Basic Statistics for Players on Red Hot Pawn

Originally posted by Palynka
He meant www.bigfootedbignosedcircusfreaks.com

If someone has a thing for clowns, would this be considered a link to porn under the TOS?

Originally posted by wormwood
a couple of years ago it was 1280, then 1281, then 1285, 1286... can't remember the exact times, but it seems now it's been more or less steadily climbing towards the average... you could probably find some of the older data by searching the forums. the average has been posted only once or twice (by chris I think), but median more often as it's so easy to find out.

If you are buying a house and the neighborhood has a lot of houses that are about the same, but a few big houses then the mean or average is skewed and does not represent the true arithmetic mean. The median price of houses would be more representative to the buyer of the actual worth.

In my data the mean and median only differ by 20 points, but if the median is approaching the mean at a faster rate then that would indicate that RHP had a few very high rated players that distorted the arithmetic mean. My analysis from May to September of this year had the loss of 1 player above 2400, but a gain of players above 2200 and above 2000. In fact, the only decrease was between 1000 and 1200. Of course, the overall number of players was down too. I don't measure paid members vs unpaid. This was not the intent of the study. My only concern was finding the frequency distribution of player's ratings. The standard deviation is unchanged between May and September.

The questions about the rating system is difficult to answer. A few "good" players (in reference to another thread) begin playing only other "good" players. Their ratings grow rapidly while others, like me (and I am not suggesting that I am a "good" player), started at the bottom and played anyone who would play. It takes a long time to increase your rating that way. Some players treat this like it is a blitz platform so their ratings probably don't increase very much at all. And I'm sure the vast majority of players play for fun and have no interest in improving their game. Bobby Fischer started with a 1750 rating; most players don't. The use of engines distorts the data some, but these are isolated cases. I don't know of very many engines that play between 800 and 1600.