How Do I Rate?

Greetings from Germany! It's my first time here (besides the Frankfurt airport) since '72. I had hoped to post some pictures, but while I brought my camera to the Internet cafe, I appear to have left the cord back in the hotel room. Sigh. Hopefully I'll remember to download the pictures to the laptop tonight so I can upload them tomorrow.

Recently, I told you of my (mis)adventures in the Cherry Blossom Go Tournament, which I entered as a 15 kyu. I said, "My understanding of the ratings is that I will be bumped down from 15 kyu to something worse...17?" Well, the new ratings are out and guess what -- I'm a 17 kyu (closer to 18 than 16). To a certain extent these ratings are nonsensical -- since I lost all my games (and since the score of the game doesn't get reported), for all the rating system knows, I'm really a 35 kyu who resigned all my games. But it takes the (reasonable) assumption that people are probably somewhere near their first guess. So "17 kyu" is the answer to the question of, "What's the most likely rating of someone who enters as a 15 kyu and loses all of his games?" So I have a starting point for next month's tournament, which I hope to enter.