BBO Discussion Forums: EBU National Grading Scheme - BBO Discussion Forums

Edit: Whoops, mispost.

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Your club TD and management will be willing to do this?

Gordon, maybe you should sell the right to play without being graded? From the sound of it, it would be worth quite a lot to some people. It would probably be best to auction it, accepting bids up to the end of the session.

Jeremy69A, on 2012-March-17, 04:53, said:

Who knows? I am interested in people who care about their ratings not being put off by a session that might lower theirs. I think that this is really important, although I admit that I don't know how many people will turn out to be interested in the ratings as more than a bit of fun.

gnasher, on 2012-March-17, 06:05, said:

Could be a nice little (much-needed) fundraiser for the YC!

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If the system is subverted as you suggest by claiming a different name or players are allowed to say that session x doesn't count then it will have little credence.

I looked at the results when the system first went live; it would have been too difficult to have totally ignored them. I noted that it rated Y (probably the fifth- or sixth-best woman player at the relatively mediocre standard club where I play a fair amount of my club bridge) quite a lot higher than both Nevena Senior and Heather Dhondy, and concluded that there was some settling in to go through.

More seriously, though, I have a regular partner with whom I play 90% of my bridge (and almost all my tournament bridge); she plays a little more with other people, but I think plays at least 85%+ of her bridge with me. Yet our initial ratings were a full 3 levels apart, and without a fair bit of analysis, which I'm not prepared to undertake, and which I'm sure she won't, of the data that EBU makes available, neither of us knows just why. We came to duplicate bridge essentially as beginners who knew our way around the basics (we'd both played kitchen-standard rubber bridge) on the back of a raw partnership that we formed at the time, we both progressed from there as that partnership, developing our system together right from the start, and sharing the gathering of experience. We've become close friends as a result. It's been very important to us to treat the partnership as one of equals throughout; in a small way, this risks undermining that for both of us in a subtle but slightly insidious fashion.

Jeremy69A, on 2012-March-18, 04:26, said:

I think that the post above indicates that it has little credence already. I know of another pair that play nearly all of their bridge together who are in a similar situation -- it seems that even small numbers of sessions with casual or first-time partners has an inordinate effect on the differences in a regular partnership.

Similarly, there will be players who always play in established partnerships, and others who play a lot of their bridge in casual or one-time partnerships. This being the case, do you think that all sessions should be counted? Should they all have an effect on the players' ratings? The same effect?

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I can well imagine this effect becoming common.

I suspect that one positive effect will be that weak players will get more games with strong players, because you can apparently never get a ratings boost when playing with a higher-rated player, but playing with a lower-rated player you can.

For the first couple of days after the scheme came out, I looked up a bunch of people, and felt like a voyeur. I don't think I will be paying any more attention to it.

Anyway. If the EBU want this thing to be taken seriously, if it is not already too late for that, they will have to acknowledge that "rating-protecting" behaviour will be bad in a number of ways, one of the most important of which is attendance. I believe that people should be allowed to protect their rating by "opting out" rather than staying home.

But maybe I am being alarmist, and no one will actually be interested in protecting their rating. But that implies that people don't really care, which means that the EBU have wasted a lot of time and money.

As I said before, they cannot have it both ways.

Vampyr, on 2012-March-18, 21:50, said:

I don't think the posts above indicate that at all - it's generally been welcomed.

Vampyr, on 2012-March-18, 21:50, said:

Of course you can - you just need to get good results with them.

Vampyr, on 2012-March-18, 21:50, said:

On the contrary, the reaction of most players I know who think they have been under-rated is that they will need to play more bridge. Only by playing more will their rating go up.

Vampyr, on 2012-March-18, 21:50, said:

Oh, really?

gordontd, on 2012-March-19, 02:28, said:

Is this just a consequence of the system being new though? I'm sure at the moment a lot of players think they haven't played enough to get an accurate rating. What will happen in the long run?

Someone who actually cares about their rating and is prepared to put time that might be better spent on improving their bridge into working out how to improve their rating without getting any better will eventually start to think about what sort of partners help their rating -- and that information is easy enough to find from their session list.

Vampyr, on 2012-March-18, 21:50, said:

I don't think you understand how the NGS actually works. Perhaps you'd find the project documentation interesting.

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How successful it is remains to be seen, but maybe you should know the facts before commenting on how much money has been wasted. 95% of the work on the project has been voluntary and it uses data already available in the Universal Membership system, so the day-to-day running costs are negligible. It has taken time to develop, but the amount of money spent is comparatively little.

Just another money wasting scheme by EBU

Only a few years ago the HQ was to be sold and a move made to Kettering and they did in fact attempt to set up a National Brodge Centre for events

Which guess what

Yup it failed

Oof Arted, on 2012-March-19, 04:58, said:

Let's be charitable and assume that your post crossed with the one above it.

Perhaps they should consider the example of the most rated game there is, chess: only tournament games are rated.

This has two good consequences compared to the EBU system: there is never a rating motive to avoid the club, and rated games are always taken seriously by the players, thus improving the reliability of the ratings.

Vampyr, on 2012-March-18, 21:50, said:

Why do you think that? If you have a rating of 60 and your p one of 40 then you pair strength is 50. You play in a field with an average strength of 54. So you are expected to score 46 (correct me if I am wrong but it must be something like that). Try to get more than 46. Then both your rating and that of your p will go up.

billw55, on 2012-March-19, 06:28, said:

When I played at a chess club, I was cajoled into playing in their 5th team (they had 6 teams, accounting for more players than turned up on the club nights), so I got a grading. The club nights were fairly informal, you just found an opponent for a friendly game, and there was a bar open of course. This is not true of bridge. Most club players just play at their local club. Tournament games are only entered into by the better or more keen players. So I don't think the comparison is valid.

I guess bridge clubs could hold sessions which are entirely rating free for all participants...

Statto, on 2012-March-19, 20:48, said:

Of course, in the London area at least, the majority of sessions at bridge clubs are entirely rating-free.

I would hope that the number of people who wish to "game" the system are minimal, and that most players are like me in wanting their rating to be an accurate representation of their bridge skill. It seems to me that the ratings as implemented should do a good job at providing accurate ratings, especially since the occasional bad match will only reduce a rating by a small amount which should be easily recoverable if a player deserves their rating.

As a player from the North of England, where congresses and Swiss Green Point events are not available every weekend, I have gradually amassed (over 30 years!) the rank of a 5* master (30K black <10 green). This is a relatively low rank - however the NGS would seem to give, I hope) a fairly reasonable estimate of grade - (I'm 61.66 AC) - and play in two clubs of SOpp rank 54 and 53.5 - which means that the clubs are relatively strong.

Relatively infrequent players like myself appreciate this sop to our self esteem - I realise that I will never make Grandmaster - or even Premier Master rank.

My impression of the system is that it is self correcting - the only way to improve a grade on a regular basis is to become a better bridge player! The discussions above all seem to relate to infrequent occurences and the effect of a bad session is not really significant (you lose/ gain about 8% of the difference between your result and your expected result - so even a 10% swing only results in a 0.8 drop in ranking. The key is consistency.

I think the only way to 'game' the system would be to play with someone who is under-ranked - this could be because they had an atypical session the previous week (scoring 45% rather than 55% for instance) or they could be a rapid improver always having an ability above their calculated grade. There is an unethical method - you pay some opponents to chuck you tops OR you arrange for your partner to play with someone else and do very badly.

I don't worry about playing with weaker players or new partners - it is amazing how many partnerships score badly on some hands due to one member forgetting a convention. Playing with a new partner - you keep it simple and usually you outperform expectations. The only concern I have is the thought that newcomers enter with an (overrated) ranking of 50% - this should no doubt be 40%. If a club has a feeder system bringing on new players then they will reap a benefit as the stronger players do better against them.

weejonnie, on 2012-April-11, 17:23, said:

Actually, currently newcomers enter on a grade of 46.00. We monitor the average performance of the approximately 100 new players joining the system per week to see what their average strangth is. Over the last few months this has been around 45-46%. If it drops any lower, we'll reduce the newcomers' ranking to match. Zia has not yet played enough rated games to get a published grade, and you may feel it was lucky for his partners to be playing with such a skillful newcomer with an initial rating of 46, but it didn't seem right to make any exceptions. Should we?