Testing A player's Strength. • page 1/1 • General Chess Discussion • lichess.org

I recently learned of http://elometer.net/, a site which claims to be able to accurately calculate a player's ELO after they attempt to solve 76 puzzles in a given time frame.

There is a also a book, written by Hungarian IM Zoltan Nemeth, which can give a decent ball park estimation of a player's ELO, after they solve as many mate-in-one puzzles as they can in 3 minutes.

My question to the community is do you know of any other sites or methods to quickly provide accurate estimations of a chess player's strength?

I recently learned of http://elometer.net/, a site which claims to be able to accurately calculate a player's ELO after they attempt to solve 76 puzzles in a given time frame. There is a also a book, written by Hungarian IM Zoltan Nemeth, which can give a decent ball park estimation of a player's ELO, after they solve as many mate-in-one puzzles as they can in 3 minutes. My question to the community is do you know of any other sites or methods to quickly provide accurate estimations of a chess player's strength?

impruuve

#2

It is a known german university and the test seems to be done using the scientific method. They discuss it at the end of the test[1].

The test does measure pure playing strength, which is different from elo rating in that it does not consider effects like adrenaline and time pressure. So my guess would be that the rating it calculates may be around 200 points higher than the actual rating of an OTB chess player.

[1] Quote:
'We used item response theory (or "latent trait theory"; Hambleton, Swaminathan, & Rogers, 1991) to derive an estimate of your playing strength based on your answers to a set of chess problems with known properties. To arrive at this estimate, we employed the two-parameter Birnbaum model (Lord, 1980) which allows items to differ a) in difficulty and b) in discriminatory power. The set of chess problems we used was taken from the "Amsterdam Chess Test" developed by van der Maas & Wagenmakers (2005), who presented their chess problems to a sample of 259 participants at a Dutch open tournament. The national Elo rating of these participants ranged from 1169 to 2629. Using a subset of the items of this test (the Choose-A-Move item set A and B), we were able to compute a maximum likelihood estimate of your ELO rating based on a prediction formula regressing the latent ability estimates of the Birnbaum model on the ELO ratings of the comparison sample. Using the test information function, we were also able to compute a 95% confidence interval for this estimate.'

It is a known german university and the test seems to be done using the scientific method. They discuss it at the end of the test[1]. The test does measure pure playing strength, which is different from elo rating in that it does not consider effects like adrenaline and time pressure. So my guess would be that the rating it calculates may be around 200 points higher than the actual rating of an OTB chess player. [1] Quote: 'We used item response theory (or "latent trait theory"; Hambleton, Swaminathan, & Rogers, 1991) to derive an estimate of your playing strength based on your answers to a set of chess problems with known properties. To arrive at this estimate, we employed the two-parameter Birnbaum model (Lord, 1980) which allows items to differ a) in difficulty and b) in discriminatory power. The set of chess problems we used was taken from the "Amsterdam Chess Test" developed by van der Maas & Wagenmakers (2005), who presented their chess problems to a sample of 259 participants at a Dutch open tournament. The national Elo rating of these participants ranged from 1169 to 2629. Using a subset of the items of this test (the Choose-A-Move item set A and B), we were able to compute a maximum likelihood estimate of your ELO rating based on a prediction formula regressing the latent ability estimates of the Birnbaum model on the ELO ratings of the comparison sample. Using the test information function, we were also able to compute a 95% confidence interval for this estimate.'

pokolfajzat

#3

@impruuve - very good point about game stress as a factor, and great comment as whole, thank you. I think a timed test would also generate a certain level of pressure that could be comparable to game pressure. When I took the book test and knew that the number of mate-in-1's I could answer in 3 minutes would give some mesure of my strength, I felt a bit under the gun. Could also be because the man giving me the test was also the author of the book. :) I could solve 49 in 3 minutes, and that put me somewhere in the 1700-1900 range. But for me, my ratings seriously vary from one time control to the next.. I'm a bit slow.. But I'm thinking there must be some way to test play strength that covers all the bases. Maybe one already exists that is more comprehensive than the german uni. test.. Maybe it hasn't been invented yet.

Rise

#4

play actual tournaments