Ģüśţāṿ said:

If one person is currently a 600 player but continuously improving their game, playing closer to 750 on average, but ONLY play 550 rated players, how long would it take them to reach 750?

Might be a ridiculous sounding question, but people generally move up faster by playing better players. If they rarely leave their home town, how long would it take for their rating to match reality? Could it?

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Ģüśţāṿ said:

If one person is currently a 600 player but continuously improving their game, playing closer to 750 on average, but ONLY play 550 rated players, how long would it take them to reach 750?

Might be a ridiculous sounding question, but people generally move up faster by playing better players. If they rarely leave their home town, how long would it take for their rating to match reality? Could it?

Click to expand...

mikepage said:

I think the issue is being misunderstood a bit.

The mere fact that one side is going to 3 and the other is going to 6 does not, by itself, make the stronger player look artificially weak in the game data.

In a handicapped race, both players have a stopping rule. In a 3–6 match, it stops either when the weaker player gets to 3 or the stronger player gets to 6. So it’s not really true that the weaker player is uniquely getting “artificially early” scores entered while the stronger player is not.

A good test is this: imagine a biased coin that comes up heads 2/3 of the time and tails 1/3 of the time, with heads racing to 6 and tails racing to 3. If you simulate a huge number of those matches and then total up all the flips, the overall heads-to-tails ratio still comes out 2 to 1 when the numbers get big. In other words, the stopping rules do not by themselves distort the underlying game-win ratio.

What the handicap changes is the match win probability, not the underlying game ratio.

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