rank - relation to wins
How to improve your rank? Just challenge other players.
You have won a game against a player, who claimed to have a stronger rank than you? Fine! Adjust your individual rank. But - please - only step by step.
It does not matter whether your opponent acknowledges the most recent result. The main point is discovering and communicating your real level of Go experience to your next opponent. As fairly as you are able to.
A misconception I've met is that player A thinks something like: "I'm 6 kyu and have been able to beat player B. So player B can't possibly be 5 kyu, like he says."
That isn't correct. The correct handicap should give each player a 50% winning probability, and a stone more or less will change that winning probability somewhat, but can hardly guarantee a sure win or loss (especially in the kyu ranges).
The European Go Federation has taken the trouble to publish a statistic about winning percentages in even games between players of different rank here.
-- Mark Wirdnam
Interesting stats. Here is a new, but related, method of determining rank -- not for use in determining handicaps. The question is, what is the RangeOfSkill?
--evpsych
(in response to the stats)
Jasonred Correct. Imagine if in martial arts, every single practitioner had a 100% chance of beating anyone of a lower belt. Not gonna happen... It's actually worse, since you often get people who can easily trounce certain chaps five grades higher...
SAS: The statistics which Mark Wirdnam mentions are interesting, but care is needed in interpreting them, because the samples are necessarily biased. For example, consider the case of 5 kyu versus 7 kyu. Most (probably almost all) of the even games of this type in the EGF's database will be from McMahon Pairing tournaments, since most go tournaments in Europe are McMahon tournaments. For a 5 kyu to meet a 7 kyu in a McMahon tournament usually requires the 5 kyu to be doing badly and/or the 7 kyu to be doing well. So the sample of 5 kyu versus 7 kyu games will be biased towards the case of weak 5 kyu versus strong 7 kyu. I'm not sure how big this bias will be, but in any case the percentages given are likely to be nearer to 50% than they ought to be.
It should be noted we are talking about the version of Go played online. In real-world (OTB) Go, ranks are at first through knowledge, then after you rise to ~18K by results, and even there it is slower going up than on-line.
The other difference is when a rank is achieved in the real-world, you don't slip down a notch (i.e. in online Go, you can go from 21K to 22K, while in the real-world you can't go back down to 22k from 21k)
-- Tim Brent
Confused: Tim, why shouldn't one go back from 21 kyu to 22 kyu in real life? Rank doesn't really express some sort of absolute knowledge level, it just gives an idea where one stands realitve the the rest of the players. When I try to figure out how a new concept works (such as influence to the center is good or tenuki), I observed that I lost more games against people which I beat before. There are even a few proverbs in this library dealing with rank setbacks:
- Learning Joseki loses two stones strength
- Reading Western authors on go loses four stones in strength
- Except when you are trying to understand Bill Spight; you either gain two stones or lose two stones in strength; it's Miai.
- Read Hikaru and lose two stones in strength. Watch Hikaru and lose four
All in all, I think it's nice, if the rank reflects these development. If the rank becomes stable, either one should be satisfied or start looking for new areas to work on. A very dynamic rank is good tool for judging progression, even if it's rather meaningless on its own.
Gabaux: Low kyu players do not have a stable strength, they may find a very good move against a strong opponent, and the same time thay tend to miss one against a weaker player. Accoring to my experiences it does change above 10 kyu.
Tas: I've made a graph of the statistics linked above. I'd like to add it here, but i don't know how to add pictures from my own computer on SL, and I'm not sure about the copyrigths of the data.
The clearest point is that in games between strong players the strongest is far more likely to win.