Author: KarinsDad
Date: 15:42:51 01/29/99
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On January 29, 1999 at 18:34:01, Matt Frank wrote: >>PS. Another example. I played a guy who was not rated, but should have been >>about 100 to 150 points below me at lunch time at G30 for a half a year. I won >>every game except the last one (where I had a choice of 2 moves and picked the >>wrong one, moving quickly will get you everytime). So, although he played strong >>and often had me in tight positions (he was up material about a third of the >>time), I managed to squeeze out (barely in a lot of cases). According to the >>formulas, his rating should have been about 850 points lower than mine. But the >>truth of the matter is that he just didn't have my number. They were almost >>always close games. I never once blew him out. This was a sample set of over a >>hundred games which bucked the ratings odds. Look at Anand vs. Karpov. Ratings >>are a very crude metric, but they tend to mean everything once they are 500 >>points apart. > >Really, all I can say to this is that the sample size is entirely too puny. And >this topic is really interesting anecdotal evidence, yet far from convincing. >Even the Anand--Karpov results you quoted earlier are based on a small sample >size with a large margin of error. > >Matt Frank No argument here. However, you must realize that ratings are approximates over very large sample sets. So, you can always find cases where one player has a hard time beating another, even after hundreds of games, even though that player may even be rated higher than the player s/he is playing. The point is not that my examples prove anything. The point is that where there is smoke, there is fire. They are circumstantial evidence which illustrate the need for an analysis of a large sample set since they disagree with the formulas (and of course, they should, according to my theory, since I picked examples at the extremes of the formulas). KarinsDad
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