Marvellous 12 2019

says Shoo...nothing to see here. - zeio
says Shoo...nothing to see here. - zeio
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The CNT has held mass round robin from time to time pitting both sexes. Generally speaking, the best women could compete with the best men if spotted a few points.
 
says The sticky bit is stuck.
says The sticky bit is stuck.
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On the philosophical note ... : )
I think, there will be a gap for the simple fact that our bodies are different. It's just how we are, how we evolved so far ...
Surely yoass, you are right that to become better you have to be challenged, so in terms of athleticism we are a challenge for women, but should it mean that we have to be the same ... athleticism is just one aspect of our bodies ...

Don't strawman me. :)

And I do think this is all assumptions here, and assumptions based on simplification to boot. Yes, there are physiological differences, but they're averages in a spectrum. Women are usually lighter and more nimble, but some men are smaller, lighther and quicker on their feet than some women. Men are usually built heavier and more powerful, but some women outbeefcake quite a few men.

The assumption that, when offered a chance to compete, the top women (after adapting by that baptism of fire) will in the end not be able to cope is just an assumption. There's no telling beforehand how that adaptation would take place, player by player. Mima Ito may not outgun Liang Jingkun, but might still be able to outpace him in another way. Agility matters too, and who's to conclude upfront that in the balance between agility and raw power the outcome will always be that raw power beats agility? I'm not one to jump to that conclusion.

So yes, I'd be interested in seeing what happens of women really got the chance to compete. Over here, competition is mixed — but there's also a women's only competion. The highest ranked players are men, but if you look closer then theres also a (rather large) participation gap. If only 10% of players is female, it's unrealistic to expect 50% of the top to be. Looking at the figures, I think they are at present inconclusive.

Funny thing is, there's a history to this. We had a top female player once who was not permitted to partake in the men's competition, even though she was far above the level of the rest of the females — and at or above the peak level of the men. In the end, she got dispensation, and after a while that got generalized and female players were allowed more broadly to participate in men's competition. Ever since I've encountered women in competion, at every level. And although that's a spectrum too, there seem to be gender-specific nuances in playstyles, technical preferences and tactics.

But there's a lot of legacy there. Girls get trained differently, coached differently, or at least they used to be — and have older girls and women as role models who were taught to play a close to the table pushing, blockiong and countering game, and these patterns drag on in that way too.

I don't know, but I would hold that assuming structural disparity and easy, oversimplified arguments "from nature" don't hold water sufficiently. If we wanted to find out whether or not the women hold up, we'd have to put their feet to the fire. For a long time. Without jumping to easy, swift conclusions.
 
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Funny thing is, there's a history to this. We had a top female player once who was not permitted to partake in the men's competition, even though she was far above the level of the rest of the females - and at or above the peak level of the men. In the end, she got dispensation, and after a while that got generalized and female players were allowed more broadly to participate in men's competition. Ever since I've encountered women in competion, at every level. And although that's a spectrum too, there seem to be gender-specific nuances in playstyles, technical preferences and tactics.

there's a similar debate on the subject of chess where too you see women compete and beat men at all levels. Except at the highest level where the gap is huge. Basically you take the whole ladder of skill and shift it down a few steps and then the game's even, i.e. the very best female players are on par with very good male players and absolutely can't touch the very best male players.

There is an argument that links this to the difference in sheer number of players of both sexes. It says that men outnumber women in chess by such a margin that it alone is enough to explain the difference in resulting skill. A study I read looked into German Chess Federation's structure and there were 16 times as many men as there were women. They say top 100 in world ranking are all men only because there are enough outliers in millions of male players to push back the best female player. Which to me as a statistician makes absolutely zero sense and I firmly believe there are mistakes in their methodology. If both sexes were drawn from the same probability distribution skill-wise, you should expect to see every 16th player in top 100 to be female.

The results of the trials are of course not enough to confirm anything with great confidence but you can't ignore them either.

ps: I feel I should add a disclaimer. Listen, I wanted the girls to win. I don't like when everything is status quo, it's too boring. And I expected them if not to win but at least do better as well. Especially Wang Manyu, Chen Meng and Zhu Yuling. I am not male-biased at all and a mixed league is something I'd very like to see, but you know how when there's a new show they do a pilot to test the water? Well, this was the pilot for that league and the girls lost by a score of 8 games combined against 22 games combined. And they lost against men most of us never even heard about.
 
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says The sticky bit is stuck.
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If both sexes were drawn from the same probability distribution skill-wise, you should expect to see every 16th player in top 100 to be female.

Assuming the same distribution and level, yes. But these are also assumptions. There's this strange phenomenon observed in studies in extreme sports, that strangely suggest the male population has extremer outliers in both directions. Average skill levels, then, may be close, but paradoxically it is both true that most men rate below most women and the top men outperform the top women.

If that is the case (to be determined), then it takes a larger sample size in the group of women to produce the same number of extreme outliers. We should map out the exact shape of that Bell curve, which is a challenge. There is a corpus of studies (and it's not my field), perhaps more enlightened scholars in this area have deeper insight to share here...

I think we should also note that we're not starting from a level, unbiased Moment 0. We're carrying the weight of historical legacy. If we really would be interested in finding out, a large number of large-scale experiments over a long period of time with rigourous methodology applied would be needed. Which makes me say: let's not jump to conclusions, and easily assume that what we think we see is the rule of nature.
 
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Assuming the same distribution and level, yes. But these are also assumptions. There's this strange phenomenon observed in studies in extreme sports, that strangely suggest the male population has extremer outliers in both directions.

that one is expected though, the bigger the sample the more outliers there is. However, the "most men rate below most women" bit is incorrect. A portion of men are worse than an average woman, that's true and is consistent with the assumption that men are generally better at physical sports. Or, possibly, at any sport, as chess, go, esports etc. demonstrate. Here's an interesting trivia: female chess players performed better when they didn't know they were playing against men. Better than those who did know, that is, still not better than men.
 
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Don't strawman me. :)

Funny thing is, there's a history to this. We had a top female player once who was not permitted to partake in the men's competition, even though she was far above the level of the rest of the females — and at or above the peak level of the men. In the end, she got dispensation[...]

But there's a lot of legacy there. Girls get trained differently, coached differently, or at least they used to be — and have older girls and women as role models who were taught to play a close to the table pushing, blockiong and countering game, and these patterns drag on in that way too.

I don't know, but I would hold that assuming structural disparity and easy, oversimplified arguments "from nature" don't hold water sufficiently. If we wanted to find out whether or not the women hold up, we'd have to put their feet to the fire. For a long time. Without jumping to easy, swift conclusions.

I think we should also note that we're not starting from a level, unbiased Moment 0. We're carrying the weight of historical legacy. If we really would be interested in finding out, a large number of large-scale experiments over a long period of time with rigourous methodology applied would be needed. Which makes me say: let's not jump to conclusions, and easily assume that what we think we see is the rule of nature.

To strawman you ... nice one ; ) not at all.

I mean the statistical considerations and the number of extreme outliners based on the sample size are interesting.
But, correct me if I'm wrong, you seem to say that if only women were permitted to compete with men, who knows how it would play out? The thing is, it happens all the time actually.

Just to give some examples, a year ago in our men's league we used to have those cadette girls (one of them is in the national team now, of which I'm very proud of : ) A level above us there was a women's team competing in men's league. Our club has boys and girls teams, so during the practice they compete against each other all the time.
China has their best females to play matches against male players from time to time. To be frank I'm not sure if Polish Superliga allows women to compete. I see not reason why not to.
[Edit] I remember the article about CNT team practicing before one of WTT(T)C's and the author wrote how, at one point the whole team played matches man vs woman. Women were give a 2 point advantage.

So my answer would be that, men-women competitions happen all the time. It's just that at the top level we want to recognize the distinctiveness of our sexes.

If we omit the argument from "nature" than all other considerations will simply be incomplete.
 
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China has their best females to be play matches against male players from time to time.

Which, to lift out that part, states that the top women get to meet the top men incidentally. Meaning, the women train with women all the time, are coached "like women are supposed to", with talk permeating the premises in which men players that fail to meet some arbitrary bar are threatened with punishment in the form of training "in the basement, with the women". That kind of talk, to my ears, is telling in that it hints at a harmful bias.

I don't know how it would play out, but incidental encounters aren't enough to test, shape and harden players. Of whatever gender. Coming back to my historical anecdote, here's what happened when Vriesekoop got permission to play in the top (men only, until that time) superleague. She lost a few matches at first, started winning more, and after a little while became one of the dominating players. This is exactly what happens if a new talent gets to play the highest level at first; it is exactly the way Harimoto is progressing in the world tour. Of course he's young! He could never compete with the grownups! Yet he's getting the chance to harden himself (he has the allowed genitalia for that, supposedly) at that level, and, how wonderful, he's rising to the challenge. Incidental (and relatively low intensity) sparring sessions with men when nothing's at stake for women isn't the same thing, is it?

I did like to see (also anecdotal!) footage of sessions in which Dima and Mima (disclosure: big fan) trained together. It leads me to think, what if that happened structurally?
 
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Which, to lift out that part, states that the top women get to meet the top men incidentally. Meaning, the women train with women all the time, are coached "like women are supposed to", with talk permeating the premises in which men players that fail to meet some arbitrary bar are threatened with punishment in the form of training "in the basement, with the women". That kind of talk, to my ears, is telling in that it hints at a harmful bias.

I don't know how it would play out, but incidental encounters aren't enough to test, shape and harden players. Of whatever gender. Coming back to my historical anecdote, here's what happened when Vriesekoop got permission to play in the top (men only, until that time) superleague. She lost a few matches at first, started winning more, and after a little while became one of the dominating players. This is exactly what happens if a new talent gets to play the highest level at first; it is exactly the way Harimoto is progressing in the world tour. Of course he's young! He could never compete with the grownups! Yet he's getting the chanse to harden himself (he has the allowed genitalia for that, supposedly) at that level, and, how wonderful, he's rising to the challenge. Incidental (and relatively low intensity) sparring sessions with men when nothing's at stake for women isn't the same thing, is it?

I did like to see (also anecdotal!) footage of sessions in which Dima and Mima (disclosure: big fan) trained together. It leads me to think, what if that happened structurally?

As much as I would defend my argument from nature, sure I'll give you that Harimoto's case is interesting. I mean athletic wise he should not be above say Ding Ning's level ... Listen if it was up to me, I would surely allow women to compete men in Budapest ... ; ) Of course + keeping their own category ...
 
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I think before the plastic ball, women competing with men was easier and made more sense. Now it can obviously still happen but the physical disparities are now much more pronounced in their effect on the game.

Sure, stamina wise I would agree.

Which, to lift out that part, states that the top women get to meet the top men incidentally. Meaning, the women train with women all the time, are coached "like women are supposed to", with talk permeating the premises in which men players that fail to meet some arbitrary bar are threatened with punishment in the form of training "in the basement, with the women". That kind of talk, to my ears, is telling in that it hints at a harmful bias.
[...]

No one should be practicing in the basement for sure ...

Another way of defending my argument from nature would be, that we just specialized - men and women. We mastered different domains of our life, which was probably most beneficial. Say if you are a chess players you tend to hang out with chess players and practice accordingly.
So this coaching "like women are supposed to" would be just a derivative of a more fundamental thing.
 
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China's Pre-WTTC 2019 Warm-Up Matches

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4th April 2019 (Thursday)

1900h – Wang Manyu vs Wu Yang
– Wang Chuqin/Zhou Qihao vs Zhang Yudong/Sun Wen

1945h – Liang Jingkun vs Zhao Qihao
– Sun Yingsha vs Gu Yuting

2030h – Xu Xin/Liu Shiwen vs Zhou Yu/Yan An
– Ding Ning vs Sun Mingyang

5th April 2019 (Friday)

1000h – Ding Ning vs Wang Yidi
– Liang Jingkun vs Zhou Yu

1045h – Lin Gaoyuan vs Yu Ziyang
– Wang Manyu/Sun Yingsha vs Qian Tianyi/Sun Mingyang

1130h – Xu Xin/Liu Shiwen vs Xu Yingbin/Cao Wei
– Wang Chuqin/Zhou Qihao vs Liu Dingshuo/Zhou Yu

1400h – Sun Yingsha vs Liu Fei
– Lin Gaoyuan/Liang Jingkun vs Cheng Jingqi/Fang Bo

1445h – Xu Xin vs Yu Ziyang
– Wang Manyu vs Liu Xi

1530h – Liu Shiwen vs Sun Mingyang
– Lin Gaoyuan vs Xu Chenhao

Ma Long, Fan Zhendong, Chen Meng and Zhu Yuling will not participate because they will be playing at the Asian Cup in Japan.
 
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