Intriguing, First-Ever Comparison: Grandmaster Rankings in Blindfold, Rapid, and Regular (FIDE) Play

Grandmaster tournaments and matches are much more varied today than they were throughout most of the 20th century. The “old-fashioned” events had slow time limits and players rarely had to play more than one game a day. More recent tourneys are often played at a much faster overall pace, frequently have sudden-death blitz playoffs after a relatively slow start, and may involve computers or humans-plus-computer as entries. One of the most interesting new varieties has consistently attracted the top grandmasters in the world to its venue – the annual Amber tournaments in Monaco or Nice during March or April. There the contestants play two games a day with a single opponent, one at a rapid speed (25 minutes for the entire game, with a bonus of 10 sec for each move made) with a standard chessboard and pieces to move in front of them, and the other at basically the same speed with both players “blindfolded”, in the sense that they enter their moves on a computer keyboard but can see only a blank chessboard and their opponent’s last move on the monitor facing them.

The Amber tourneys allow an eventual comparison of each player’s world ranking at blindfold chess with his or her ranking in rapid chess or in chess at the traditional slow speed (“classical”, FIDE-rated games). Would the FIDE rankings of grandmasters correlate best with their blindfold play or with their rapid play, and would players’ rankings in blindfold and rapid chess differ significantly? Supposedly obvious predictions about these correlations might prove false if data were available to test them.

Elmer Sangalang of the Philippines volunteered to calculate ratings based on the 2,376 games played in the rapid and blindfold modes over all the 18 Amber tourneys that started in 1993, including the most recent event in March of 2010. Sangalang was the editor of the 2nd edition of Arpad Elo’s “The Rating of Chess Players, Past and Present”, published in 1986, which extended and corrected material in the first edition. Now retired, Sangalang worked mainly as an engineer, actuary, and applied mathematician. He has been a consultant for FIDE on the ELO rating system since 1984.

It was not an easy job to collect complete scoretables for every Amber tourney but ultimately Sangalang was successful and he could include all games from the blindfold and rapid halves of those events. On the other hand, FIDE ratings appear regularly every 2 months and he waited for the publication of the May 1, 2010 ratings and rankings to have the most recent results available for his analysis.

His method for calculating the Amber rapid and blindfold ratings followed the standard ELO procedure (Method of Successive Approximations). The calculations began by assigning every player an initial rating of 2600, to keep the numerical values completely independent of players’ different FIDE ratings. Starting with the players’ actual FIDE ratings seemed less reasonable and would bias the results in favor of the more highly-ranked individuals. So all the numerical ratings for the three groups presented below (Blindfold, Rapid, and FIDE) are independent of each other and cannot be compared in terms of their numerical values, that is, one cannot conclude that, say, Anand’s FIDE rating of 2789 means that he is better at slow chess than rapid chess (rating of 2688) or blindfold chess (rating of 2667). However, the rankings of the players (from 1 to 29) have no such limitations or restrictions and a comparison of these in the three groups is entirely justified. To increase the statistical reliability of the results, only players who participated in at least two Amber tourneys were included below, a total of 29 competitors.

Here are the results for the three types of play. We reiterate that each of the three sets of data are independent of each other, and the numerical values of the ratings cannot be legitimately compared. Before looking at the results, readers might like to guess, for example, whether FIDE rankings would correlate best with rankings in blindfold play or sighted rapid play.

Ranking	Name	Number of Amber Tourneys	Blindfold Rating
1	Morozevich, Alexander	8	2739
2	Kramnik, Vladimir	16	2704
3	Grischuk, Alexander	2	2703
4	Anand, Viswanathan	16	2667
5	Topalov, Veselin	12	2644
6	Shirov, Alexei	11	2633
7	Leko, Peter	9	2628
8	Carlsen, Magnus	4	2628
9	Aronian, Levon	5	2620
10	Ivanchuk, Vassily	18	2615
11	Svidler, Peter	5	2614
12	Radjabov, Teimor	2	2594
13	Kamsky, Gata	4	2586
14	Karpov, Anatoly	9	2586
15	Almasi, Zoltan	3	2581
16	Gelfand, Boris	11	2575
17	Karjakin, Sergey	3	2573
18	Lautier, Joel	6	2569
19	Bareev, Evgeny	4	2536
20	Vallejo Pons, Francisco	4	2531
21	Nikolic, Predrag	6	2516
22	Polgar, Judit	4	2515
23	Polgar, Susan	2	2513
24	Piket, Jeroen	10	2510
25	Van Wely, Loek	12	2503
26	Ljubojevic, Ljubomir	11	2486
27	Seirawan, Yasser	2	2481
28	Nunn, John	2	2431
29	Korchnoi, Viktor	2	2350

Ranking	Name	Number of Amber Tourneys	Rapid Rating
1	Aronian, Levon	5	2703
2	Anand, Viswanathan	16	2688
3	Bareev, Evgeny	4	2683
4	Carlsen, Magnus	4	2667
5	Ivanchuk, Vassily	18	2655
6	Kramnik, Vladimir	16	2650
7	Leko, Peter	9	2648
8	Kamsky, Gata	4	2644
9	Topalov, Veselin	12	2642
10	Shirov, Alexei	11	2638
11	Karjakin, Sergey	3	2628
12	Svidler, Peter	5	2617
13	Morozevich, Alexander	8	2617
14	Gelfand, Boris	11	2613
15	Karpov, Anatoly	9	2608
16	Polgar, Judit	4	2591
17	Radjabov, Teimor	2	2553
18	Grischuk, Alexander	2	2546
19	Piket, Jeroen	10	2545
20	Van Wely, Loek	12	2534
21	Almasi, Zoltan	3	2527
22	Vallejo Pons, Francisco	4	2515
23	Korchnoi, Viktor	2	2508
24	Lautier, Joel	6	2498
25	Ljubojevic, Ljubomir	11	2494
26	Nikolic, Predrag	6	2478
27	Seirawan, Yasser	2	2474
28	Polgar, Susan	2	2454
29	Nunn, John	2	2432

Ranking	Name	FIDE Rating
1	Carlsen, Magnus	2813
2	Topalov, Veselin	2812
3	Kramnik, Vladimir	2790
4	Anand, Viswanathan	2789
5	Aronian, Levon	2783
6	Grischuk, Alexander	2760
7	Shirov, Alexei	2742
8	Gelfand, Boris	2741
9	Ivanchuk, Vassily	2741
10	Radjabov. Teimor	2740
11	Karjakin, Sergey	2739
12	Leko, Peter	2735
13	Svidler, Peter	2735
14	Almasi, Zoltan	2725
15	Morozevich, Alexander	2715
16	Vallejo Pons, Francisco	2703
17	Kamsky, Gata	2702
18	Polgar, Judit	2682
19	Bareev, Evgeny	2663
20	Lautier, Joel	2658
21	Van Wely, Loek	2653
22	Seirawan, Yasser	2644
23	Piket, Jeroen	2624
24	Karpov, Anatoly	2619
25	Nikolic, Predrag	2606
26	Nunn, John	2602
27	Polgar, Susan	2577
28	Ljubojevic, Ljubomir	2572
29	Korchnoi, Viktor	2564

After all the above rankings had been tabulated, statistically-determined correlations were calculated for each of the three possible pairs of comparisons: Blindfold vs. Rapid, Blindfold vs. FIDE, and Rapid vs. FIDE. Somewhat surprisingly, the FIDE rankings correlated most strongly with the Blindfold rather than with the Rapid rankings, even though both the FIDE and Rapid results involved games played with sight of a chessboard and the Blindfold games did not. All the different correlations were highly statistically reliable, but the strongest one was between FIDE and Blindfold; the next highest was between FIDE and Rapid, and the weakest was between Blindfold and Rapid. For those readers who are familiar with correlational techniques in statistics , the FIDE vs. Blindfold correlation for player rankings was +.84, for FIDE vs. Rapid +.76, and for Blindfold vs. Rapid +.72.

It is intriguing to speculate as to why a player’s world ranking (FIDE) in regular, “classical” chess would correlate best with his or her blindfold ranking, rather than with his or her regular rapid play. We offer one possibility and we welcome other suggestions from readers: Players may well be more cautious or careful in blindfold play than in rapid play with sight of the chessboard and thus try riskier lines of play in the latter, leading to more variable outcomes. (Recall the advice of world-class blindfold players like Alekhine who recommended that one “keep it simple” when playing without sight of the board). The fact that in the Amber tourneys the correlation between the Blindfold and Rapid conditions was relatively low (+.72) would be consistent with essentially the same kind of argument. At any rate, and speaking more loosely, you can predict a grandmaster’s FIDE ranking better from his Blindfold ranking than from his Rapid ranking.

We thank Mr. Sangalang for his careful and extensive work making the above calculations. Readers with questions or critical comments should send them to him or us via the “Comments” boxes below this blog. All of them will be published and answered.

Permalink  |  Posted by Eliot Hearst at 06:25 PM  |  Comments: 1

---

COMMENTS

One ought to consider the possibility or likelihood of a future variant of the Amber Tournaments where each participant plays two games against the same opponent on a given day. Instead of one regular-rapid and one blindfold-rapid, each participant plays sighted against his blindfolded opponent and they reverse roles in the second game. Each participant’s rating result from all his blindfold games against sighted opponents will be compared to his rating result from the regular-rapid Amber games. That way we will be able to measure quantitatively whether a particular player plays blindfold chess better or worse than he does over-the-board, and to what degree.

In my opinion, such tournaments will be welcomed by the Amber participants. After all, each one will be performing exactly the same things he is used to (playing one rapid sighted game and one rapid blindfold game in one day versus each round robin opponent). Merely a change in paradigm is required in order not to get distracted by the fact that he is not doing the same thing as his opponent is doing in the same game.

This novel idea could possibly heighten the interest of players and chess fans to blindfold chess and provide you data for further study.

Elmer Sangalang, June 07, 2010

---

Your Name

Your Email Address

Your Comment

Please enter the word you see in the image below: