The chess Olympiad, draws, and the 2014 Lindau Meeting on Economic Sciences

No forecast for the Olympiad. Why? First of all, each match has 4 games even though all the teams have more than 4 players. Due to this, I don't know who will be playing whom; it is unclear whose ratings should be plugged into the model. The second difficulty is related to computing power. It takes a couple of minutes to run 40,000 simulations for a typical elite round robin. But in the Olympiad there are more than 170 teams playing 4 games each round. Even if I scaled down to a more modest 10,000 simulations and made the code more efficient, this would take a long time.

Nevertheless, I should be able to release a forecast for the last 2 or 3 rounds of the Olympiad. That is because the objections above don't apply to the final rounds: only a handful of teams will be in contention, so the rest of the results can be discarded. The computation problems vanish. In these critical rounds, it seems safe to assume that each country will only use its top players, thus resolving the uncertainty over who is playing whom.

Looking ahead, the Sinquefield Cup begins on August 27. It is a double round robin with a star studded field: Carlsen, Aronian, Caruana, Nakamura, Topalov, and Vachier-Lagrave. It will also be the debut of the long awaited draw rate model. Over the last week, my research stalled, so I had enough time to nearly complete the project. Most likely, there won't be any noticeable difference in the forecasts, but it does feel better to give the model a better empirical foundation. But this project has implications beyond just tweaking forecasts; it will shed light on the debate over whether chess is being "played out" - i.e., originality is being exhausted and more games will end in a draw. The data includes the ratings of both players and the year that the game was played. If chess really was being played out, then the draw rate should increase as year increases, all else equal. The preliminary results are very clear: the year that a game was played in definitely impacts the probability of a draw. At the moment, it isn't obvious if the draw rate is increasing or decreasing over time; the coefficients on interaction terms in probit models are notoriously difficult to interpret. It is entirely possible that there is no clear-cut answer: perhaps the draw rate has been rising for 2500-players during 1976-1987 but then draws declined for 2600s during the 1990s - this can't be ruled out at the moment. When the results are ready, I'll try to get them published in a major chess magazine or website. My earlier essay, "1.e4 - 'Best by Test'?", touched on this subject. I found that White's percentage score was dropping by 0.01% per year, all else equal. This passed tests of statistical significance, but was hardly a cause for concern: we are very far from the day where Black can completely nullify White's edge just by reciting opening theory.

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I'm honored to be able to attend the 2014 Lindau Meeting on Economic Sciences and even more honored that they published a media summary of my research: The Economic Impact of Beliefs. Don't worry: it's short and written in plain English. They even inserted a neat (and relevant) picture of a solar eclipse. Look for more on Twitter under #LindauEcon14