All rating systems are flawed (in practice). As long as Chess Mentor provides a fair estimate of the trend in my improvement, I am happy!
Awesome avatar, btw. I'm a HUGE celtics fan.
It's not a fair estimate of the trend for my improvement. That's my whole gripe.
The key word here (that you seem to be missing) is trend, or relative. It doesn't matter if your Chess Mentor rating is 7, 290, 1700, or 589281! If your rating used to be lower than it is now, you are improving. If it used to be higher, you need to work harder. It's as simple as that!
I really don't think it's THAT simple. It's obvious that the makers of Chess Mentor were trying to have the ratings coincide with people's actual OTB strength.
But it seems like they simply used judgment calls in determining a puzzle's difficulty.
I'd like to know where I stand relative to other players in a similar skill range. I've offered a few ways that it could be improved. I know that pragmatically, it's too difficult to poll thousands of players on before posting the problems. But at least they can start polling the people who ARE answering them. Implementing a polling system is a good (and low-pain way) to start helping them to improve Chess Mentor overall.
I don't think its obvious they tried to conincide with OTB ratings at all, actually.
And what do you mean where you stand relative to other's of similar strength? You are about as equally skilled at chess as others of similar strength to you. If two people study with Chess Mentor, the one with the higher rating is likely better at chess (or whatever aspect you are studying). You are asking for a feature that is akin to saying to your chess tutor "How good am I relative to the people that other guy is tutoring?", when the two tutors have never met or shared students.
All rating systems are flawed (in practice). As long as Chess Mentor provides a fair estimate of the trend in my improvement, I am happy!
Awesome avatar, btw. I'm a HUGE celtics fan.
It's not a fair estimate of the trend for my improvement. That's my whole gripe.
The key word here (that you seem to be missing) is trend, or relative. It doesn't matter if your Chess Mentor rating is 7, 290, 1700, or 589281! If your rating used to be lower than it is now, you are improving. If it used to be higher, you need to work harder. It's as simple as that!
I really don't think it's THAT simple. It's obvious that the makers of Chess Mentor were trying to have the ratings coincide with people's actual OTB strength.
But it seems like they simply used judgment calls in determining a puzzle's difficulty.
I'd like to know where I stand relative to other players in a similar skill range. I've offered a few ways that it could be improved. I know that pragmatically, it's too difficult to poll thousands of players on before posting the problems. But at least they can start polling the people who ARE answering them. Implementing a polling system is a good (and low-pain way) to start helping them to improve Chess Mentor overall.