GOTW - Whackometer Week 4

Here are the results for the Week 4, Game-of-the-Week Whackometer, which attempts to see whether one (or more) of the GOTW judges are "whacko".

This week, Michael said , "I confess, I am a whacko judge". Do the statistics bear him out?

Name Week-4 || Average
Jeff  0.589 ||  0.388 
Greg  0.017 ||  0.329 
Arun  0.749 ||  0.492 
JimD  0.897 ||  0.556 
Mike  0.182 ||  0.199 

Remember that a number closer to 1.000 means that the judge agreed with the collective wisdom of the other judges, a number closer to -1.000 means that the judge disagreed with the collective wisdom of the other judges, and a number close to 0.000 means that the judge neither agreed nor disagreed with the collective wisdom of the other judges.

This week, three of the judges (Jeff, Arun, Jim) all were in pretty high agreement with the wisdom of the group. Michael was less so, and Greg had almost no relationship in his choices with everyone else.

Overall, Michael still is somewhat less correlated with the wisdom of the group than the other judges. So, he's edging closer to whackoville, but he's not there yet. There's still a ways to go.

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On another note, I was interested in seeing whether any of the judges exhibited a bias toward one team or another in picking game of the week. For example, did "Storm McRainy" award most GOTW points to Seattle, or "Jack Daniels" give lots of GOTW points to Tennessee? This can also be done with correlations.

Fortunately, the results were rather uninteresting. All judges agreed with the other judges with correlations ranging from 0.743 to 0.849. That's pretty high, and suggests there's absolutely no bias from any judge. I'll keep track of this for a few more weeks, but I doubt anything will come of it.

USCL Ratings and Power Rankings: Week 4 (2009)

Another week in the USCL, and another set of power rankings and ratings.

As a note of clarification, I took a good long hard look at how I was creating the power rankings. In the previous system, I was using the following ratios to calculate power ranking -- 43% team record, 43% opponents' records, 14% opponents' opponents' records. The more I dwelled on it, and the more I studied the rankings it was giving me, the more I came to realize that there was too much stress on the strength-of-schedule, and too little on the actual record achieved; a win is a win, after all, regardless of who the opponent is.

Therefore, in this slightly altered formula of power rankings, the ratios are now 55% team record, 35% opponents' records, and 10% opponents' opponents' records. I don't plan to change it again this year... famous last words.

Given that, here are the rankings for post-week 4 in the USCL's 2009 season.

1 -	San Francisco	1.000
2 -	New Jersey	0.992
3 -	Seattle	0.938
4 -	Miami	0.850
5 -	Boston	0.823
6 -	New York	0.817
7 -	Tennessee	0.736
8 -	Dallas	0.729
9 -	Arizona	0.721
10 -	Baltimore	0.657
11 -	Philadelphia	0.656
12 -	Chicago	0.640
13 -	Queens	0.629
14 -	Carolina	0.493

Some interesting observations. New York is several places above Baltimore, even though New York's record is 1.5-2.5, and Baltimore's record is 2.5-1.5. This is highly due to the strength of schedule. New York has played New Jersey twice and Seattle once -- three weeks of tough opposition, while Baltimore has played lower scoring teams.

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The ratings are presented below. Remember, to be included on the list, a player must have played three lifetime games in the USCL, as well as having played in the 2009 season.

Rank	Rating	Name
1	2655	Jaan Ehlvest
2	2638	Hikaru Nakamura
3	2621	Julio Becerra
4	2604	Sergey Erenburg
5	2600	Boris Gulko
6	2588	Larry Christiansen
7	2576	Dean Ippolito
8	2575	Joel Benjamin
9	2574	Marko Zivanic
10	2571	Jacek Stopa
11	2554	Gregory Serper
12	2546	Alex Shabalov
13	2545	Josh Friedel
14	2543	Giorgi Kacheishvili
15	2539	Yuri Lapshun
16	2539	Eugene Perelshteyn
17	2533	Alejandro Ramirez
18	2532	Pascal Charbonneau
19	2529	Alex Lenderman
20	2515	Marc Esserman
21	2505	Eli Vovsha
22	2505	Bruci Lopez
23	2492	Rogelio Barcenilla
24	2491	Thomas Bartell
25	2490	Levon Altounian
26	2478	Alex Stripunsky
27	2478	Jesse Kraai
28	2474	Sam Shankland
29	2459	Jorge Sammour-Hasbun
30	2459	Dmitry Schneider
31	2458	Daniel Ludwig
32	2449	Denis Shmelov
33	2449	Sergey Kudrin
34	2446	Slava Mikhailuk
35	2438	Jan van de Mortel
36	2435	Angelo Young
37	2435	Larry Kaufman
38	2434	David Pruess
39	2433	Oleg Zaikov
40	2431	Tegshsuren Enkhbat
41	2429	Mackenzie Molner
42	2419	Florin Felecan
43	2415	John Bartholomew
44	2414	Mehmed Pasalic
45	2414	Blas Lugo
46	2408	Mark Ginsburg
47	2407	Nikola Mitkov
48	2406	Jonathan Schroer
49	2405	John Donaldson
50	2402	Robby Adamson
51	2399	Keaton Kiewra
52	2391	Jay Bonin
53	2379	Shinsaku Uesugi
54	2375	Andrei Zaremba
55	2374	Vadim Martirosov
56	2374	Eric Rodriguez
57	2366	Yian Liou
58	2366	Ron Simpson
59	2364	Ron Burnett
60	2354	Victor Shen
61	2352	Bryan Smith
62	2351	Peter Bereolos
63	2349	Aviv Friedman
64	2344	Michael Lee
65	2344	Yaacov Norowitz
66	2340	Matthew Herman
67	2331	John Bick
68	2329	Bayaraa Zorigt
69	2315	Eric Tangborn
70	2311	Ilya Krasik
71	2306	Todd Andrews
72	2296	Jon Burgess
73	2294	Ray Kaufman
74	2269	Craig Jones
75	2261	Nelson Lopez
76	2257	Josh Sinanan
77	2256	Tsagaan Battsetseg
78	2250	Danny Rensch
79	2227	Alejandro Moreno Roman
80	2217	Leo Martinez
81	2207	Elizabeth Vicary

GOTW Whackometer - Week 3

Here are the results for the Week 3, Game-of-the-Week Whackometer, which attempts to see whether one (or more) of the GOTW judges are "whacko".

Name Week-1 Week-2 Week-3 Average
Jeff  0.792  0.319 -0.149  0.321 
Greg  0.471  0.307  0.522  0.433 
Arun  0.493  0.563  0.164  0.407 
JimD  0.493  0.505  0.329  0.442 
Mike  0.661 -0.058  0.009  0.204 

Remember that a number closer to 1.000 means that the judge agreed with the collective wisdom of the other judges, a number closer to -1.000 means that the judge disagreed with the collective wisdom of the other judges, and a number close to 0.000 means that the judge neither agreed nor disagreed with the collective wisdom of the other judges.

This past week, the results were pretty varied. Greg agreed most with the other judges, while Jeff somewhat disagreed with them. Michael, once again, was independent of them.

For all three weeks, however, each judge still has a positive number, indicating that (overall) each judge agrees with the other judges to some degree.

Thus, so far, no whacko.

USCL Ratings and Power Rankings: Week 3 (2009)

UPDATE. I forgot to increase the current week counter on the spreadsheet, and thus what I posted was wrong. Mea culpa. Thank you for HA81 for the constructive criticism which made me go back to look at this.

Here is the correct list.

USCL 2009 Week 3 Power Rankings (CORRECTED)

1 -	San Francisco	1.000
2 -	Seattle	0.931
3 -	New Jersey	0.922
4 -	Miami	0.883
5 -	New York	0.843
6 -	Dallas	0.813
7 -	Arizona	0.801
8 -	Tennessee	0.737
9 -	Philadelphia	0.718
10 -	Chicago	0.699
11 -	Boston	0.691
12 -	Queens	0.562
13 -	Carolina	0.543
14 -	Baltimore	0.527

I had been asked by United States Chess League Commissioner, Greg Shahade, to also publish power rankings for the 14 USCL teams. Note that these Power Rankings are entirely based on mathematical formulas; there is no subjectivity at all. They are calculated using the same formula that used previously on this website. Top team always get a 1.000, the remainder of the teams get numbers less than that.

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Below are the unofficial player ratings for the United States Chess League for 2009, post-week 3.

USCL 2009 Week 3 Player Ratings

Rank	Rating	Name
1	2641	Jaan Ehlvest
2	2632	Hikaru Nakamura
3	2631	Julio Becerra
4	2604	Sergey Erenburg
5	2588	Larry Christiansen
6	2584	Joel Benjamin
7	2576	Dean Ippolito
8	2574	Marko Zivanic
9	2571	Jacek Stopa
10	2566	Pascal Charbonneau
11	2554	Gregory Serper
12	2546	Alex Shabalov
13	2542	Josh Friedel
14	2539	Eugene Perelshteyn
15	2533	Alejandro Ramirez
16	2529	Alex Lenderman
17	2529	Giorgi Kacheishvili
18	2525	Boris Gulko
19	2515	Dmitry Schneider
20	2506	Sam Shankland
21	2505	Bruci Lopez
22	2505	Thomas Bartell
23	2501	Levon Altounian
24	2500	Marc Esserman
25	2500	Eli Vovsha
26	2492	Rogelio Barcenilla
27	2486	Daniel Ludwig
28	2478	Alex Stripunsky
29	2464	Sergey Kudrin
30	2448	Mehmed Pasalic
31	2444	Jan van de Mortel
32	2442	Mark Ginsburg
33	2441	Denis Shmelov
34	2439	Jorge Sammour-Hasbun
35	2434	David Pruess
36	2430	Florin Felecan
37	2424	Robby Adamson
38	2424	John Bartholomew
39	2423	Tegshsuren Enkhbat
40	2415	Slava Mikhailuk
41	2414	Ron Burnett
42	2411	Jonathan Schroer
43	2407	Nikola Mitkov
44	2405	John Donaldson
45	2401	Angelo Young
46	2398	Larry Kaufman
47	2391	Jay Bonin
48	2388	Oleg Zaikov
49	2388	Keaton Kiewra
50	2380	Ron Simpson
51	2377	Eric Rodriguez
52	2375	Andrei Zaremba
53	2360	Bryan Smith
54	2355	Blas Lugo
55	2354	Victor Shen
56	2352	Michael Lee
57	2351	Peter Bereolos
58	2349	Aviv Friedman
59	2347	Matthew Herman
60	2332	Vadim Martirosov
61	2323	Yian Liou
62	2315	Eric Tangborn
63	2311	Ilya Krasik
64	2306	Todd Andrews
65	2296	Jon Burgess
66	2295	John Bick
67	2281	Craig Jones
68	2261	Nelson Lopez
69	2256	Tsagaan Battsetseg
70	2250	Danny Rensch
71	2241	Leo Martinez
72	2216	Josh Sinanan
73	2207	Elizabeth Vicary

GOTW Whackometer, Part 2

Well, I woke up yesterday morning, with a sick feeling that the co-linearity problem was actually a real problem, given the population size. So, I redid the correlations, but this time correlated a judges score with the sum of the points of the other judges. In this way, a judge's own points are not considered in the correlation.

The results are rather interesting.

Name Week-1 Week-2 Average
Jeff  0.792  0.319  0.556 
Greg  0.471  0.307  0.389
Arun  0.493  0.563  0.528  
JimD  0.493  0.505  0.499
Mike  0.661 -0.058  0.302

Mike's correlation in week 2 is pretty close to 0, which suggests that he had almost no correlation with the other judges. However, in both weeks, all the judges are reasonably similar in their correlations. Two weeks is not a very good sample.

HOWEVER, note that this is for the games that were selected. Remember that there are about 20 other games, that ALL judges marked as 0. Including these games would lead to a much higher correlation for everyone.

Game of the Week Controversy

Only week 2 in the United States Chess League, and there's already controversy about the "Game-of-the-Week" judging. It appears that several members of the Boston Blitz are upset that their team member, Marc Esserman, only came in second place in the voting.

There have been claims of a "whacko judge". But how can we define "whacko"? Quantitatively, I mean...

One method is by performing standard Pearson correlations on an individual judge's scores with the total scores of all the judges. Yes, there's some co-linearity issues, but I'm not really going to worry about that.

Correlations produce a score called "r", which ranges from -1 to 1. When r=1, it means that one set of data lines up exactly with another set of data. For example, the ordered data set {1, 2, 3} and {2, 4, 6} have an r=1. On the flip side, an r =-1 means that one data set is exactly opposite (in terms of lining up) with another. Take the data set {1, 2, 3} again; the data set {6, 4, 2} has an r=-1, because 1 and 6, 2 and 4, 3 and 2, line up in the opposite order.

So what does an r=0 mean? It means that the two data sets have absolutely no statistical correlation at all, either negative or positive; it is like there are two random data sets.

In terms of USCL GOTW judging, what we would like to see is some sort of positive correlation between each judge's scores and the scores given to the games as a whole. If there is some sort of "whacko" judge, then they should have a near zero or a negative correlation. Indeed, even if one judge has a noticeably lower positive correlation than the other judges, it something of which to keep track.

For Week 2, GOTW judging, I calculated the correlations between a judge's score and the tally of all the judges. Before I go into the numbers, let me first give an example.

Winner / Total Points / Score of "Greg"

Friedel / 18 / 2

Esserman / 14 / 5

Ehlvest / 9 / 0

Perelshteyn / 9 / 3

Charbonneau / 6 / 0

Krasik / 6 / 4

Lopez / 4 / 0

Zaremba / 3 / 0

Becerra / 3 / 0

Matlin / 1 / 0

Recio / 1 / 1

Altounian-Burnett / 1 / 0

The Pearson correlation ("r") between Greg's scores and the scores of all the judges was 0.594, which is a high positive number, which indicates that his choices matched reasonably well with the choices of the group as a whole.

Let's look at the correlations of all the judges of week 2, from highest (i.e., agreed closest with the group) to lowest.

Week 2 Correlations
Arun: 0.770
Jim: 0.733
Jeff: 0.604
Greg: 0.594
Michael: 0.280

Michael's score is well-below the other judges, but still positive, which means that he did agree somewhat with all the other judges.

So, let's go back and see what happened for the Week 1 voting, where the results were apparently less controversial.

Week 1 Correlations
Jeff: 0.882
Michael: 0.799
Arun: 0.683
Jim: 0.683
Greg: 0.667

These are all reasonably close, when Jeff and Michael having a better correlation.

So to summarize, we can determine the average correlation for both weeks.

Average Correlation for both weeks
Jeff: 0.743
Arun: 0.727
Jim: 0.708
Greg: 0.631
Michael: 0.540

All are reasonably high, so I think it may be too early to refer to a "whacko" judge.

2009 USCL Ratings Week 2

The ratings have been posted for week 2 of the USCL in 2009. Again, only players who have played in 2009 are listed, and to be listed, players have to have played a minimum of three lifetime USCL games.

Rank	Rating	Name
1	2640	Jaan Ehlvest
2	2626	Julio Becerra
3	2614	Larry Christiansen
4	2604	Hikaru Nakamura
5	2604	Sergey Erenburg
6	2574	Marko Zivanic
7	2572	Joel Benjamin
8	2568	Dean Ippolito
9	2558	Pascal Charbonneau
10	2554	Gregory Serper
11	2547	Josh Friedel
12	2546	Alex Shabalov
13	2540	Bruci Lopez
14	2539	Eugene Perelshteyn
15	2533	Alejandro Ramirez
16	2527	Alex Lenderman
17	2525	Dmitry Schneider
18	2513	Thomas Bartell
19	2501	Levon Altounian
20	2500	Marc Esserman
21	2500	Eli Vovsha
22	2500	Alex Stripunsky
23	2482	Sam Shankland
24	2468	Sergey Kudrin
25	2453	Andrei Zaremba
26	2444	Jan van de Mortel
27	2441	Denis Shmelov
28	2434	David Pruess
29	2431	Florin Felecan
30	2426	Jonathan Schroer
31	2424	Robby Adamson
32	2424	John Bartholomew
33	2423	Tegshsuren Enkhbat
34	2414	Ron Burnett
35	2407	Mehmed Pasalic
36	2407	Nikola Mitkov
37	2405	John Donaldson
38	2403	Larry Kaufman
39	2396	Peter Bereolos
40	2395	Angelo Young
41	2392	Ron Simpson
42	2391	Jay Bonin
43	2390	Oleg Zaikov
44	2377	Eric Rodriguez
45	2373	Keaton Kiewra
46	2360	Bryan Smith
47	2354	Victor Shen
48	2354	Ilya Krasik
49	2349	Aviv Friedman
50	2315	Eric Tangborn
51	2314	Michael Lee
52	2311	Todd Andrews
53	2288	John Bick
54	2280	Matthew Herman
55	2278	Tsagaan Battsetseg
56	2262	Craig Jones
57	2261	Nelson Lopez
58	2215	Josh Sinanan

2009 USCL Inaugural Raring List

Welcome to the (unofficial) USCL Ratings List of 2009! I am pleased to provide this service again to all the USCL fans out there.

The details of the calculations of this rating system have been described elsewhere, but to summarize... (a) it uses a modified Glicko system; (b) there are different scores for a draw if your team won or lost; (c) it accounts for color in your score expectancy; (d) uncertainty scores are automatically raised at the beginning of a season; (e) initial rating assignment depends on the board that you played; (f) all games are given equal weight (regular season, playoffs, tiebreakers).

That being said, the same conditions apply to each published list. First, the player must have played at least three lifetime games in the USCL, and second, the player must be active in the year the list is published.

Here is the initial list for 2009 - there are so few names on the list, because there are fewer players active in 2009 (so far).

Rank	Rating	Name
1	2618	Julio Becerra
2	2614	Larry Christiansen
3	2576	Gregory Serper
4	2568	Joel Benjamin
5	2552	Alex Lenderman
6	2546	Alex Shabalov
7	2544	Dean Ippolito
8	2544	Alejandro Ramirez
9	2539	Pascal Charbonneau
10	2535	Levon Altounian
11	2535	Bruci Lopez
12	2534	Eugene Perelshteyn
13	2512	Josh Friedel
14	2500	Eli Vovsha
15	2500	Alex Stripunsky
16	2495	Marc Esserman
17	2473	Sergey Kudrin
18	2447	Andrei Zaremba
19	2434	David Pruess
20	2432	Jonathan Schroer
21	2431	Florin Felecan
22	2424	John Bartholomew
23	2417	Nikola Mitkov
24	2416	Tegshsuren Enkhbat
25	2409	Oleg Zaikov
26	2407	Mehmed Pasalic
27	2405	John Donaldson
28	2403	Larry Kaufman
29	2398	Ron Simpson
30	2396	Peter Bereolos
31	2394	Eric Rodriguez
32	2392	Robby Adamson
33	2385	Ron Burnett
34	2373	Keaton Kiewra
35	2360	Bryan Smith
36	2354	Victor Shen
37	2315	Eric Tangborn
38	2311	Michael Lee
39	2298	Craig Jones
40	2288	John Bick
41	2280	Matthew Herman
42	2261	Nelson Lopez
43	2215	Josh Sinanan