I wrote the program at the suggestion of an online friend who wondered how often a patzer would win a major chess tournament (most of us dream this!)
It turns out: not that often! But miracles and upsets do occur--about less than 1% of the time say statistics, for most parameters. In the real world, you probably will have more upsets than that, because of sandbagging cheating ('Black Swans' if you will)
Please check out this program, and if you like it, leave a comment in the Discussion board at CodePlex or in this thread. Thanks!
http://swisschesswinpredict.codeplex.com/
*SWISS CHESS TOURNAMENT WINNER PREDICTION SIMULATOR (SCTWPS)*
Program estimates the probability of a given chess player winning a Swiss-style chess tournament.
The user should be familiar with statistics such as the mean and standard deviation.
The program requires from the user the following inputs:
--The mean Elo and the standard deviation of all the chess players in the tournament.
--The Player Elo = the Elo of the chosen chess player under consideration to win the tournament.
--The total number of chess players in the tournament
--The number of games to be played by each player
--The number of iterations that the chess simulator will run.
The program takes from a few seconds to several hours to run, depending on the parameters chosen (bigger nos. = longer time). The user can abort the program anytime, by closing the window. A progress bar shows percent completion.
The program outputs its main results to the screen, and optionally more data to a small text file (limited to typically ~130 kb). The results tell how often the chosen chess player wins first place, and how the other players fare.
The program makes no changes to a user's machine, nevertheless, the user should take care to download this program from a reputable source, such as CodePlex.com and run it through a virus checker and/or in a sandbox environment.