2021 US Championship

[Brad Thomson]

Gender is irrelevant, to become the best you need to play the best, period.

[Pargat Perrer]

Good morning Pargat and Bob A.

I am having my morning coffee and reading your discussion on how ratings work.
I have so much to explain, but I think an illustration would work better.

I am toying with the idea of creating a fictitious chess club with all fake unrated members.
They send in their first tournament to be CFC rated. What happens?
This has happened before several times, so I do know of what I speak.
I will keep the fake people separate from real people, so as not to affect the real CFC ratings.
I will start a new thread afterwards to explain the new ratings. It should be a great tool to explain CFC rating calculations.

Thanks Bob, I will be very interested to see what you post, i hope it doesn't take a long time.

In the meantime, do you have anything to contribute to the real question at hand: if women are not inferior at chess to men, and they limit themselves to only playing other women, will they eventually achieve ratings parity with men, meaning an equal % of the women will have ratings over 2800, equal % will have ratings in all other rating categories? Allowing for margin of error, of course.

Bob Armstrong is arguing that women MUST play higher-rated men in order to get their ratings eventually up to the 2800 level. That suggests that women are inferior at chess to men for no other reason than being female.

[Kerry Liles]

If everyone in such a "fake tournament" is unrated I am curious how initial ratings are calculated too.
Luckily, there are many rated players around and encountering such a situation must be rare.
I will have to revisit some rating "theory" but I've always been curious how to evaluate a unrated player losing against someone rated 1400 and another loss against someone 2100. etc

[Bob Gillanders]

Good morning Pargat and Bob A.

I am having my morning coffee and reading your discussion on how ratings work.
I have so much to explain, but I think an illustration would work better.

I am toying with the idea of creating a fictitious chess club with all fake unrated members.
They send in their first tournament to be CFC rated. What happens?
This has happened before several times, so I do know of what I speak.
I will keep the fake people separate from real people, so as not to affect the real CFC ratings.
I will start a new thread afterwards to explain the new ratings. It should be a great tool to explain CFC rating calculations.

[Bob Armstrong]

Hi Pargat:

Re Elo - for a long time, the lowest ELO rating was 1200, and they would not evolve it to allow for lower ELO ratings......then finally they caved. Not sure when that was, but during my chess lifetime.

I know nothing about how Arpad's system was implemented by FIDE, but I believe before that there were other countries that did have their own rating systems (Again, not sure of this though)

Bob A

[Pargat Perrer]

If women are not at all inferior to men at chess, can women not achieve the same ratings as men over time JUST BY PLAYING OTHER WOMEN? It simply must be the case, otherwise how did men ever get 2800 ratings?

Tonight I went on Quora web site where I am a member and asked the question in a non-sexist manner, not even mentioning women at all. Here is how I worded the question:

"If I want to start a new chess variant and do Elo rating of games played, what initial rating do I assign all players? What did FIDE use when it began using Elo ratings?"

Here is the only answer I have so far, and I did direct my question to members of Quora who have answered FIDE Elo rating questions in the past:

"Easily the most interesting question about Elo ratings I’ve come across. I don’t know the answer. I think maybe 1200…"

I did an extensive internet search on questions such as this, i.e. history of FIDE Elo ratings, and no one seems to know how it all started.

The Elo formula is dependent on the 2 players having an existing rating. No one addresses how it gets started when there is NO EXISTING RATINGS FOR ANYBODY! That is why I asked my question about doing Elo ratings for a new chess variant, because that guarantees that no one will have an existing rating.

But on Quora web site, I did see lots of questions that were a bit similar. For example, someone asked what initial FIDE rating one gets, and this was answered by a member of the FIDE rules committee:


Shaun Press
,FM, FT, IA, Member FIDE Rules Commision
Author has 392 answers and 381.2K answer views

A2A

There is no beginning FIDE rating, as it is based on your performance in your first event(s) ... Currently the lowest FIDE rating that can be achieved is 1000, although most players start with a rating higher than that. Garry Kasparov ‘s first FIDE rating was 2595 after winning the Banja Luka GM event in 1979 despite being unrated when he began the tournament.

Perhaps since the lowest FIDE rating possible is 1000, it means when FIDE first began Elo ratings, everyone was assigned a rating of 1000 to kick things off. But he didn't say that specifically.

[Pargat Perrer]

There are rating pools of players across this country and the actual playing strength of players is shown by various ratings accorded, depending on the strength of the pool. What happens is that the rating increase stagnates at the rating of the top players in the pool because they all beat each other randomly and their ratings stay effectively fixed.

You seem to be saying that chess players cannot improve by playing other players in their so-called "rating pool", whatever that is (never heard that term before).

What you fail to realize, Bob, is the players improve through study and learning outside of actually playing games. They learn openings, they learn rook-and-pawn endgames, they learn tactics, all via books or lessons. What you are saying is that no one can ever advance out of their "rating pool". The top players in the pool never improve, they just split all their games 50-50 and no one's rating increases, according to you.

This is ridiculous. Sorry, you can call it disagreeing, but I call it ignorance.


What we need here is a history of the ELO rating system in chess. How did it start? Were all the players awarded the same starting rating and things just went from there?

Also relevant is the story of computer engine ELO ratings. How did engine ratings get as high as 3500? Does a new engine get the same starting rating as all other engines did and advance from there?

If women are not at all inferior to men at chess, can women not achieve the same ratings as men over time JUST BY PLAYING OTHER WOMEN? It simply must be the case, otherwise how did men ever get 2800 ratings? Unless some men were awarded a starting rating of some extraordinary value, like 2500 lets say, while other men got a starting rating of say 1000.

Thus the level of the women's elite pool is the same....it has a maximum beyond which it will never go (I disagree that women playing women will send their ELO's over time skyrocketing). The maximum ratings at the top of the pool fix the ceiling rating of the pool.

To increase their ratings, top women must enter the best and highest rated pool, the non-gender open section (Qualification for the world cup, etc.). Here the ceiling is higher, and since women are equal to men, they will achieve the higher rating.

To be clear, I am not saying that women won't improve by playing higher-rated men. Yes, of course they will over time.

I'm saying that even the highest-ratinged women DO NOT NEED to play the highest-rated men to improve their ratings to the levels that men achieve.

How did men get there? When the highest-rated man in the world was say 2500 ELO, how did he manage to get to 2600, or 2700, or 2800? He kept beating players with LESS SKILL THAN HIM.

Unless someone can point out some man who started out with an ELO rating of 2800 before even playing a single rated game?

[Bob Armstrong]

Hi Pargat:

It is not that I don't get it......it is that I disagree.

There are rating pools of players across this country and the actual playing strength of players is shown by various ratings accorded, depending on the strength of the pool. What happens is that the rating increase stagnates at the rating of the top players in the pool because they all beat each other randomly and their ratings stay effectively fixed.

Thus the level of the women's elite pool is the same....it has a maximum beyond which it will never go (I disagree that women playing women will send their ELO's over time skyrocketing). The maximum ratings at the top of the pool fix the ceiling rating of the pool.

To increase their ratings, top women must enter the best and highest rated pool, the non-gender open section (Qualification for the world cup, etc.). Here the ceiling is higher, and since women are equal to men, they will achieve the higher rating.

I fear you are the one who fails to grasp how the ELO system actually plays out at ground zero.

It has nothing to do with gender. It has to do with WHO YOU PLAY!

Bob A

[Pargat Perrer]

No. Women are eligible to play in the Open section, and thus play for the bigger prize money (there simply happen to be no women there at this time), but men are not allowed to play in the Women's section. Thus females are eligible for all of the prize money, men only for some of it. This strikes me as sexist.

Can women play in BOTH the mixed section AND the women's section? If not, then they aren't eligible for all the prize money. They must choose.

[Pargat Perrer]

a. Women have lower ELO ratings purely because they fail to play THE BEST (Mostly Men in the open tournaments) all the time. They spend a lot of their time playing lower-rated top FIDE Women in the FIDE women's system - not as productive for improvement. It has nothing to do with sexism nor women being inferior in chess.....I stated this clearly in my post.

I have explained to you now 3 times that you are wrong in this belief. I have explained it clearly, that if women were the only ones playing ELO rated chess and they aren't inferior to men, they should eventually have about the same % of players with a 2800+ rating and that is without ever playing any men. If men can do it playing only men, and women aren't inferior, then women can do it playing only women!

You just don't get it, so I must conclude you really don't understand the ELO rating system. I do NOT BELIEVE you hold this view because you are sexist, even though this view itself is sexist. I think you are just hung up on this notion that women have to play higher-rated men in order to progress to men's ratings. But no, they do NOT. If they want to learn from better players, they are free to play under tournament conditions against 3500 rated chess engines, and they would eventually become BETTER than men, who won't play such engines because of their egos.

But even if women only played women, they would eventually have their own 2800+ rated players. How many? That depends on how many women players there are. But the % of the total players that are over 2800 would eventually be the same for both men and women, because we are agreed women are not inferior at chess.

b. I have no problem with women enjoying the atmosphere of women-only tournaments, over open tournaments. So they can ask organizers to have women-only tournaments (Same as Junior, Senior, Men-Only, et.) This is a totally different thing than the separate, parallel, women-only title system that FIDE brought in ages ago.

I have no opinion on the title system, since I don't know enough about it and I don't know how much women are motivated by these titles.

c. Junior girls now make up a large percentage of all club juniors. They play in open tournaments mostly at that age. The times they play women-only is when it is set up under the separate women-only FIDE title system (FIDE World Girls Championships). And women are now playing much more and I think this parallel incubator system, to graduate women to the open tournament, is now not only not needed, but holding back top women players from reaching the pinnacle of chess.

You could be right that the time may be at hand to remove the so-called "incubator system". I didn't realize that as Brad pointed out this goes all the way back to the mid-1990s. I thought it was much more recent than that.

[Brad Thomson]

I still don't get it! The women are playing for $100K, not $295K? You're surely not resorting to bafflegab ala Belzberg are you?

No. Women are eligible to play in the Open section, and thus play for the bigger prize money (there simply happen to be no women there at this time), but men are not allowed to play in the Women's section. Thus females are eligible for all of the prize money, men only for some of it. This strikes me as sexist.

[Fred Harvey]

Hi Fred:

I'm unclear where you stand. Are you in favour of:

1. Women-only tournaments, organized through private profit enterprise (An organizer), who runs around trying to figure out how to accrue prize money for this one tournament?

2. A whole parallel, separate, women-only title system operated by FIDE?

Bob A

When I can stand without falling over, I stand for freedom of choice. A responsibility of any national or international organization should be to encourage as many choices are available as possible, and therein lies the problem. Perhaps......

[Bob Armstrong]

Hi Pargat:

a. Women have lower ELO ratings purely because they fail to play THE BEST (Mostly Men in the open tournaments) all the time. They spend a lot of their time playing lower-rated top FIDE Women in the FIDE women's system - not as productive for improvement. It has nothing to do with sexism nor women being inferior in chess.....I stated this clearly in my post.

b. I have no problem with women enjoying the atmosphere of women-only tournaments, over open tournaments. So they can ask organizers to have women-only tournaments (Same as Junior, Senior, Men-Only, et.) This is a totally different thing than the separate, parallel, women-only title system that FIDE brought in ages ago.

c. Junior girls now make up a large percentage of all club juniors. They play in open tournaments mostly at that age. The times they play women-only is when it is set up under the separate women-only FIDE title system (FIDE World Girls Championships). And women are now playing much more and I think this parallel incubator system, to graduate women to the open tournament, is now not only not needed, but holding back top women players from reaching the pinnacle of chess.

Bob A

[Bob Armstrong]

Hi Fred:

I'm unclear where you stand. Are you in favour of:

1. Women-only tournaments, organized through private profit enterprise (An organizer), who runs around trying to figure out how to accrue prize money for this one tournament?

2. A whole parallel, separate, women-only title system operated by FIDE?

Bob A

[Fred Harvey]

Yes, and as Neil pointed out earlier, the men are entitled to play for $195K while the women are entitled to play for $295K simply and only because they are women. This is not fair to men. It is blatant sexism.

I still don't get it! The women are playing for $100K, not $295K? You're surely not resorting to bafflegab ala Belzberg are you?