Say you enter your first tournament at 3dan.

You beat the following two players
Mr S (rank 3d, highest 3d) (rating 2245)
Mr C (rank 4d, highest 5d) (rating 2319)
You lose to
Mr W (rank 2d, highest 4d) (rating 2188)

Your exit rating is 2303, entry rating 2300
You are subsequently demoted to 2d, your exit rating is 2218, entry rating 2200

Is it the right decision?

I didn't follow these two lines at all :S

An exit rating is your rating at the end of the tournament.
An entry rating is your rating at the start of the tournament.
I hope that clears things up for you.

If not, then press switch saying new player in GoR system.

I think Javaness means if you put his entry rank @2d his final GoR is 2218; but with the same results against same opponents if his entry rank is 3d his finally GoR is 2303.

I think he should be put as 3d rather than demoted to 2, because when you pair him you paired him at 3d.

Or maybe I misunderstood it, I didn't understand much neither.

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求而不得
舍而不能

If you mean to say the player was post-tournament adjusted to 2d because of the last loss, and ended up with a GoR of 2218 instead of 2303, then no, I would have said it was a ridiculous decision.

I think the politics over that sort of thing is pretty terrible at the moment, but trying to explain this has been worse than banging my head against a brick wall.

Three results is really not enough to say anything meaningful about a player. These results are pretty much compatible with any rank from 1 dan to 6 dan.

If the tournament organizers had better information than these result to base their decision on, then there is nothing wrong with the decision. If they did not have better information, then there is no compelling reason for the change.

The person in question is a British Player who entered a tournament at 3d and won 2/3 which including beating a British 4 dan. As a result his exit GoR would be close to 3.8 dan on the BGA ratings list which would have made him one of the top British players. If his entry grade was 2 dan, won and lost against the same opponent than his exit GoR rating would be 2.9dan on the BGA ratings list.

I suppose the BGA is trying to get him to enter as 3d at his next tournament as opposed to 4d.

This all sounds rather bewildering to me. I'd always assumed that rating systems (which I have no experience of yet in Go, unless you count KGS, although I played chess in my teens so knew roughly how they worked for that) were objective mathematical algorithms which took the current rating of all players in the tournament, together with the results of the tournament, and output a new rating for each player. I wasn't aware there was any choice in the matter (other than the choice of what kind of rating system to use in the first place, of course, but this is presumably unchangeable most of the time) - let alone any politics involved

couple remarks.
1) I agree with Herman that you can not say all that much from the results in only one tournament.

2) winning 2/3 games is a respectable result and does not indicate a wrong entry rank to me. Both 2d and 3d could be accurate (even 1d or 4-5d might be possible).

3) an exit rating of 2303 means he is a solid 3d (not close to 4d) 2250-2350 is the 3d range in the EGF system.
next tournament he will therefore just enter as 3d again which seems fair.
Isn't there a classification comity (who is now trying to demote the guy) who would have to promote him to 4d before he can use that rank?

4) Maybe the most important point. demoting a player after he just played his first tournament where he got 2/3 is probably not going to make him want to play more tournaments. According to other posts here the BGA is having enough membership/ tournament turnout problems already. Scaring this new tournament player away sounds like a very bad thing to do...

5) just see how he will do in subsequent tournaments before promoting or demoting the guy.

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Laurens
Go school: freegame's Teaching School
Author of: The Next Move a book for 15-3kyu players.

Robinz: it's relevant that it's the player's first tournament. So you have an algorithm for updating ratings, but the ones in place require an initial rating.

Though changing it after the fact is quite a bit more political, I'd say.

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Occupy Babel!

(emphasis added)

That is basically how it works. The question here is: What if a player has no current rating? That happens when he has never played any official event before.

In those cases, the EGF rating system assigns an initial "current rating" based on the player's reported dan/kyu rank. If the player is reported to be 3d, then he is put at 2300, if he is reported to be 2d, then he is put at 2200. Only after that is the tournament result processed to change the ratings of all the players.

The question javaness is asking is whether an initial rating of 2300 is better than an initial rating of 2200 or vice versa, for this player given these results.

An alternative method that rating systems can use to assign ratings to new players is to find a stable point: Given the ratings of the opponents, find a rating for the player that would not change given his results against them. In this case, that would put the player at around 2324

The fact remains, however, that any method is pretty much a wild guess given the lack of data in this case.

Yes, but not in the BGA system, which has 3d around 2240.



The BGA seems very unaware of just how much bad will this prescriptive attitude is creating. I have already decided that I'm not entering any more tournaments until I feel sufficiently strong to hold 2200 GoR points so that I can reset as 2d, simply because the political administration is invasive nonsense. Assuming good faith and the fact that, right now, points need to be injected into the system at dan levels to keep parity with other countries, are important aspects that are both ignored.

I have no idea who is making these judgements, or for what reason, but I hope they realise that they are encouraging people to lose faith in the UK rating system, and indirectly discouraging people from entering tournaments. If their goal really is to increase activity and participation, this is most definitely not the way to go about it.

Depends on how the games went (not necessarily on the result)... the opponents can evaluate the level better than any rating calculation can. Is the concerning player unhappy about this result or not?

2nd edit:
I don't understand topazg. If the dan ranks in the UK were in rapid deflation ("needing the injection of rating points to keep on parity with other countries) this should show in the international performance of UK players against other countries. It doesn't, unless there is a general deflation in Europe a deflation in the UK is unlikely according to the statistics. Not playing tournaments to wait for a rank reset is at best a rationalisation, at worst rating obsession. It points to a real problem however - people started choosing tournaments according to "rating potential". Shortly, the success of the GoR may turn out to hurt European (tournament) Go in the long run.

3 games ought to produce some kind of provisional rating - but no such concept exists in GoR. Of course, we can't say for certain how strong somebody is, so why should we change their entry rank? They entered above the bar at 3d, but where demoted to 2d when the results where submitted to the rating database. I guess nobody will lose any sleep over it, but that still doesn't mean it will make sense to me.

The change is done because a system exists. This quietly publicised system basically forbids entry at a grade above 2dan - unless you happen to be foreign or a foreigner living in the UK. The motivation is presumably to make it harder to obtain a 4 dan rank (whether or not you want one). It has the probable effect (in this case) of making the ratings less accurate. It usually seems to hit people who don't actually care about British dan certificates, and who have no interest in ratings, which is amusing. Overall, I'm sceptical about the merit of the policy.

I found out where the confusion comes from. The BGA has a "strength" allongside a "rating". (something i did not know before)
The 3.8 was referring to the strength not to the rating.
The BGA rating is that of the EGF (GoR).
the BGA strength = (rating - r) / g
where:
r is the rating for an average shodan.
g is the difference in rating corresponding to a one-grade difference.
basically a correction for the deflation (or inflation) of European ranks (not ratings)


Than the tournament derector who signed up the guy as a 3d missed this rule. had the TD (or player) known about it, he would be entered as a 2d, and there would have been no problem at all

The fact that there is this rule places the problem in a different perspective in my opinion. It provides a much more solid foundation for demoting the guy to 2d than the results of the tournament. I would say have a chat with the guy and explain the problem and ask him if he objects to correct his entry rank from 3 dan to 2 dan even though the tournament is over already.
If it was me I would not like it, but knowing there is this rule I would respect it and accept the change.

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Laurens
Go school: freegame's Teaching School
Author of: The Next Move a book for 15-3kyu players.

hyperpape, Herman: thanks for the explanation, of course it's obvious that what I talked about doesn't work if a player enters without a rating on the system (but I hadn't thought of it when I posted).

Nevertheless, surely the BGA should just pick one method in advance for assigning ratings to new players based on their results, and stick to it - even if it gives absurd results in some cases, which is probably unavoidable. No great harm will be done provided it is clear to everyone that this rating is in some sense "provisional" (similar to the question marks on KGS grades - I think everyone knows that these numbers are basically nothing more than wild guesses). Allowing some officials to (seemingly arbitrarily) decide what is done on a case-by-case basis seems to just create potential for bad feeling, as this thread demonstrates - even though their intentions are probably entirely good.

Actually, my reason for doing it has been personal complaints against me of sandbagging (rare, I accept, but IMO this is a bigger issue than the one in question from the OP), which leads to an unpleasant atmosphere. Entering at a higher rank is frowned upon by the organisers. Entering at a lower rank is frowned on by fellow participants. Tournaments should be fun, not political.

EDIT: Maybe I should not particularly care what either think, but I do - to me, tournaments should be social events as well. It feels to me like "having to care about ratings and ranks" is forced upon us a bit. I would much rather just go and be able to enter as whatever I feel is most appropriate at the day, and let everyone else do the same - then enjoy the day, throw stones around, and go home. Instead, I end up deliberating over all this nonsense prior to turning up at all to find what other people are going to find the least awkward. Sure, I'm probably making way more of the problem than it needs to be, but having been caught in the middle of a genuinely awkward public dispute over it a couple of years back, I've become naturally cautious.

Addendum: Of course, I understand the awkwardness of the reset to 3d being, actually, a reset to 3.7d because GoR and EGF 3d don't tie up, and that's a separate problem in itself. The ability to reset as "GoR 2230" for example would be much more useful.

IMO the rating of a player should not depend at all on the rank he declared at tournaments. It should only depend on your won/lost games. The declared rank is used for match-making and nothing more. For me that rating resets are available and needed is evidence for the system being flawed. I'd look into using WHR or a similar system to calculate ratings.

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Sanity is for the weak.

There are exactly zero rating systems that work when you have insufficient data. This issue would not be solved by WHR, Glicko or any other rating system you can come up with.

Rating resets allow the rating system to use additional data: The knowledge of the players and tournament organizers about a player's current playing strength in relation to other players. That knowledge is generally pretty reliable, in my experience.

So what rating resets try to compensate for is lack of data, not any inherent flaw in the rating system itself.

If all active players in Europe played at least one rated game every single week, plus a few tournaments per year, rating resets would never happen and the EGF rating system would probably be able to generate reasonably reliable ratings.

I understand that players can be underrated (the rank is after all not that much important, if not involving a reset). I also understand that playing underrated players is not popular, because you don't win much if you win, but lose a lot if you lose. At the same time, not only tournament organizers, but the federations and individual players all around don't like the idea of resetting at all. Maybe in lower kyu ranks, but above that it is like you didn't earn it and cheat your way up.

In the last tournament I played such an improving player, and asked afterwards (after luckily winning) whether he is really only 3k because he felt stronger. But you shouldn't take such comments as complaints, but as encouragement (at least I do, when someone tells me that I am underrated). It is just another way of saying "you improved".

The only way to be a sandbagger in the long run is by improving. (Calling you sandbagger is just an impolite way to express it.)