Thursday, April 07, 2016

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.

2 comments:

Tony Cortizas, Jr. said...

Ahhhh...linear regressions and a scatter graph! Always a thrill. My jumping back into TNS may put a dent in your trend
line.

Unknown said...

I would love to see where people are coming from. You could upload an address list to CartoDB - the world's cheapest/easiest mapping tool and get a point-based map!