"This is the conundrum of elite chess. The stronger the players, the greater the odds of the match ending in a draw. "What ended up happening," said Mark Glickman, senior lecturer in the Department of Statistics and longtime chess enthusiast, "is that these top players were not having their ratings change very much, just because the games would be drawn all the time.""
"Chess may be the quintessential game of skill, but oftentimes top-ranked competitors cancel each other out and prevent a decisive outcome. Among elite chess grandmasters, more than 70 percent of competitions end in ties. And that is just conventional "over the board" chess; in the growing realm of online competition known as "correspondence chess," some 95 percent of matches end without a winner."
Elite chess features exceptionally high draw rates that suppress rating movement among top players. Stronger players face greater odds of drawn games, with over 70 percent of elite grandmaster contests ending in ties and roughly 95 percent draws in correspondence chess. The 2018 world championship between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana resulted in 12 consecutive draws. Ties also arise in simpler games where perfect play prevents decisive outcomes and in sports like soccer or cricket. A new ranking method incorporates player strength when estimating tie probabilities, allowing ratings to change appropriately even when draws are common.
Read at Harvard Gazette
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]