Chapter VII: 2103

Milestones are wonderful things. Last week, I got my license to kill...er...drive. And yesterday, I finally pushed my Yahoo! Literati rating above 2100.

Literati is basically yahoo.com's version of Scrabble, with some adjustments to the board layout and letter values so as to avoid being sued for copyright infringement.

The rating system is similar to the ELO system used by the International Chess Federation. Basically, a player of "average" ability (average being used in the statistical sense) is assigned a rating of 1500. Each 100 points above and below 1500 is supposed to be one standard deviation of skill. If this were actually true, my rating of 2103 would be approximately six standard deviations above average, putting me in the top 99.9999998th percentile. Another way to put this is that there are only 12 people on the planet better than I am.

In practice, 2100 in Literati is more like three standard deviations, or the 97.5th percentile. The reason that 2100 is so special is because when you're in a game lobby, your screen name has a little colored square next to it based on what rating range you're in. Green for 0-1199, blue for 1200-1499 purple for 1500-1799, orange for 1800-2099, and red for 2100 and above. So yes, that's what the big deal is: I have a red square now.

This would have been even cooler if it had happened three years ago, when I was communist (the Kremlin is called Red Square). I probably didn't need to add that parenthetical note, but some of you guys are pretty fucking stupid and might not have gotten it. You know who you are. =)

Until next time, do svidaniya.