Significance of Tournaments

How much does a tournament tell about the strength of a player?

If we look at a single tournament, the result is heavily superimposed by the form of the day. Have a look at the rating table to see how the performance of players fluctuates. Therefore we need to consider more than one tournament to get a realistic idea of the playing strength.

But don't we distort the results and prevent scholar players from improving their rating? Arpad Elo (The Rating of Chess Players Past and Present) plotted the rating of chess players over the time. It showed that the rating of adult players changed by no more than about 10 points a year independent of in-activities and internments. There are rare exceptions: At the age of 14 Robert Fischer gained more than 100 Elo points a year.

Though the history of the Stratego rating is young, the data already show the same behavior as the chess rating.

Anyway, we must find a balance between an effective suppression of fluctuations and an up-to-date measurement. An aperture of about 2 1/2 years seems to be a good choice.

Therefore this system uses a GAUSSian function with a time constant of about 2 1/2 years. The tournaments start with a significance of 1.00000 and fade away with the time.