5 ms·
This is all pretty standard knowledge in chess circles, but it's always nice to see someone taking an interest in analyzing chess stats. I was a bit thrown by t
by dfan 12y ago
This is all pretty standard knowledge in chess circles, but it's always nice to see someone taking an interest in analyzing chess stats. I was a bit thrown by the misuse of chess terminology, though.
In chess, a "match" is a series of games between two players. The correct term for an individual game is a "game".
"Plays per person" is known as simply "moves". If each player has made 37 moves, that's 74 half-moves, or 74 ply (in the context of lookahead in the game tree by a computer).
Most analysts, when studying performance, assign scores of 1 and 0 to White and Black when White wins, 0 and 1 when Black wins, and 1/2 point to each when there's a draw. It is unusual to not count draws when analyzing performance. Doing so would decrease White's apparent advantage. For example, I just checked all the 2013 games from Chessbase's Megabase and White scored 53.4% with draws counted as a half point for each side.
By the way, one of the reasons that draws have decreased in the last 30 years is probably the advent of faster time controls. I also suspect one reason that games have gotten longer is the death of adjournments.
- rhiever 12y agoI revised the wording in the post to reflect your wording suggestions. Thanks! The visualizations are a pain to replace, but I'll get the terminology right on those in future posts. To me, it doesn't make sense to assign a draw as 1/2 to Black and White. Technically, neither side won, so why not just throw that game out when looking at which side wins more often? That's what I do in this analysis, although I show the full breakdown in the final area plot.
- cven714 12y agoYou wouldn't want someone who lost all of their games and someone who drew all of their games to have the same number of points in a tournament, for an example of why draws are 1/2. Not that it matters for who wins more often, as you say.
- dfan 12y agocven714's point is correct; it's more for tournaments than for matches (where match refers to a series of games). Also note that even in a match, where players alternate colors, Black should be happy to draw and take White in the next game, while White would be disappointed with that result. So it is worthwhile to keep track of draw results even if they are thrown out. When researching openings, players often take into account how well an opening has performed in the past. There's a large qualitative difference between White 60% Black 40% Draw 0% (60-40) and White 12% Black 8% Draw 80% (52-48), although the fraction of decisive games won by White is the same in both cases.
- monkeypizza 12y agoConsider this hypothetical situation: A game in which for evenly matched players, in a match of 1000 games, 9 are wins for white, 1 is a win for black, and 990 are draws. Would it really be reasonable there to say that W has a massive 90% advantage? I don't think so - in that situation white only has a tiny average advantage per game, so that winning such a match would mostly depend on real skill differences.
- toolslive 12y agoactually, a draw has a certain value. There is a rating system (ELO) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system. This means the weaker player has a benefit from a draw, while the stronger player drops rating points when drawing a weaker one.
- toolslive 12y agoshorter time controls: yes. no more adjournments: yes. but also increasing popularity of things like 'Sofia rules' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw_by_agreement#Only_theoretical_draws_allowed_.28Sofia_Rules.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw_by_agreement#Only_theoreti... which has a big impact