Hi,
I know this is something that has been raised before and discounted, but I would find it really useful if rating distribution stats were shown for Correspondence in the same way as other formats - just to give me an idea of how strong I am relative to other players.
Have a great weekend, all.
Chris
I was wondering about something similar with training/puzzle rating (when I hit 2100 it occurred to me that the ratings are probably between 500 and 1000 points inflated from anything that would be considered descriptive of reality). However, I think I understand the reasoning for both of them - if you provide a high score to beat, people will be determined to beat it, and correspondence and training are the two parts of the site that you could probably most easily get away with cheating on. So, as nice as it would be, I can sort of see why they did that.
Here's another interesting part of the story, even if it's maybe only tangentially related to your suggestion: even if this existed, it would still only tell you relative to people *that are rated*! This means that if your pool only consists of weaker players, you will look better on the distribution, which would be a big problem with training and correspondence, both pools (I think) mostly being made up of weaker players. I'd be much more interested in, say, how much higher the correspondence rating is than standard rating on average among people that have a non-provisional rating for both (or, even better, overlaid distributions made up only of people that have both ratings). That would give you some information that would take into account that a lot of the really strong players don't play correspondence here. That'd be a neat tool to be able to compare for variants and such as well, although it might be too server-resource-intensive to do so.
Thanks Hedgehogs4Me,
Some interesting points. On your first para, there are cheats on lots (all?) of the different variants on the site. These affect the accuracy of the ratings for each variant.
On the second para, yes, like every variant/chess website/governing body, your rating is only relative to the pool of players earning ratings in it. But so what? I agree it would be great to see the overlaid distributions that you mention. You can already see them on an individual basis, but overall distributions would be cool.
At the end of the day, there are lies, damn lies and chess statistics. They have limited accuracy, but they at least give a general impression of where you are relative to the pool of players.