I've been trying to figure out if it's a good or a bad thing that I'm almost breaking even after playing more than 400 games on chess.com. It might just be a thing :-) The software is essentially set up so that the vast majority of players will fall into this category. It's only the outliers who will be able to steadily improve their rating. I'm not an outlier yet, and there's a decent chance I'll never be. In order to achieve my goal of reaching 1451, however, I need to somehow morph into an outlier.
Why do I say that the software is set up so that the vast majority of players will break even? Due to two essential selection criteria:
1. it always pairs you with a player of roughly equal strength; for example, I'll never get to play a 1400 player until I raise my rating well into the 1300s
2. among the players of roughly your strength that it pairs you with, it tries to ensure that roughly half the time, you're a favorite (i.e., you have a higher rating than your opponent)
Looking at expected outcomes, in the 440 games I've played so far, I was a favorite in 235 of them, but only managed to win 157 of those games. Thankfully, expectations can be thwarted in either direction; of the 198 games where I was an underdog, I won 49. In the remaining 7 games, there was no favorite; I won only 2 of those.
neostreet: 1161 (208-210-22 (440))
monvieux: 1334 (379-317-17 (713))
No comments:
Post a Comment