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Alastair's avatar

There is, of course, another possible explanation for the handicap drift. The handicap system has ongoing fundamental flaws (please read: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1AaiydYTUC).

These will have consequences that should be unsurprising to anyone who understands the problem. Just to recap, the main flaws in the system are miscalculating the probabilities of winning & losing matches incorrectly, and then assigning the wrong outcomes & handicap movements to these results. 

The top players play most, if not all, of their matches off level, and, as these matches are deemed to be "more important", the assigned handicap movements are larger. This will have a predictable effect: handicap drift. Why? The explanation is simple:

When two players meet, one expects the genuinely better player to win more of their matches when they play off level. However, as the current system rewards Wins (and, even worse, Big Wins) with large handicap changes, this means that their handicaps move more than they should. There will therefore be a tendency for the very best players to drift away from the other top ten/twenty players. Also, these other players will now have worse handicaps than they should do, and when they play someone lower down the handicaps, and genuinely not as good as them, they Win, or even more likely, given they now have a faulty handicap, gain a Big Win. This roughly corrects their own handicap, but now the next lesser player down the chain has a wrong handicap. They now play someone worse than themselves and the process repeats.

What happens is that over time, on average, these handicap points are passed down the handicap system to lesser players.

Obviously, the better tranche of players will be passing on these handicap points, so they will not experience quite the same extreme handicap drift as the lesser players. This is precisely what we see in the data: the biggest drifts have occurred for the worst quantiles, while the best quantile has seen the least drift.

It is an inherent process that will continue while the current system is in place.

The idea to reduce all handicaps is an excellent one, with which I heartily agree. But it is only a sticking plaster that does not address the underlying problem that causes the issue.

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Joshua Greene's avatar

This is very interesting. I am curious how this compares with other activities with handicapping systems: golf, chess, and go.

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