I think it's simple: people who play or have played both want to know which game they are better at, relatively speaking.

I think this is a fun AND potentially useful discussion.

I mostly play on IGS and I do lots of experimenting, but if I had to pick my "true" IGS rank I suspect it would be 2d+. (I've achieved an official 3d rank several times.)

I used to play chess, and when I retired from tourneys I was a B player.

When I talk to people about Go and tell them that I'd probably be an AGA 4d, I tell them that my "guess" is that that's about equivalent to a weak chess master, but that's speculation on my part. But it's a useful comparison for establishing context in conversations.

Chess players are the wrong people to convert. Try backgammon players... black and white stones of equal value and already playing a fun game.

P.S. OGS rating is seriously *ucked up. (Longer thinking time, rarely full handicap and rated 9x9 games mainly.) Many established European dan players play deep in the kyu ranks there.

As far as I can tell, all of the turn-based servers place a user several ranks weaker (sometimes 5 or more) for a given strength compared to real-time servers and go organizations.

but that's not a fault of the server, as much as it is of the time limits.

with weeks and months (sometimes even years) to finish a game, the server can't really keep up with your real life progression.

I don't mean to suggest that it's a problem... the server's ranks are internally consistent. It can just be surprising to someone new to them expecting that they are about X kyu or dan.

A rough linear estimate of http://www.goratings.org/ and chess elo rating (FIDE) is like this.

We start at 2000 points and every 200 points in goratings is approximate to 100 points of chess elo rating.

Top GMs are around 2800 points (+800) and on goratings top pros are around 3600 (+1600)

Also a quote from wiki.



Now if +700 chess rating is equal to +1400 goratings.org we get to around 3400 which comes to ~30 top players which is not a bad estimate.

It is impossible to tell for real which elo corresponds to a go rating but this rough estimate is just fine by me.

Hi there! I was 8 dan on OGS when I was 3 and then 4 dan in EGF/BGA (and similar on KGS). But yes I was unusual in this regard and many European dan players had lower ranks there.

Regarding the comparison of Go and Chess ratings, there was a nice chart on Sensei's library comparing the ratings by percentage of the playing population at each level but I can't seem to find it now. As I recall Chess ratings (maybe USCF, are they are bit stronger than FIDE Elo?) were a bit stronger than the same number in EGF GoR. So I'm an EGF 2368 (4 dan) currently (lost quite a bit lately!) which would correspond with about 2250 in (some) Chess rating.

Now that's precocious!

I think the chart you mean is http://senseis.xmp.net/?RatingHistogramComparisons, although the graph created from it seems to have gone missing.

USCF ratings are weaker than FIDE ratings, in that a 2000 USCF player is weaker than a 2000 FIDE player.

My 2000 USCF rating "feels like" 1 dan to me, and my 4k AGA rating "feels like" 1600, but that's not based on anything quantitative.

I decided to gather some data so that we can answer this question in the way that, for me, makes the most sense.

I started by downloading the FIDE list of all players standard ratings (243252 players, found at http://ratings.fide.com/download.phtml) and the EGF list of all players who have participated in any tournament (38928 players, found at http://www.europeangodatabase.eu/EGD/EG ... system.php).

The question now is: someone who is better than 50% of the chess players, what EGF rank should they reach in order to be better than 50% of the go players as well?

The next figure shows the FIDE vs EGF same-percentile isoline. It shows the rating that players need to have in both systems in order to achieve the same relative position in the respective populations.



According to this comparison, an EGF 10k (rating 1100) is equivalent to a FIDE 1800 player, a EGF 1d (rating 2100) is equivalent to a FIDE 2170 (expert), a FIDE master (rating 2300) corresponds to a EGF 4d and a FIDE grandmaster (2500) corresponds to an EGF rating of 2800 (EGF 7d is at 2700).

The EGF 10k = FIDE 1800 might be the most surprising comparison, the rest seems acceptable to me. We might be skewed to believe that 10k is easy to reach, or maybe this says something about the data sources.

(I had to remove everyone with a EGF rating of 100, as 5500 players clustered at this exact rating)

Could you somehow compare this data to goratings.org site?

No, because goratings only rates professionals. I would need an equivalent chess source, comparing with the FIDE general table would not work.
I could eventually remove every rating below grandmaster, but the threshold is quite arbitrary.


The reason that 10k shows up so high is that ~16000/33000 players on EGF have a rating lower than that.
Yes, almost 50% of the EGF players have a rating lower than 10k (after removing the 100 rating cluster, otherwise it would be more than 50%). The 50% cut-off in FIDE is at ~1800.
The more I look at the data, the more I believe that we underestimate how difficult it is to get to 10k.


I would be interested in doing a similar analysis with online servers data. If you have access to a chess ratings database from an online server, please let me know.

Yeah, that is surprising. I think of 10k as being the level where you begin to play a game that is recognizably Go. I would peg the equivalent FIDE level, where you are actually playing chess rather than just shuffling pieces around, at maybe 1200.

I think the lesson is that it is harder to get to the point where you are playing a "real game of Go" than it is to get to the point where you are playing a "real game of chess". I definitely think there is a much larger gap between learning the rules and playing reasonably in Go than in chess.

This may be an artifact relating to sample size and the number of people who pick up go for a short time and then give it up as compared with chess. I also think beginners are encouraged to enter tournaments in go much sooner than they are in chess because there's less competition otherwise, which may lead to this as well. I'd be interested in seeing a comparison for a country with a more active go population like, say, Japan, or perhaps a comparison between two popular online servers.

For those of us more familiar with AGA (or KGS) ranks, an EGF 10k is about the same as an AGA 6k. Using that more familiar scale, it doesn't really surprise me that a 6k is near the 50th percentile mark of tournament players. (Okay, maybe I'm a little surprised.) I can play chess at around a 1200 level with minimal practice or study. It's taken me a couple of years of consistent effort to get a stable 5k rank on KGS.

(Also note that the minimum FIDE rating you can start with is 1000, so this limits the bottom range of the scale.)

It seems reasonable to me to use the ranks/rating histograms to make an approximate equivalence. Go and chess are similar activities so it seems reasonable that the distribution of ranks over the two populations would be the same. That is people whose go rating is in the nth percentile play in the go population the way someone whose chess rating is in the same percentile would play in the chess population. That says nothing about how an individual player with a certain go rating would play chess.

A more meaningful question might ask for comparative ratings of people who play both games as much and about as well.

It might not be of any interest but I play go at AGA 5d level. I took a 50 year hiatus from playing chess, that is I hadn't played even one game for a 50 year time period. I had no knowledge of chess openings or tactics, even didn't know who the world's top players were. Then my brother's daughter's husband challenged me to play chess. Our first game was a draw, I lost the second, and won the next three games. His chess rating is 1700. We played "correspondence" games, with three days time for each move. This benefited me because I could take a lot of time reading the position before moving. I also found that my go focus on making my stones/pieces work together efficiently helps in chess. He now wants to learn go.

The difference is that there are a lot of lower level chess players have no FIDE Elo because low lewel tournaments are often only ranked in the national ranking systems. On the other hand, there are no national Go Ratings in Europe, and even very small Beginner Tournaments are EGF-ranked. Clearly this makes for a "too high" median chess rating compared to the Go Ratings. I know that in Germany, the median of the german chess rating(DWZ, usually 50-100 points lower than Elo on amateur level) is between 1500 and 1600.

I'm not sure I agree with that. I found some of my old 21-22k games on KGS from 2005, and I think they're recognizably Go. The reading is atrocious, and there's a lot of tunnel vision, but I wouldn't call it "not recognizably go". Take one example, where I get slaughtered: http://eidogo.com/#url:http://files.gok ... rBlanc.sgf.

_________________
Occupy Babel!

I think there's at least two questions you can have here:
1 (Easy): What is the range of skill that a player can have? If you wanted to be scientific, you could take people who have never played either game, spend a day teaching them one game, then measure an ELO style rating. It seems that Go is a bit wider than Chess here. On a scale where Fan Hui is 2800, there are players whose ELO is negative. This isn't particularly helpful for comparing a chess 2000 ELO player with a Go 2000 ELO player, unfortunately.
2 (Hard) Try to come up with some kind of way to compare the effort or place in the distribution, so that you can say that someone with a 1500 Chess is ELO is as good/better/worse than a person with a 1500 Go Elo.

_________________
Occupy Babel!

Comparing specific rating numbers is meaningless. If we added 2000 points to everyone's ratings, people's relative playing strength would not change. Any comparison has to be based on players' percentiles in the cumulative histograms.