Is there a solution to rating deflation?

 The words on Oleg Korneev's Facebook are very clear:

"Do you actually understand what his rating is for a chess player? This is his business card, capital, basically. I receive in packs of standard emails from chess tournaments organizers and club management, where invitations are denied or offered disgusting conditions, motivating it by a low rating (now I'm below 2500).

Let's conclude: the loss of rating for chess professionals turns into the loss of chess earnings. Elo-deflation is robbing chess professionals."

What he is referring to is what he believes to be the governing body of chess, FIDE, and their failure to arrest and reverse the ELO rating deflation that has been impacting on professional chess players like Korneev, for some time.

Oleg Korneev- concerned about rating deflation.

Korneev has been an active chessplayer for a number of years and a successful one at that, maintaining a 2600+ rating for a number of years, while winning many open tournaments in Spain and around Europe. He originally hails from Ukraine.

I myself have felt the effects of rating deflation and my rating is currently dangling at 2419, a level that I haven't seen for over 25 years. Soon I may be eligible for under 2400 tournaments; eligible for under 2400 rating prizes and so on. While that may be a positive thing for my bank account, the negative is the damage to my ego and more concretely and objectively, the chances of my getting decent conditions in future tournaments, something Korneev alluded to in his post. I contacted a tournament in Portugal last year and got knocked back. I contacted Sitges, the tournament in Spain at the end of last year that everyone tries to play in, and was only offered reduced accomodation. I wasn't invited to Cambridge this year, the organisers preferring other English GMs.

These are examples of how this is impacting your "average" chess professional and I'm sure there are many more that my fellow pros can come up with.

Not being a data scientist I am not exactly sure why rating deflation exists, but I will still attempt to explain why this has become a recent phenomenon. Firstly, there are a lot more chess players in the ELO eco system than existed say 30 years ago. And a lot of these players have quite low ratings. If they come into the system it will take some time for their rating to catch up with the reality of how strong they are, thus causing the effect of sucking back the players higher rated than them in the system. This has been observed in reality.

Secondly, and something I would assume few would argue with, is the pandemic effect. Many chess kids got the chance to become significantly stronger at chess during the lockdown, as they had nothing better to do than sit at home and play blitz online. Like most of us, except that older players like myself were never going to improve much, if at all. Instead huge amounts of juniors did improve, and we are now encountering these same players in swiss tournaments.

The problem with these children of the pandemic is that their ratings have not caught up with reality. If we look at English chess as a example, I play English kid A who is rated 2000 FIDE. His or hers ECF rating is about 200 points higher. Although ECF ratings are slightly inflated, I might argue that they should be at least 2150. That means mathematically speaking if my true strength is 2450, then overtime I will lose rating if I play enough games against such a player.

In reality it tends to be worse than that, and I am struggling to win any games at all against such players. Which makes me think they are even stronger than "only" 150 points underrated.

How did it all come to this? When I first started playing in strong FIDE rated events back in the 1990s, I very rarely played against opponents who were much lower rated, and I beat most of those. So I'd have ups and downs with my rating progress, but not the almost precipitous decline I see now.

Nowadays the typical pairing you will face in swiss tournaments is someone born post 2000, probably rated around 2000. More often than not it seems I drop rating against such players. Quite often they will be born after 2010, which makes such a pairing scarier still.

                                                 Keith Arkell- a lone voice crying in the wilderness? 

Years ago I recall Keith Arkell being one of those who warned about impending rating deflation and how it would ripple through to the top eventually. The "Orakell" posted this himself recently on Facebook: 

"It was about 11 years ago when I first predicted that the ‘ripple of deflation’ would eventually work its way to the top.

Well, I don’t think deflation deniers have much of an argument left any more now that the the 4th highest rated player on the planet is a ‘mere’ 2762 on live ratings.

It’s also noteworthy that many of the game’s superstars are now 100 or so points below their peak, even though age wise they are still in their prime."

Keith feels that FIDE are only beginning to do something about rating deflation because it is starting to impact on the highest rated players. They are only panicking because their beloved Magnus could soon be rated below 2800.

It has to be said though that not everyone agrees with myself, and Mr Korneev and Mr Arkell.

Former 2700+ player Michal Krasenkow had this to say on his own Facebook:

"OK, I have read Jeff Sonas' analysis, justifying the rating reform. I have removed my earlier post but that doesn't mean that my fears are dispelled.

First of all, Jeff Sonas doesn't address my main argument: the reason that high-rated players underscore against low-rated players is not that low-rated players are underrated but rather the peculiarity of the Swiss system (used in most of rated events): it doesn't pair players randomly! Except first rounds, high-rated players can only meet those low-rated players who score well enough to be paired against them, and those low-rated players are indeed likely to be underrated or simply in a good form. So UNDERPERFORMANCE OF HIGH-RATED PLAYERS IN SWISS TOURNAMENTS IS A NORMAL SITUATION. To eliminate this effect, obtain reliable statistical data, and see whether ratings are really adequate or not, only first-round games of open tournaments should be included in the analysis (which was not done).

I appreciate the simulation of what could have happened after the same reform presumably initiated on 1.1.2017. It is indeed interesting but, first, it does show inflation, and second, it doesn't (and can't) take into consideration the human factor, for instance the wave of fraud by beginners to obtain initial 2000+ ratings using the new regulations etc. We have just seen how apparently normal, logical regulations regarding qualification to the Candidates tournament have been misused.

What is important - the "reform" is irreversible. You can give a player a "gift" of several hundred rating points but you can't take them away, except in cases of proven fraud. So we'll not be able to eliminate its negative consequences and prevent a possible disaster.

And I don't withdraw my appeal to FIDE: please reconsider the decision before it is fully implemented! Otherwise the cure can be worse than the disease!"

I don't agree with Krasenkow that it is as simple as the quirks of the swiss pairing system to explain why we are seeing rating deflation, although this is an interesting argument to make and one I admit that I had not thought of. What his argument doesn't explain to me is the sheer number of players I'm seeing who are underrated. There are whole armies of them.

One of the reasons there are so many players who are underrated (at least in this country) is that not enough games are FIDE rated. This doesn't allow juniors to catch their FIDE ratings up with their real strength, or at least not quickly enough. So if junior A plays in a local league match that game might be sent off for ECF rating, but not for FIDE rating. Many weekend tournaments are also not FIDE rated, a criminal development in the 21st century.

You apparently have this issue in India as well, from what I'm hearing. That internal games in that country are often not FIDE certified, meaning that players in that country are often criminally underrated and inevitably wreak havoc when they come over to Europe to play.

Where I believe Krasenkow makes a very salient objection, is where he hints at be careful what you wish for. In other words by reversing rating deflation you may end up going from one extreme to the other and the reality ensues that it becomes far easier to become a Grandmaster, far easier to become an international master, and titles that have already been devalued overtime are worth even less than before. Which means that players like myself and Korneev find it harder to get conditions, not easier.

I think in this you get to the crux of the argument. Why does deflation really matter? Does it matter if ratings are lower?

In reality they are only numbers and it doesn't matter if Magnus Carlsen is rated 2470, if the ratings still point to him being the top player. So in that sense they don't matter. They would only matter if FIDE cared about advertising the potential of rating records being broken, and there isn't any clear evidence that they wish to do so. If everyone gets pushed together, that doesn't really matter. There might be some objection that standards are going down because ratings are being pushed down, but a more careful observation of the situation will see that this is not the case.

If someone like Korneev isn't getting conditions, then who is getting them? The obvious answer is younger, improving players. Someone like the 28 year old Daniel Fernandez, who might not be 2600 but has still managed to resist deflation and actually raise his rating in this period, despite playing in many tournaments.

Or Ameet Ghasi; who is not quite as young, but is not at all past his prime and seems to still be improving. He has played plenty and has managed to stablise at above 2500.

Tactical genius Ameet has managed to buck the deflation trend.

I think what Mr Korneev and Mr Arkell want is a comfortable chess retirement. You can't beat father time. You are going to get older, weaker, and inevitably die. That's the sad reality that faces all of us "senior players", or in my case "pre-senior." So while being aware of this reality, older players still desire a reversal of rating deflation; which means we can get invites to the tournaments we would like to play in, without it bankrupting us. A reasonable argument I would like to think. And I would also claim that it is somewhat unfair that relatively inactive players who might otherwise have seen their rating drastically reduce, protect themselves by only playing in senior events (thus avoiding underrated juniors) or by rarely playing at all. When they do play they might get better conditions than their colleagues who are far more active, leading to an unequal situation. As mentioned above, it is almost a fact that the more you play, the more likely you are to be exposed to rating deflation, and your rating will then almost inevitably drop.

It is not easy to make new suggestions to a difficult and nuanced situation so I will only make some tentative proposals, which I list below:

• FIDE should take steps to increase the number of FIDE rated games played internally, and encourage federations to FIDE rate as many games as possible. It is an intolerable situation that many organisers are still resistant to the idea that their tournaments should be FIDE rated.

 

•  Along the same lines, scrap national ratings. FIDE ratings are accurate enough, so I've always felt it rather daft that we have English ratings at all. It just confuses the situation. This would encourage organisers to FIDE rate their games, otherwise these games wouldn't be rated at all. That in turn would help underrated juniors to catch up with their true rating much quicker.

Another possible argument could be to change the K factors on certain groups of players. So if some players are inactive for a long enough period, or don't play enough games to meet the requirement, then their K factor reverts to 20, or even 40. Again the purpose of that would be to speed up the time to where we get to the players true strength, as it stands now. Like Krasenkow I am a bit wary of doping the system by pumping points artificially into it, because of the monster you might create.

In any case, these are just proposals and I'm sure others will have plenty more that I haven't thought of. Just as I'm sure we haven't heard the end of this deflation argument.