I would be happy to review a game for you if you post such a request in forums.
hmmm. so you think that the KGS is not honest?
Hi Kosh. Thanks for the offer but I dont have any games in question, just that the rank in the servers are so different… that is all.
The ranking from one site/system to another is invariably different. “Honest” doesn’t come into it.
That said, I don’t recall previous comments on the differences of ranks in these forums ever being so extreme.
I was unable to examine your KGS ranking as I no longer have KGS installed.
I looked at your last 10 games and noticed that they all were with handicap.
Do you play only handicap games?
I wonder if that could cause a less accurate calculation of rating.
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FWIW, other players coming from KGS have reported the same sort of thing, though not to that extreme.
It is important to be aware that there is very little that calibrates go servers to each other. It strikes me as somewhat miraculous that our ranks on different servers end up as similar as they do in practice: there is no almost mathematical or practical reason that I’m aware of that this should be the case.
Very occasionally, a server does something to adjust it’s ranks if it is perceived as “out of wack” but I can only vaguely recall something like that happening once in the short couple of years I’ve been involved.
I don’t really buy the idea that handicap play is affecting things: the rating system takes handicap into account, so without a hypothesis of how it would be causing this effect, it’s a bit of a shot in the dark as to the cause.
Especially since other players reporting the same effect haven’t been similarly playing handicap here, that I am aware.
I guess it would be interesting to see if the OP suddenly ranks up if they start playing unhandicapped!
My feeling is that the OP’s “real” OGS rank is currently more like 19-20k, which is where it was for some time before a few recent losses. The OP is not currently playing “the biggest move” during the opening, which is one of the signs of someone transitioning from TPK into DDK, so it seems to me the rank is “correct” relative to other OGS players (irrespective of handicapped play).
A timely meme is always good:
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My understanding is that lower ranks players as a rule they get handicaps which makes sense.
That’s not strictly true.
There is the option to play with or without handicaps.
IF handicaps are selected, then the lower ranked player gets the handicap stones AND the game is ranked as if it is EVEN. Each player will get the same amount of rating points for winning.
IF handicaps are NOT selected, then the game is ranked as if it is not even: if the lower ranked player wins against their more skilled opponent they get a lot of rating points, wheras if the higher ranked player wins against the less skilled person, they get hardly any rating points.
For some reason, at OGS not-handicapped is the default (unlike some other servers). I don’t know why that is - having less handicapped games played reduces the basis for the one-rank-per-stone expectation.
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Hello, also for me it was confusing when starting to play at OGS that my rank was several kyu ranks higher than on kgs or in tournaments.
KGS Iam atm 8kyu, national / international tournaments 10kyu.
On OGS Iam between 12 + 13kyu.
there is an overview (but already a bit old) that shows how different the rankings in different countries / servers are:
If this confuse you you can hide the ranking on OGS. That will only hide it for you (not the same on KGS) so you will still have the main benefit of a ranking system: to play balanced games.
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I was 5d+ in kgs and 2d in ogs at this moment, so the difference should be acceptable, as the AI improved a lot.
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what strikes me is the conversion between rating and rank. I see people with a 2200 rating being 1 dan and a 2300 rating being 2 dan.
i would expect a conversion similar to this instead:
https://senseis.xmp.net/?EGFRatingPerRank
btw i like the different ratings for different time settings and board sizes (old-school chess.net style).
Hi Bas,
Dave de Vos here.
The ratings you see here on OGS are Glicko ratings, which I think are comparable to Elo ratings (so a 100 point difference in rating corresponds to a 64% winning probability in an even game).
EGF ratings are not really Elo ratings. By definition of the EGF rating system, 100 points difference corresponds to 1 rank, or equivalently 1 full handicap stone.
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Tbh, I am in Thailand and I find that the OGS ranks are a little strict compared to my country. I think that KGS is more accurate for me (im some 12k in ogs and 7k in kgs). However KGS rank calculation is absolute bs I played a game against a 9 dan lost by like 150 points for fun and it bumped me from 7k to 2d which i dont understand.
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I think kgs regularly recalibrates your ranks based on players it thinks are very consistently some rank.
So if these players drift a bit in the system (I think) it recalculates peoples ranks based off of them.
https://www.gokgs.com/help/rmath.html
and
https://www.gokgs.com/help/anchor.html
From time to time, the anchors are adjusted ; some old anchor whose rank is no longer reliable enough is removed, and some new anchor is added. When such an event occurs, it will slightly change all the KGS ranks.
Anyway, you can even have played no games and then have your ranking move around up or down. I also don’t really enjoy that that much.
I think OGS won’t match every individual countries rating system, in the same way ranks across different servers don’t match either.
At one point OGS did shift slightly to align itself better with the EGF and AGA rating systems around the 1d level.
I think those (AGA and EGF) rating systems are seen to be somewhat strong as to compared to others at least at the lower ranks. Probably once you hit 5 or 6d in any rating system it can be hard to compare.
For instance though, as an EGF 1 kyu I could play even games with Japanese 5 dan’s when I visited Japan. I was able to win a two stone handicap game 
I think that’s also ok too Each system is doing its own thing for its own player pool, and they don’t necessarily match other unrelated systems.
My feeling is that if OGS is a popular western server then the correspondence between AGA and EGF ranks with OGS ones starts to become self reinforcing at some point. What I mean is, if people learn to play go on OGS and play their first tournament, they might give an OGS rank as their entry level. It might get slightly adjusted then as the EGF, AGA and OGS ranks probably don’t align well the further you go away from 1dan, but still there will be some correlation between them as more people come into the system with OGS ranks say.
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As of today (long time not being on KGS) a main difference is that OGS ranks are much quicker to follow your results. On KGS your rank shift after a bunch of games to a engraved number in a rock, so much that players create new accounts from time to time to let their rank evoluate.
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