[nominatronic]

A similar fun example is the distribution of Elo ratings on a chess site, e.g. here's the weekly distribution on Lichess for Bullet games (less than 3 minutes):

https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/bullet

It's easy to understand why this happens:

- Player ratings will fluctuate by small amounts as they win and lose individual games.

- People are happy to stop playing when their rating is at e.g. 1503, but if it's 1497, they'd rather play just one more game than leave it that way.

- At any given time, most accounts are not playing, so the distribution shows a bias towards values just over a 100 Elo threshold.

The other neat thing is that you can see this effect reduce as you look at longer time controls:

Blitz (less than 10 min): https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/blitz

Rapid (less than 30 min): https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/rapid

Which makes sense because the time and effort of gambling just one more game to get the rating back over the line is higher at the longer time controls.

[s_dev]

Or you can look at the cut off date of competitive sports players and athletes. If January 1st is the cut off for age there will be a disproportionate number of players born in December. If it's June 1st many of the players will have birthdates in May and April.

[noqc]

Haha, guilty. I put my rapid rating above 2k and haven't played in months since then.

[isolli]

When I dip below 600, I usually get angry and play more, then lose and quit even further down.

[chatmasta]

> At any given time, most accounts are not playing, so the distribution shows a bias towards values just over a 100 Elo threshold

FYI, that graph only includes players who were active (played a game) this week.

[nominatronic]

Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that out of all the accounts included, most of them won't be actively playing games right now.

[chatmasta]

In fact none of them will be, because it's computed by analyzing the rolling last 7 days, and each accounts "ranking" is whatever their ranking was at the end of that period (i.e. "now," more or less).

Basically I'm not sure why you're saying that leads to a bias toward "slightly above 100."

Ohh... unless you meant slightly above a multiple of 100. I see now. Because people stop playing when they hit a milestone, right.

[mananaysiempre]

(That’s basically how the election falsification example in TFA works, too: a lot of individuals targeting a subjectively nice metric without cooperating with one another.)