Blog 59 - Another NGS Update

A while ago I updated you on some changes that we were going to make.  As the time is now approaching a further update is worthwhile, especially as we have added something additional. After three years of grading sessions for the National Grading System, a number of changes are being introduced at the beginning of April this year.

The most significant is that the maximum number of boards used to calculate your grade will increase from 1000 to 2000 (around 80 typical sessions).  This will reduce the effect that any single session has on your grade and will mean that your grade will have smaller fluctuations.

Green pointed events, and other EBU or national events, currently are weighted triple compared to other events of the same number of boards.  Since these events typically mix players from different clubs and areas, the extra weight helps the standardization of grades across the whole of the EBU, very important in the early years of NGS.  It is now appropriate to reduce this extra weight from triple to double.  All other events will have the normal single weighting.

The NGS has always intended to include only events that took place within the last three years in calculating your grade. Since the first graded events were in April 2010, these old events will start to be excluded from your grade from April 2013 even if you have played less than 2000 boards in the last three years.

Your grade will continue to be regarded as "Mature" if you have played over 1000 boards in the last three years and "Evolving" if you have played between 300 and 999 boards in the period.  If you have played fewer than 300 graded boards in the last three years, your tentative grade is not published.

The additional change mentioned above concerns the 15% of EBU members who play as a pair nearly all their graded games with each other.  We are adding a mechanism to pull the grades of such pairs closer to each other.  This is a gradual mechanism which will take typically another 2000 boards to have a significant effect, so don't expect any sudden change.  It will have no effect on you unless you and your regular partner have both played over 85% of the boards contributing to your grades with each other.

For more details on these changes, we will add to the NGS FAQ on the website and to the 'further reading' document in the next few weeks.

Blog 47 - National Grading System

After very significant background work by the NGS working party and testing of software written by one of them, I am pleased that we are now very close to being able to put the system into live use, probably by the middle of the year. We still have work to do in determining how to present the information at various different levels.

We have tested the software with real data from that collected via the Pay to Play process and once we are ready to go live, we will do some more testing with a few clubs, so that they can check the outputs from the system and make sure that they make sense!

If you are interested, please contact me at the first instance (barry@ebu.co.uk) . We are only looking for a few clubs, so it will be very much on a first come first served basis for trialling the software. There will be no impact at club level and no extra work to do, other than to check the results of grade changes to make sure they make sense.

As ever, the EBU would like to record their thanks to the efforts of its volunteers on the working group: Barrie Partridge, Paul Bond, Mike Christie, Peter Lee, Anthony Moon, Paul Habershon and Andy Kittridge. We must especially not forget the contributions of the late Dr John Carter and John Probst, who continues to recover from a stroke.

• Please view our NGS Overview document.

Blog 45 - Update on NGS and Stratification

National Grading System


I am pleased to say that our volunteers are busy working on a "proof of concept" test of the NGS, using test data obtained from our P2P files. While we are still some distance from completing the project, if the tests prove that we are going in the right direction (things are looking positive!) we will be a lot closer to completion of the NGS project.

Stratification

Further testing of these changes is now being carried out by a couple of clubs using Scorebridge. If they are happy with what has been developed and tested so far then a further dozen or so clubs who have offered themselves for "beta" testing will get a chance to test the changes. Once we have passed that test we will advise other scoring software developers of what they will need to do in order to add stratification into their programs.

I would hope that we will have reached this stage by the end of November.

We propose to write an article describing how Stratification for our Clubs will operate so please do not send in lots of emails asking how just yet! One thing to note at this point is that using Stratification at your club will be totally optional.

Barry