Nice Improvement in Rating

[chipschap]

Since I started practice here my USCF rating has gone up 82 points.  For me, that's rather good.

It's interesting that my USCF rating is about 260 below my Chess Tempo rating and about 50 above my CTS rating.  Of course such single-point correlations don't mean much.

The bottom line is clearly, though, that practice here has made a very big difference in my OTB results.

[richard]

Great news chipschap.  I'm very happy to hear you are seeing some benefits from the site.  As the number of users increases I'll be able to do some analysis on OTB rating changes versus time spent and types of problems done (I don't think I have enough data for reliable results yet).

Regards,
Richard.

[chipschap]

Richard,

At some point, if you continue to ask for USCF ID numbers (and people cooperate!) you can certainly do time-series graphs of USCF ratings, problems attempted, solved, etc., and look for correlations.  Of course as you note, to get statistically meaningful results you ought to have a goodly number of participating players--- certainly hundreds rather than dozens, though that may take some little while to reach.  You would also need reasonable time intervals, surely no less than six months or even more.  It would not be easy, overall, but it would be fascinating.

[richard]

The main issue with analysing FIDE/UCSF data is that the frequency of playing in rated tournaments is pretty low for many players (in some cases no games for years). I'm going to start asking for ICC usernames which have much more frequent play.

Hexalingual a CT and CTS user has been collecting data from CTS for a while and I'll be interested to see his results.  CTS has a much more stable rating system in terms of no problem set updates and no rating system changes for a long time so it makes for a better test subject than CT at the moment. I'm hoping that CT is getting closer to not have to make further changes of this nature (other than new problems), but for now it is also a complicating factor in any analysis.

Regards,
Richard.