Thursday Night Swiss Getting Stronger

Thursday Night Swiss Getting Stronger

Over the last decade, the weekly Thursday Night Swiss has seen quite an increase in both attendance and the average strength of the players.  This is in part because the "regulars" are improving and the ratings are climbing, but the occasional players that stop in for a month here and there are also stronger on average.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words...

This chart shows the median rating of each Thursday Night Swiss tournament since the start of 2005 and including last month's March TNS.  A simple linear regression shows that the median rating has increased more than 150 points.  

The attendance has also increased quite markedly.  Here's a chart that shows the average of the median rating over the course of the year as well as the average tournament attendance.

Year	Avg # Players	Avg Median Rating	Count Experts
2016	24	1796.33	11
2015	23.583	1808.92	47
2014	20.917	1783.58	45
2013	21	1765.42	43
2012	21.083	1744.25	31
2011	15.75	1766.58	31
2010	14.667	1759.50	28
2009	14.5	1748.33	39
2008	13.5	1765.67	38
2007	12.917	1650.17	27
2006	15.917	1673.17	40
2005	13.667	1644.83	23

The "Count Experts" column shows the total number of player-months where the player was rated over 2000 in terms of post event rating.  For example, if an expert played 3 TNS's, that person would count 3 towards the annual count.

With all of that as an introduction, we've decided to change the rating limit of the under section from U1800 to U1900.  The hope is that now that we're consistently getting more than 20 players, it is more realistic to have two sections in every tournament.  However, since the players have been getting stronger, fewer players are eligible for the under section, and many of the players that are eligible are choosing to play up, since many of them are in the high 1700's and want to challenge themselves.  With the higher under section limit, we will hopefully have two competitive sections.

If you're interested in playing this month, tonight is the first round of the tournament.  As always, feel free to show up before 7:10pm and we can register and pair you tonight.  If you can't make it to the first round and you'd still like to play, either show up next week before round 2, email boylstonchess@gmail.com, or register online at our website.  We post standings and projected pairings online after each round so you can follow along at home as well.  Hope to see you at a Thursday Night Swiss soon!

Technical Details

In order to download all of the rating data, I wrote a relatively simple HTML scraper that scans through the list of tournaments for the Boylston affiliate.  The scraper then selectively downloads data for tournaments that match a pattern (the pattern is "TNS|(THURSDAY NIGHT SWISS)|TNIS|(THURSDAY NIGHT ILLINOIS SWISS)|(THURS. NIGHT SWISS)|(40-90,SD-20;D5)" if you must know).  If you're interested in the specifics, the raw data is online as a csv and I posted the scraping code on github: https://github.com/andrewphoy/TournamentImporter.  Feel free to ask if you have any questions about the data or if there's some other interesting question you have about our tournament attendance.