How I won the "Chess Ratings - Elo vs the Rest of the World" Competition

Understand

This article discusses in detail the rating system that won the kaggle competition "Chess Ratings: Elo vs the rest of the world".

• The competition provided a historical dataset of outcomes for chess games, and aimed to discover whether novel approaches can predict the outcomes of future games, more accurately than the well-known Elo rating system.
• The winning rating system, called Elo++ in the rest of the article, builds upon the Elo rating system.
• Like Elo, Elo++ uses a single rating per player and predicts the outcome of a game, by using a logistic curve over the difference in ratings of the players.