Tuesday 1 December 2015

Some big improvement

The release of the 2015 December Australian Ratings threw up a somewhat remarkable occurrence. On the list of most improved players there were 8 players (out of 30), all from the one club. The Belconnen Chess Club recently became a bit of a mecca for improving juniors, and this is now being shown on the rating list.
To be absolutely honest,  in a lot of cases the players who joined the club were already on the improve, and would have jumped up the list anyway. But there are also some players (with higher ratings) who's improvement has been helped by the step up in competition. Of course the trade off for the club is that some existing members ratings have taken a bit of a hit, although this hasn't been too drastic (due to the use of the Glicko 2 System in Australia).
So congratulations to the young Belconnen members for their improvement, and it will be interesting to see how far this improvement extends.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Another massive rating jump was Joshua Walker, +500

Not-A-Robot said...

Glicko 2 is well known to be manipulable, as are any system if you look.
FIDE already currently has the K=40 debacle and its many wonders (a US kid jumping to 2600 without a performance of even 2500, due to playing 30-odd games in one month with a pre-rating just below 2300). Burma had a top-to-bottom scam going, and there are many "dubious" events in others, but no one can top Claude Bloodgood (well, Crisan should get a honorable mention).