35 Suggested Items for the Annual General Meeting

[Fred McKim]

An interesting article:
http://www.kaggle.com/blog/wp-conten...kaggle_win.pdf

On a related issue, I am curious whether anyone has investigated the effects of having more frequent rating updates. The article above primarily discusses the importance of not overfitting to test data-- it should be clear that the more often the ratings are updated the more "fitting" is taking place. While the effects are quite modest in individual cases, there may be a systemic impact--

Example: Players A and B are both very active, with player A's rating averaging at 1900 and Player B's rating averaging at 1800 over the course of many months. On the ocassion they meet Player A is rated 1970 due to a good performance last week, while player B just came off a poor performance and is currently rated 1730. If monthly lists were used there would only be a 100 point difference, but with weekly lists the difference is a whopping 240 points.

While I suspect there is little net difference over the course of months on Players A and B, (it could afterall have been the other way with player A coming off a poor result and B a good result) it seems clear that the more frequent the updates the greatler to the volatility of ratings in general.

FIDE calculates ratings 6 times per year. All results for the two month period are effectively pooled.

CFC in fact rates after every event, even though the published results are only updated once a week.

[Lyle Craver]

6 times a year? Well it used to be twice a year so we should give thanks.

Ironically enough 6 times a year was what the CFC used to do back in the days when ratings were done on 3x5" index cards. In fairness to FIDE they do a LOT more players than we used to "in the day".

Perhaps Francisco Cabanas (former Ratings Auditor and later CFC President) will care to hold forth on this subject?