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That's exactly what Elo controls for: all things, being equal, what is the skill component. Now there could be a second-order effect in which a higher Elo playe
by queuebert 3y ago
That's exactly what Elo controls for: all things, being equal, what is the skill component. Now there could be a second-order effect in which a higher Elo player is even better at winning from an advantageous position, but given large enough samples this should be in the mix.
- ladberg 3y agoYeah I guess my claim is that two people of the same Elo on lichess are likely to not be perfectly equal. If the average winrate of any random two players with the same Elo is something like 60/40 (random speculation) then you'd bias the results in the article enough to create the kind of graphs shown. The problem is that this doesn't really average out with more samples.
- BurningFrog 3y agoI accept that players with the same ELO can have unequal strength. But I don't see how that wouldn't average out over lots of games?
- ladberg 3y agoThe probability of player A being up a rook over player B is higher when player A is better than player B, even if their Elo is the same. So the author has picked scenarios where player A is already more likely to be better than player B but assumed they were of equal skill, which will cause the results to be biased. If I have time later I'll try to whip up a small coin-tossing demo in Python that demonstrates what I mean, I'm definitely not the best explainer!
- BurningFrog 3y agoOK, that's a reasonable argument at least. My gut feel is that the effect is minimal at best, but I don't have an argument for that.
- queuebert 3y agoOver a long series of games, two players with equal Elo playing the same number of games as white will have a 50/50 score.
- ladberg 3y agoI mean I agree that's the ideal but not necessarily true in practice. I bet if you took two random players of the same Elo and pit them against each other many times, it would not be 50/50.
- queuebert 3y agoTrue, but that error will average out across a large section of players, and lichess has probably the largest database of players in the world.