Normal Topic Massive Rating Swings (Read 4422 times)
Gerry1970
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Re: Massive Rating Swings
Reply #8 - 09/27/13 at 14:43:49
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I have been away from OTB for a while so I just play online blitz at the moment. Some days I will lose a ton of games and another day I will win a ton. My environment across those two days has not changed even though I realize that some of my opponents could be taking things less seriously on the day I win or some of them have hit the beer already given time differences. Nevertheless it got me thinking about performance in OTB.

Some days I think we are not up for it, mentally and physically, just like a football team that is not up for it on the day and is not sharp. Worse, we don't get to choose the days we compete on, other than dropping out after doing badly in say the first two rounds. If you have not got many slow time control tournaments in your area you really have to play. If the tournament day is one of those where you are not really up for the competitive fight and are not sharp then things will go badly as for any competitive team. (When I say not up for the fight, I mean that we think we are but end up in the middle of the first game for example and we just don’t have it today.) Over my OTB life I have had 4/4 scores and 0/4 scores in OTB play.

As I read what I wrote above I realize this might be stating the obvious.

Gerry
  
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Bonsai
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Re: Massive Rating Swings
Reply #7 - 09/27/13 at 13:07:51
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Despite having been on a relatively stable rating level work/private stress and amount of training seem to have a sizable impact on my play and occasionally lead to some swings. I'd assume that that's the same for other people, too.
  
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Keano
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Re: Massive Rating Swings
Reply #6 - 09/27/13 at 11:39:58
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There can be massive swings at GM level too, especially those GM's who's style leads to quite high variance in results, and who tend to pack in a lot of events. I remember playing some Indian GM and his rating was only 2380 or something like that. Somebody told me the year before he was around the 2500 mark.

  
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MartinC
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Re: Massive Rating Swings
Reply #5 - 09/27/13 at 09:17:27
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Well presume we're talking 'stable' people here because young/fast improving people can obviously go up much faster.

Once you talk about people who've reached a broadly stable grade then to a large degree it depends on how you set up your grading systems. 

You can either set up to try and be really stable by weighting 'old' games highly  - FIDE say - or to make it quite responsive to performance in recent tournaments. No right or wrong answer to this really.

With very responsive systems what you mostly get is random variation around a fairly stable 'core' grade. In the ECF one, the variance tends to be ~+-100. 100 is a little extreme but normal enough.

I actually went  -~200 in six months in the ECF system. (From maybe +80 to -125 vs my stable grade). They've been experimenting a little and some of those features are emphasising randomness a little.
  
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ErictheRed
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Re: Massive Rating Swings
Reply #4 - 09/26/13 at 22:05:51
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If we're talking class players, it's really no big deal.  I actually skipped the "1600s"; I jumped from 1599 to 17-hundred-something because I lucked out and scored 4/4 in one tournament!  In that one, I legitimately played well and beat two A-players, but an overrated Master and another 1800ish player blundered against me and lost (probably from underestimating me).  In my case though, I was improving rapidly and my rating continued to climb (I only played about 12 rated games a year in those days).

So a couple of lucky wins or unfortunate blunders are all it takes to have huge rating swings at that level.
  
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JEH
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Re: Massive Rating Swings
Reply #3 - 09/26/13 at 21:09:17
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1) Long breaks (years)

2) Playing too much (resulting in reduced game effort)

3) Under rated juniors

4) Poor mental state (work/life distractions)
  

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Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, stuck in the middlegame with you
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Stigma
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Re: Massive Rating Swings
Reply #2 - 09/26/13 at 19:08:59
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I had a rating "swing" of minus 75 points in only 8 days recently! 
My brain wasn't working properly, and the tournament had a very high coefficient (K factor). I really don't want to withdraw from tournaments unless there's some concrete, physical illness (to date only 1 single tournament), but maybe this is a principle I should abandon!?

On the plus side, I expect I'm now slightly underrated and should swing back up eventually - this is always more fun  Smiley
  

Improvement begins at the edge of your comfort zone. -Jonathan Rowson
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dfan
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Re: Massive Rating Swings
Reply #1 - 09/26/13 at 17:52:04
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1) The worse a player (and his opponents), the more volatile their rating will be, because ratings are based on results and the results of weaker players are more random.

2) The FIDE and USCF rating systems are also specifically designed to make the correlation between results and ratings more volatile for weaker players. Look up "K factor".

As a result of this, I don't think swings of 100 points mean very much at the class level, unless that swing turns into a plateau that is confirmed by many subsequent games. So I wouldn't be overly concerned at losing 100 points, or overly excited at gaining 100 points, unless the change sticks.
  
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Gerry1970
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Massive Rating Swings
09/26/13 at 17:15:06
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Hello All:

I have seen class players sometimes have ratings swings of over 100 ratings points in a year. I know online blitz is very different but even there I have swings of 100 points myself in very short periods.

Any thoughts on these big swings for OTB players? 

Thanks,

Gerry
  
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