I was interested in your recent blog about playing juniors which reminded me of my own experience. Here is an extract from a recent article on Chessbase that you might have already seen?
Players develop particularly rapidly between the age of 10 to 18 but in these years you now only gain Elo points from other players (unlike previously). Some of these rating points come from junior players who quit chess. However, because the playing strength of virtually all junior players increases from the age of 10 to the age of 18 years these junior players mainly gain rating points from adult opponents who "sponsor" the ratings of the juniors. As a result a lot of players ranging from 1000 to 2000 Elo points are underrated which also affected higher Elo levels.
The full article is here https://en.chessbase.com/post/problems-of-calculating-ratings-of-junior-players
Strange that FIDE are aware of the problem but seem unable to resolve it. Perhaps the answer is just to add 100-200 rating points according to age.
a) Juniors improve more quickly than adults, and so at any point in their development are more likely than adults to be underrated;
b) As the article contends, juniors improve with (almost) every tournament they play;
c) If a tournament is an all-junior affair, the average rating of the participants will not change even though each one of them has (probably) improved;
d) When such juniors later play in tournaments not restricted by age, their adult opponents are going to get an undeservedly lowered rating performance.
So what can be done about this?
Joe's suggestion of adding points to a rating according to age is similar to how the ECF/BCF used to treat juniors in its grading system. It may be the answer, but I am not statistically expert enough to know.
What I do know is that many adults exacerbate the problem by taking a defeatist attitude to playing juniors.
They expect to get outplayed tactically, so they either:
a) Fail to give the game a 100 percent effort, and so their fear of being outplayed tactically becomes self-fulfilling; or
b) Try to avoid complications at all costs and end up playing so passively that their young opponents get to build winning attacks unhindered.
There is no doubt most juniors are much stronger tactically than positionally. A junior rated 1700 could easily have a tactical strength of 2000, but positionally be little better than 1400.
This is why an old adage has it that the best way to play against juniors is to get queens off as soon as possible, even at the cost of positional concessions.
It might also be a good idea - I have no authority for this - to try opposite-side castling if reasonably possible.
This may sound counter-intuitive as such positions often lead to rival attacks, but my point is that many key decisions players have to make in such games are of a positional nature, eg when to make a move on the side of the board where you are attacking, and when to make a move on the side of the board where you are defending.
Once you reach a certain age, another way to get back rating points you have been "robbed" of is to play in tournaments restricted to seniors.
Just as almost all juniors are underrated, so almost all seniors are overrated, as is evidenced by a gradual decline in their ratings.
Perhaps surprisingly, this can be especially true with titled players. This is because Fide has privileged the best players with a lower K factor, meaning their rating drops more slowly than non-titled players of the same strength.
But at the end of the day I suspect the best antidote to juniors is to have the right mental attitude, and to remember that they may well be afraid of your (hopefully) superior positional skills, as well as quite possibly being more nervous as a natural consequence of their immaturity.
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