A New Approach in the Evaluation of Team Chess Championships Rankings

Abstract

Classification method in a team chess championship has long been an issue of great concern. In quest of the "golden standard," Chess Federation officials applied many different ranking methods. As part of the "improvements," significant changes were introduced at the 2009 Serbia Team Chess Championship. In this paper, we will examine results of the 2008 and 2009 tournament by applying the statistical ranking method. Our aim was to compare classification in these two tournaments and for the first time quantitatively evaluate the rankings method in team chess championships. Some significant results were obtained during the process and we see them useful for the quality evaluation procedure of the classification methods. The correlation between 2008 Serbia Team Chess Championship ranking and the ranking based on the I-distance method was very significant with r=0.9639 and p LT 0.001. On the other hand, in the 2009 Championship our results clearly showed that the proposed "soccer ranking method" is inadequate for chess competitions. We propose the I-distance method of ranking as a possibility of rankings improvement and achievement of impartial results by any team.