When Chess Players Blunder

An anonymous reader writes: Joe Doliner has done a statistical analysis of mistakes in rated chess games. He used a chess engine called Crafty, which is capable of not only finding mistakes, but quantifying how bad they are. After crunching all the matches on chessgames.com in 2014, which amounted to almost 5 million moves, Crafry found only 67,175 blunders that were equivalent to a 2-pawn deficit or worse. With a pair of graphs, Doliner shows how mistakes decrease as player rating increases, as you'd expect. According to the trendline, gaining 600 rating points roughly halves the number of mistakes a player makes. He made the data and tools available in a public repository for others to dig into.

Comments

Cause meet Effect.

[thesupraman]

I would suggest that making half as many mistakes gains you about 600 rating points, rather than the other way around.
Unless those points can be magically sprinkled on a player in some form..
But hey, cause and effect seem to be highly, shall we say, flexible these days.

(yes, I know its all semantics here, but hey..)

Re:Cause meet Effect.

[Paradise Pete]

I would suggest that making half as many mistakes gains you about 600 rating points

I think the big problem is that a "mistake" is being defined so crudely. I'll bet players make about the same number of mistakes no matter how good they are, but what they actually qualify as a mistake gets smaller and smaller.
It's certainly true for me. I play at about a 1900 level now and was 2200 in my youth. I make tons of mistakes, but at the same time hardly a week goes by when somebody doesn't accuse me of using a computer. In other words, they don't see the mistakes. But I know they're there and to players better than I they are obvious mistakes. But almost none of them are "2 pawn +" blunders.