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Sections

Current member lists with ratings

We hope to be able to present the membership and ratings list in a more convenient way in the future. For now, they are only available as downloadable files :
Members by name
Members by province
Members by rating

What data are included in ratings

Here is an overview of what we've done in the past, what we're doing now, and where we hope to be in the near future.

History

From 2000-2005 the CGA maintained a ratings data file for use with the AGA accelrat program. This had a list of IDs, names, ratings, and a confidence value (SIGMA). Whenever we were received a tournament result file from a Canadian tournament the ratings officer had to identify each participant in the rating file. For each inidentified participatant a new entry was added for them with their initial entry rank in the tournament. The ratings officer then created a new file with containing the tournament results in the required format, and then ran accelrat to produce new ratings.

This approach had the significant benefit of capturing as much tournament rating data as possible. However there were some serious problems:

The ratings data file was not tied to the membership list at all.
Players could wind up in the ratings file multiple times under various alia(contracted or asumed North American, romanized Asian, or simply misspelled names and nicknames).
A lot of work for the ratings officer, converting from arbitrary file formats to the input format required for accelrat.
Ratings were only posted once annually, to the gazette, or online (not an inherent requirement of the approach, but how it was being done) as opposed to being dynamic and digitally available.

Current approach

From 2005-2008 the CGA has been using Chuck Elliot's system. All games entered into the ratings since then had to be between two players in the CGA membership database. When new data are received the updated ratings have been posted to the web almost immediately. The data sources being used are:

Events requiring CGA membership (The Canadian Open and Winter Cup)
Alberta club results(Chuck also uses this for the Edmonton local ratings).
Games submitted though the filling out the rating submission form and mailing it to ratings@go-canada.org.

The current system represents a big improvement in data integrity, but we have issues with not enough data being captured. If tournaments other than the Open or Winter Cup wished to have their results entered into the national ratings they had to do the work of filling out the ratings submission form. Since we plan to offer tournament directors a better system in the near future we have not been pushing them to submit games this way.

What we hope to be doing in the near future

Early in 2008 the CGA moved from a static web site built with frames to a PHP based site with a MySQL database on the back end. The site has been activated, but much of the enhanced functionality tied to the relational database remains under development. By Christmas 2008 we expect to have the CGA membership records migrated from Chuck's private database to the online database, and provide CGA members the ability to login and update profile information.

Once the above functionality is working we will be encouraging all Canadian Go players to create accounts on the server, even if they do not belong to the CGA. This will allow us to draw on a larger body of game data, while still including only official games between players in the database. All players in the database will have a rating, but only the ratings of current CGA members will be published.

Along with the above, we need to make it easy to get data into the database. To accomplish this we plan the following

Provide the capability to export a datafile from the database formatted for use with a supported list of pairing programs.
Ensure we can upload results from the supported pairings programs directly to the database
Provide a simple form for club directors to enter rated club game results.
All data coming in should be tagged with ts source (the submitter), the unique identifiers of the players, the event type (Tournament game, club game, perhaps fast tournament game), and the event date and name.
Players should be able to view all their rated games in their profie, so they can identify errors.

Given the above we can consider arrangements like including club games in the ratings for kyu level players, where its important to capture rapid changes, and only use serious tournament results for dan level players. As long as the database has the correct games captured and tagged with the event type changing algorithms for computing a rating becomes trivial.

How are the ratings calculated

Currently we are using Chuck Elliot's algorithm. You can see an online article on the system here or a document with somewhat overlapping content here. For a good discussion of other possibilities you can look at the Wiki article here.

Until we have proper data capture systems in place reviewing the rating algorithm we use will remain lower on the priority list. Once we have the data captured to a database we can experiment with the effects of choosing different algorithms. With the advent of the RDBMS ratings may even be computed for specific uses according to variably selected criteria and/or datasets.

My posted CGA rating is not good, what can I do?

You can apply to the CGA Ratings Officer to have your rating changed. To do so fill out the form here. If you believe your rank is more than a couple stones incorrect we'd appreciate your asking us to correct it. Please include as much info as you can (Server ranks, tournament results, AGA rank/results, etc).

Some examples of when it would be appropriate to do this:

A player is now living somewhere remote, where they cannot regularly attend CGA events. Their CGA rating might might be 10K, but their KGS rating is 1K, and their IGS rating is 2K . They should send us the server rank info, and ask us to adjust.

A player is living in a part of Canada where the majority of players are not CGA members, or results from the tournaments they participated in were not submitted to the CGA and their tournament results demonstrate their CGA rank is incorrect.

If in doubt send the ratings officer an email.

Last updates : overall : 2009-08-22 membership : 2009-07-23 ratings : 2009-07-04

	ONGOING EVENTS CGA League Play NAMT Qualifying UPCOMING EVENTS Canadian Open September 4th-6th, 2010 Vancouver, BC RECENT EVENTS Game Summit June 13, 2010 Ottawa, ON Quebec Open May 15, 2010 Montreal, QC Alberta Open May 15-16, 2010 Calgary, AB High School & University Team Tournament Apil 24th, 2010 Toronto, ON USA-Canada Youth Friendship Match Canada 6 - USA 2 2009 Canadian Open Sept. 5th - Sept 7th 2009 Toronto Winner: Zhaonian(Michael) Chen