Assorted whatnot

First, a partial translation, courtesy of Chess24.com, of an interview Peter Svidler gave to sportsdaily.ru after the Candidates. Somewhat interesting if you're a Svidler fan, with hints of the pessimism that some feel holds him back.

Second, a ChessBase article on that video everyone is talking about concerning chess ratings over time. In fact, I may as well embed the video, as everyone else has.


The article establishes who created the video in the first place. It also explains what EDO is, which some of the earlier articles on the video did NOT do. It's disappointing ChessBase didn't mention Chessmetrics, though, especially given that they used to get publish a fair number of articles from the Chessmetrics creator, Jeff Sonas. You can learn more about EDO Historical Chess Ratings at the EDO site, maintained by EDO creator Ron Edwards. It has the advantage over Chessmetrics in that it has been kept current, and I will add it to the blog roll later today. Still, the article is worth a read as Edwards explains some of the weaknesses of the approach when rating earlier players.

Finally, a problem, because why not? I don't have a source for the following problem, other than that it was submitted to the ICC ProblemBot by user Stormline.

White to move and win

Chessmetrics

At the club last Thursday we started talking about historical ratings, and Chessmetrics came up. The site hasn't been updated since early 2005, but it's still there and still has a lot of interesting historical information. The proprietor is Jeff Sonas, who states the following on the front page:

Hello, I'm Jeff Sonas and I'd like to welcome you to my new and improved Chessmetrics site. This website is devoted to statistics about chess. Since the summer of 1999, I have spent countless hours analyzing chess statistics, inventing formulas and other analysis techniques, and calculating historical ratings. This website allows you to explore chess history "by the numbers" in an interactive way. You won't find any analysis of chess moves here, but you will find historical ratings and many other statistics that can't be found anywhere else in the world. In addition to estimating the chess-playing strength of individual players throughout chess history, I have also invented new ways to rate the strongest tournaments and matches of all time, as well as the best single-event individual performances. You can find lots of colorful graphs showing the rating progression of top players throughout time, and also age-aligned graphs, so you can see who were the most successful players at various ages.

It's a nice approach, though there were some criticisms of it. However, no system can be perfect, and his approach hasn't been surpassed as far as I know.

...

This also indirectly points out the difficulties in creating an alternative to FIDE. FIDE does a lot more than just organize a few tournaments and matches. They do lots of work on ratings, titles (including titles such as International Arbiter, which most of us never think about), rules, and who knows what else. If anyone really wants to create an alternative to FIDE, they're going to have to start doing this other work as well, which Kasparov's various entities never strived to do, to the best of my knowledge. We're stuck with FIDE until someone else is willing to at least attempt some of these other functions. And so far none of the FIDE wannabes have even tackled ratings, even though there have been at least three websites that I know of in which people have done their own work. So it CAN be done, but no one wants to do it.