A School of Continuous Improvement poster sorts a suburban chess club's players into four ledger-derived playing-style archetypes, and reports the club committee binding pennant board order to the typology instead of the official ratings list.
A four-archetype taxonomy drawn from a suburban club's hand-kept results book has become the sole instrument deciding interclub pennant board order.
The School of Continuous Improvement has a habit of finding an instrument already doing more work than its custodians realised, and its newest example sat in a ring-bound results book at a suburban chess club. Dr Osei Vandermeer, Dr Marit Osayande and Dr Petra Umbile mined six seasons of the club’s hand-kept ledger for a four-archetype taxonomy of playing style, and report that the club committee has since made the typology, not the official ratings list, the instrument that decides who sits at which pennant board.
The team’s method turned a wall of pencilled tallies into four durable clusters, reliably recovered across five of six seasons, then set the resulting typology against the club’s published ratings. The two track only loosely. Since the spring pennant, board assignment has followed archetype outright, with the classification frozen until an autumn audit reports.
A ledger kept to settle disputes about who played whom has ended up deciding who gets to play whom next season, and nobody had to change a single row to make that happen.
— Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor, Review Cadence Observatory
“We didn’t set out to replace a rating system,” Dr Osayande added. “The rating system was simply slower to notice what the ledger already knew.”
The finding reflects the School’s continuing appetite for the instruments a community already keeps for itself, long before anyone thinks to call it an instrument.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.c3mjfj.