20-10-2011, 09:26 PM
Dougie made a deliberately exaggerated example, but the point underlying it is that a lot of juniors play a lot of their games against other juniors. In general, these players are improving fairly rapidly, but many of them will not be doing so relative to each other. Among its other uses, therefore, the junior addition makes sure that young players are not effectively penalised for playing against their peers.
I really don't see why any of this is an issue. On average, the junior addition is about right. There are players whose strength is above their added grade, and players whose strength is below it, because if there weren't it wouldn't be an average. There are always going to be outlying cases, like those provided by Kai or Clement this year, because the results of chess are not entirely predictable. Every grading system throws up quirks because people sometimes put in performances you wouldn't expect, one way or the other (hence why we had Tom Donohue wandering around providing awful value with a FIDE grade of about 1750 for a while), or their playing strength changes dramatically.
Occasionally we all have to play against people who are underrated, which should happen roughly as often as we get to play against overrated players (which here includes juniors who aren't improving, who you automatically get extra credit for wins against, as well as older players like me whose ratings appear to be dropping). We just don't notice the latter as much, perhaps partly because losing to somebody who doesn't come up to your waist is more memorable.
On a further note, I'd also like to add that I think it's completely ridiculous that this thread has reached a full 3 pages while nobody on this board saw as worthy of comment the fact that Calum MacQueen came within one draw of an IM norm in Slovenia, or the fact that Neil Berry faced both Van Wely and Smirin, and came pretty close to drawing in the latter instance. I mean, it's great that we're all happy to talk about the consequences of playing against underrated juniors, but it would be nice to keep at least half an eye on what they might be aiming for.
I really don't see why any of this is an issue. On average, the junior addition is about right. There are players whose strength is above their added grade, and players whose strength is below it, because if there weren't it wouldn't be an average. There are always going to be outlying cases, like those provided by Kai or Clement this year, because the results of chess are not entirely predictable. Every grading system throws up quirks because people sometimes put in performances you wouldn't expect, one way or the other (hence why we had Tom Donohue wandering around providing awful value with a FIDE grade of about 1750 for a while), or their playing strength changes dramatically.
Occasionally we all have to play against people who are underrated, which should happen roughly as often as we get to play against overrated players (which here includes juniors who aren't improving, who you automatically get extra credit for wins against, as well as older players like me whose ratings appear to be dropping). We just don't notice the latter as much, perhaps partly because losing to somebody who doesn't come up to your waist is more memorable.
On a further note, I'd also like to add that I think it's completely ridiculous that this thread has reached a full 3 pages while nobody on this board saw as worthy of comment the fact that Calum MacQueen came within one draw of an IM norm in Slovenia, or the fact that Neil Berry faced both Van Wely and Smirin, and came pretty close to drawing in the latter instance. I mean, it's great that we're all happy to talk about the consequences of playing against underrated juniors, but it would be nice to keep at least half an eye on what they might be aiming for.