Since the field is small I was able to add the results from today’s matches into the system. The 6-1 records from Brian Braun-Duin and Marcio Carvalho were worth close to a hundred Elo points each! These big swings are possible because each player in the tournament has a comparably stratospheric rating, so each match is worth a lot to each participant. (In contrast, a typical Grand Prix for a player with a 2100 rating is kind of like a college football schedule: a smattering of titanic clashes interspersed with the Elo equivalent of FBS teams.) Here’s a look at how each player’s ranking has changed. I’ll update again on Saturday night after the back half of the Swiss rounds is in the books.

5-2 was about par for the course for Lukas, who maintains his incredible peak. It is certainly unsustainable, but I’m captivated to see how long he can continue to hold such a high rating. As Rebecca said in the post below, we shouldn’t look at Lukas’s high rating as an indication that he’s that much more likely to win the tournament from this position. What Elo is picking up on is that his recent results (112-38 in his last 150 matches!) are consistent with the results of a real juggernaut.

And to be fair to Niels, Elo didn’t punish him too much for his 1-6 day — it only cost him about 46 points off his rating. Given the Elo ratings of the people he played, the ratings only expect that a 1716 player would manage 2.4 match wins. For comparison, a 1500 player would only expect about 1.76, and going 1-6 against that slate would only cost the 1500 player about 27 points. (These 25-to-50 point adjustments very small. Remember our rankings are “elongated,” so that a 25-point difference only corresponds to around 1.25% of win expectency in any given match.) The fact that Niels has a large ranking delta just has to do with the fact that there are way more high-1600s players than there are players in the 1800s and above, so he fell past a big pack of people.