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Chessville
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The Black Hole in Chess Ratings – Part I By Russ Mollot (founder, Chess Express Ratings) When a massive star runs out of nuclear fuel, it collapses due to gravity. The matter in the star crunches together with unstoppable force due to the enormous mass present in such an object. The gravitational pull even overpowers the nuclear force which normally keeps atomic particles apart from each other. What was once a shining star implodes and crunches and scrunches down to an object smaller than Manhattan Island. One tablespoon of matter from this collapsed star would weigh thousands of tons! Anything passing too close gets sucked into this cosmic vacuum cleaner. The collapse continues, warping space and time around the object. Nothing near it can escape its pull; even rays of light feel the gravitation pull of this monster, and are bent into a spiral – a death spiral – and cascade down into the object. No object nor light ray can escape from the collapsed star: thus the name “black hole”. Since no light (nor the usual spectrum of electro-magnetic radiation) can escape from a black hole, one cannot see it coming! The only way to detect one is by watching for other effects, such as seemingly unexplained changes in the motion of nearby massive objects (stars, planets) as they are pulled from their normal orbits to slowly but surely be drawn down the gravity well of the black hole. Pretty scary.
Many adult players have noticed the “black hole effect (BHE)” when playing youngsters in rated tournaments. In fact, it is common for a youngster to defeat a veteran adult player rated 300 points higher (e.g. a kid rated 1200 beats an adult rated 1500). It is too common. The BHE results in veteran players with well-established ratings experiencing – with growing frequency – a gradual decline in their ratings. This is the key symptom. This is the clue that the otherwise invisible Black Hole is approaching. Well-established rating levels are being warped – bent downward – by the pandemic of unregulated scholastic ratings. “But,” you say, “the points lost by the veteran player are added to the youngster’s rating, so nothing is lost.” This is true but the fact of the matter is that the youngster has been grossly underrated in the scholastic chess world from which he learned his good chess skills. The root of the problem is the plethora of unregulated scholastic chess programs scattered about the country. These programs, for the most part, are doing a wonderful job and advancing the sport of chess. But, as was pointed out by Tom Braunlich (in his well-known article “Scholastics and the Soul of Chess: Is Scholastic Chess Killing Tournament Chess, or Saving It?*), scholastic programs have different goals – different agendas – from the world of chess as a sport. These diverse and often conflicting goals result in hodge-podge ratings, pretty much devoid of any standard meaning.
Thus, when assigning an initial rating (the ratings world could call this an estimated provisional rating) to a child, not terribly much thought is put into this process. It is rather a difficult problem, when you think about it. Should you use any arbitrary number? Should you relate this number to the child’s age? height? IQ? Math test score? Should you give a higher initial rating to the child who already knows the names of the pieces? or higher still for the child who knows how to move them? Should “equality” be the watch-word, with all children starting with the same initial rating? Indeed what rating can you give a child who hasn’t even heard of the game? Zero? One hundred? One thousand? What would you do? If you start them too high, their ratings will fall when they meet other competitors – something that will make your students feel sad. If you start them low (even too low), they will have a greater tendency to gain rating points when they play other kids – which will make your students (and their parents!) feel happy. Wouldn’t you, therefore, be more inclined to under-rate the kids in your scholastic chess program? This has been a noticeable tendency; it even appears that scholastic chess organizations are in competition to see who can give their kids the lowest initial ratings. The rampant anarchy in scholastic chess ratings is a ticking time-bomb that is leading to the devastation of the purpose and meaning of chess ratings. Let us examine several simple examples so we can project the effects which are percolating throughout the greater system of chess ratings. Suppose you are going to teach a single child how to play. He (or she) knows nothing about chess to start with. Let us further suppose that we assign an arbitrary rating of 500 (for no particular reason) to this child. During the next 8 months we work with this child, teaching him the rules, the ideas, the things to strive for, the mistakes to avoid. We practice end-games, openings, middle game, tactics, strategy, etc. This child who had a rating of 500 when he knew nothing, still has a rating of 500 now that he should be capable of a decent game against opponents with established ratings over 1000. Clearly, the rating of 500 is inappropriate. Now suppose you are going to teach a class of 20 children how to play. They know nothing about the game. You assign each child a rating of 500. They spend eight months studying under your careful tutelage. Most of them could now play a good game against a player with an established rating of over 1000. Clearly, the rating of 500 is inappropriate. Next, suppose that when you were teaching the class of 20 children, you held a weekly “game day” when these children would play a rated game amongst themselves. By the end of the 8 month course, they’d have played roughly 30 games apiece. So there would be some divergence among their ratings. The stronger players might be up in the 700’s; the weaker players may have fallen to the 300’s. But the average rating of your youngsters remains exactly 500. The average child in your course has gone from knowing nothing to knowing enough to beat a 1000-rated player. Yet he or she is still rated at about 500. As statistics bear out, most of the children completing your scholastic chess course will forget about chess, except for the casual game of the once-every-5-years variety. Some of the children will continue to play, and a few – most likely the stronger players – “the stingers” – will get involved in tournament chess. It is these “stingers” that are causing the biggest black hole effect, as their ratings adjust upward in tournament play. Let’s suppose that the highest-rated child in your class has reached 800. This means he or she is substantially stronger (perhaps 1.5 standard deviations) than the average student in the class. Let’s assign the name “Joshua” to this child. Joshua should be able to have a good game against an adult opponent with an established rating of about 1300. Let’s call this latter fellow “Mr. Smith”. Statistically speaking, when 100 “Joshua’s” meet 100 “Smiths” across the board in tournaments around the country, the Joshua’s will gain about 16 points on average and the Smiths will lose the same. This happens, of course, not just for the Joshua’s and Smiths, but also for the tens of thousands of other kinds of pairings that will come up between kids and adults. The net loss of rating points from established ratings into the “black hole” grows larger every week. But that is only the direct effect of the black hole; i.e., the result of direct play between adult and scholastic players. There are other, indirect distortions! Read on… Take “Mr. Smith” from the previous paragraph. He will, sooner than later, play someone like “Mr. Murray”, a veteran 40-year old player with an established rating of 1300; in other words, he and Smith were formerly rated at the same strength. But suppose Smith has met several youngsters like Joshua in recent tournaments. Smith’s rating would have suffered – even though his playing strength has remained the same (i.e., Smith has not gotten dumber; he has only fallen prey to the “BHE”). Mr. Smith represents our adult player who is falling into the Black Hole due to direct encounters with scholastic players. On the other hand, Mr. Murray is representative of those adult players who have not yet played directly with scholastic opponents. However, we are seeing hundreds of Smiths meeting hundreds of Murray’s in tournaments. Bearing in mind that Smith and Murray are basically the same playing strength, what happens when they play? Their total wins, losses, and draws will “net out” to zero. Formerly, when Smith and Murray had the same rating, the net effect of their games would leave their ratings unchanged. But since the Smiths’ ratings have recently been dragged lower (due to BHE), we now see the Murrays losing net points, on average, to the Smiths! This is the indirect effect of the Black Hole. This illustrates that even those adult players who never face a scholastic opponent will, nonetheless, lose rating points to them indirectly. This effect cascades throughout the world of adult tournament chess, multiplying the BHE. The growing number of scholastic chess players -- who have all acquired highly inaccurate ratings to start with – will be “stinging” players like Smith directly, and players like Murray indirectly, warping the meaning of formerly well-established rating levels. When Smith, Murray, and those like them, go on to play other veteran players, the warping effect is spread throughout the entire ratings system. This is a very deflationary effect, pulling every veteran player’s rating downward, like a massive black hole pulling in every passing object. The effect is growing. If you have gotten the impression that I am, in some manner, opposed to scholastic chess, let me state that quite the opposite is true – I believe that scholastic chess is almost certainly the key to a strong future for chess in the USA. Anarchy, however, reigns supreme in the scholastic chess world. The lack of standards – in curriculum, methodology, and ratings – should be addressed as quickly and effectively as possible.
* Tom Braunlich’s article on Scholastic Chess originally appeared in the Oklahoma Chess Quarterly.
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There
is a “black hole” in chess ratings. It has a definite cause: unregulated
scholastic ratings. The number of scholastic chess players in the USA has
grown dramatically in the last 10 to 15 years, and consequently, scholastic
players outnumber adult players by something in the order of 4 to 1 (twenty
years ago it was more like 1 to 2, with adult players outnumbering student
players). This trend is not only continuing, it is accelerating. Estimates
put the number of kids in scholastic chess programs at between 300,000 and
2,000,000 and growing. Thus, the pool of scholastic chess players has the
potential to wield an enormous effect upon ratings, at least here in the
USA. The effect has been noticeable already, but it has been masked by the
relatively small percentage of scholastic players who play in rated “adult”
tournaments (probably due to the cost – entry fee plus USCF membership – and
often complicated by the logistics of travel, playing schedule, etc.)
In
order to win approval and funding from host schools, scholastic programs
typically present the program as a way to improve students’ learning skills
(logic, analysis, concentration, memory, patience, and decision-making) and
character (good sportsmanship, team play, improved self-esteem). Therefore,
the objectives are sometimes less about training youngsters in chess for
chess’ sake, than they are about keeping kids out of trouble, and improving
their school grades and their scores on standardized tests (the school’s
reputation is enhanced by this last). In order to keep students –
especially the youngest students – motivated, the competitive aspects of the
game are often downplayed, and ratings become rather unimportant (which is
reasonable, considering their agenda). Such programs want to encourage the
students and reward them for participation. Making the children better
students is a function of participation in the program. What their ratings
are is a matter of lesser import.
