topazg wrote:
gowan wrote:
I think there is a general belief in decline of performance as a player ages and these graphs support that. This general trend could be attributed to many things. For example, there is a belief that younger players are "hungrier" for success which leads to higher win/loss ratios. We see this decline in other fields, e.g. mathematics and physical sciences. People in their 50's and older are often satisfied with where they've gotten in their lives and don't have the drive that younger people do.
I would be interested to see "reached 9d", "won first major title", and perhaps "won 5th international title" as milestones, and then compare pros who hadn't reached these heights to these three. I suspect "won it all, not as motivated" is a much bigger factor until a lot later - if you like the ages on the x axis, they are hardly all that close between lee changho and the other two
Good idea! This seems especially relevant for major titles that have a challenger system so that the title holder only has to win 4-3, 3-2, or 2-1 to keep the title. It is natural then for the title-holder's winning percentage to be lower because he would only get to play the strongest challenger. For people like Cho Chikun or Kobayashi Koichi, this may have kept their winning percentages down over the years. I am kind of talking out of my rear, but it's a theory.
This kind of relationship will not support any generalizations. The current work sheet of 52000+ games yields an excel pivot table with 1,380 unique White player names and 1,381 unique Black player names. The number of players with five international titles to their names will fit on what... one hand or two?
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