Manual de Fritz 15 2015 | Page 324

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Fritz 15 Help
do this by producing rating and ranking lists on the basis of engine tournaments. In
fact, it contains a complete Elo management system. GM and IM norms are
automatically recognized and titles awarded. The Elo calculation can be used to
evaluate human performance, even for historical tournaments that were held long
before the rating system was invented. If you have an existing Elo list, you can add a
tournament to update the list.
Before you start rating tournaments you should create an Elo start list. This gives all
players a plausible initial rating. After that, you must maintain the list by evaluating
tournaments as they are played. To do this, mark the games of a tournament, rightclick them, then select “Add to Elo list” in the menu that appears. If no Elo list is open,
then a file selector appears, allowing you to select a list to add games to.

3.10.2 The Elo start list
Da t a ba se Window - Ra t ing

Cre a t e Elo St a rt List

Unix inventor and computer chess pioneer, Ke n T hom pson, has developed an algorithm
which allows one to create an Elo rating list out of an arbitrary set of games. Any
database of games can be treated as a gigantic tournament. Each player gets the
same initial rating (e.g., 2400). After evaluating the results of all games in the
database, each player gets a new rating. Using these new values, the games of the
database are rated again. This is done over and over again, until the ratings of all
players stabilize and the values remain constant.

The Elo management in our chess program was implemented mainly in order to
evaluate engine tournaments. But it is very interesting to use it on human results as
well. It can also be quite exciting to create Elo lists for historical game data. For the
system to work properly, it is absolutely critical that the players’ names are completely
unified. We recommend using the large high-quality databases from ChessBase (e.g.,
MegaDatabase) for the creation of historical Elo lists. Most other databases contain
player names with different spellings and other inaccuracies. In addition, databases
which do not contain complete tournaments will distort the ratings. For instance if
they only have the best games of certain players these players will achieve very high
ratings from the program.
For engine ratings, a good Elo list should be based on at least 300 to 500 games.
Implausible values in the start list are not a big problem, because after a few engine
tournaments, the programs will approach their real ratings (underrated engines will
shoot up, grossly overrated ones will lose point very quickly).

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