Overall rank vs. speed ranks discrepancies

General Go Discussion
6

It seems to me the past decisions to:

  1. Grant ratings on 9x9 and 13x13 games
  2. Separate the ranks/ratings for Blitz, Timed and Correspondence
  3. Keep the old single rating separately from the three in #2
  4. Call the old single rating 'overall’
    have complicated the matter, and made understanding of issues/
    problems difficult.

It may be time for a coherent, high-level policy to be established/published, and all above four items to be re-evaluated based on this.

Everyone understands 9x9 Blitz and 19x19 Correspondence could have different characteristics. But the issues are multi-dimensional:

  1. Board size
  2. Game speed
  3. Tournament/Ladder/Other
  4. Multiple / Provisional accounts
  5. Sandbaggers/Airbaggers
  6. Human/Bots
    and the Elo system, originally developed for Chess, does not cope well with such disparities without careful adaptations.

note: Sandbaggers are those who claims/maintains lower rank/rating than his/her true strength for the joy of destroying opponents in games. Airbaggers are those who tries to obtain higher rank/rating than his/her true strength taking advantage of loopholes in rating systems. ‘Airbagger’ term is quite new, might be unique to OGS, and may be a creation of an OGS user, Rikhon.

2 Likes