Have you noticed how people tend, in just about every circumstance, gravitate towards others that are similar, even if that similar aspect is trivial or superficial?
What brougth that question on was my experience as a clan leader - in the clans, this perhaps understandable quirk of human behaviour does seem to have an unfortunate consequence of making life harder for clan leaders that would like to find their memers equally matched opponents in challenges. For members with ratings between about 1000 and 1800 this is usually not a problem - enough clans have members that cover this range to make finding opponents fairly easy.
However, when you try to look for equal opponents for either the very high rated or the very low rated players, the human tendency to gravitate towards similarities does make life difficult: as there are not that many players in the extremes, the tendency kind of stands out: the >1900 players tend to gravitate to the same clans, as do the >1000 players. The result is that the players at the extremes tend to have only a handful of people in other clans that they could be matched with in a challenge without having a large rating difference between the opponents.
So untill we get a lot more players in the extremes, I'd like to extend a request to all players in these ranges that are considering joining a clan: please try to join a clan that doesn't already have many players near your rating.
In the clan system, we could really use a seek dissimilar people instinct! 🙂
-Jarno
Originally posted by flexmorebut it's intelligent behaviour for high-rated players to flock together, as they could form an unbeatable clan. Imagine a '2000+ clan'! on the other hand, it is unintelligent behaviour for low-rated players to flock together, as they would be better off associating with high-rated players...
the fact that high rated players do this more than low rated players leads me to conclude that chess rating is inversely proportional to intelligence.