Current member lists with ratings
Members by name
Members by province
Members by rating
What data are included in ratings
Here is an overview of what we’ve done in the past, what we’re doing now, and where we hope to be in the near future.
History
From 2000-2005 the CGA maintained a ratings data file for use with the AGA accelrat program. This had a list of IDs, names, ratings, and a confidence value (SIGMA). Whenever we were received a tournament result file from a Canadian tournament the ratings officer had to identify each participant in the rating file. For each inidentified participatant a new entry was added for them with their initial entry rank in the tournament. The ratings officer then created a new file with containing the tournament results in the required format, and then ran accelrat to produce new ratings.
This approach had the significant benefit of capturing as much tournament rating data as possible. However there were some serious problems:
- The ratings data file was not tied to the membership list at all.
- Players could wind up in the ratings file multiple times under various alia(contracted or asumed North American, romanized Asian, or simply misspelled names and nicknames).
- A lot of work for the ratings officer, converting from arbitrary file formats to the input format required for accelrat.
- Ratings were only posted once annually, to the gazette, or online (not an inherent requirement of the approach, but how it was being done) as opposed to being dynamic and digitally available.
Current approach
From 2005-2008 the CGA has been using Chuck Elliot’s system. All games entered into the ratings since then had to be between two players in the CGA membership database. When new data are received the updated ratings have been posted to the web almost immediately. The data sources being used are:
- Events requiring CGA membership (The Canadian Open and Winter Cup)
- Alberta club results(Chuck also uses this for the Edmonton local ratings).
- Games submitted though the filling out the rating submission form and mailing it to [email protected].
The current system represents a big improvement in data integrity, but we have issues with not enough data being captured. If tournaments other than the Open or Winter Cup wished to have their results entered into the national ratings they had to do the work of filling out the ratings submission form. Since we plan to offer tournament directors a better system in the near future we have not been pushing them to submit games this way.
What we hope to be doing in the near future
The system used to calculate and track ratings will eventually be moving online where anyone will be able to see a complete record of ratings changes.
How are the ratings calculated
Currently we are using Chuck Elliot’s algorithm. Here is a Word Document describing the current system. For a good discussion of other possibilities you can look at the Wiki article.
My posted CGA rating is not accurate, what can I do?
You can email the CGA Ratings Officer to have your rating changed. If you believe your rank is more than two stones incorrect we’d appreciate your asking us to correct it. Please include as much info as you can (Server ranks, tournament results, AGA rank/results, etc).