“I should know, my rating is 1463.� --skrumgaer

In regard to ways to encourage the top players to keep playing games, Ryan has already given us data we can use to do it. Use each player's place profile (what percent first place, what percent second place, etc.) and the number of games played. We know this for every player.

This is the way to do it. Do a goodness-of-fit test of the player’s actual profile against that which would be expected if luck, and nothing else, determined how players placed in the game. (For background, see Wikipedia on “goodness of fit�.) If luck and nothing else governed the game, the typical profile would be 14-14-14-14-14-14-14. But with skill, a player would hope to increase the numbers on the left and reduce the ones on the right.

I will use my own profile as an example. As of 6:15 p.m. on February 21, I have played 96 games and my profile is 9-11-16-22-16-14-13. The goodness of fit takes the square of the difference between my actual and expected percentage, divided by the expected percentage, summed over all games. I call this the Test Against Plain Luck (TAPL). With these numbers, my TAPL is (9-14)squared/14+(11-14)squared/14+(16-14)squared/14, ….. +(13-14)squared/14 which comes out to 8.00, which when multiplied by my games played (96) come out to 768 points.

Plain luck is not very tough to beat; even negative skill can do it. So I offer some other tests as well:

Test Against Own Worst Rating (TAOWR): instead of using 14-14-14-14-14-14-14 as the expected score, use the profile from your lowest rating.

Test Against Own Last 1500 (TAOL1500). As your rating goes up and down, you will pass 1500 periodically. Each time you are at, or close to, 1500, update the expected percentages with your current profile. This will toughen the challenge each time you do it. You can also have Test Against Own Last 1600, 1700, etc.

Test Against Known Bad Example (TAKBE). For this, use as the expected scores the profile of whoever it was who did the Phoenix Challenge. This will result in larger numbers for everyone since they are measuring their performance against pure negative skill.

The advantage of the TAPL is that for a given profile, scores increase as more games are played. Players who sit on their high TAPL’s will eventually be overtaken by those who play more games.

The TAPL is easy to set up on a spreadsheet. You can copy the number of games played and seven percentages right off the player’s profile page and use Paste Special (Unicode Text or Plain Text, but not HTML) to put it into the spreadsheet.

I have calculated the TAPL’s for the top 5 players and got the following:

NeKo839: 50 games, 30-18-18-12-14-04-04, TAPL = 1757

Hatty: 104 games, 24-15-16-22-06-06-08, TAPL = 2474

Dassault: 82 games, 24-07-18-14-18-07-09, TAPL = 1494

tzisc 129 games, 26-15-10-13-15-09-09, TAPL = 1963

kwizatz 70 games, 20-18-17-07-14-10-12, TAPL = 650

NeKo839 has a strong showing but has played only 50 games. No one seems to do better than Hatty in taking losing games and making something out of them. On the other hand, kwizatz has not learned to do so and has a lower TAPL as a result.