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Ratings: What's the Deal?!

by S. Evan Kreider

Occasionally someone will ask “Hey, Evan: What’s your rating?” Well, I don’t have an official rating. I don’t compete in officially rated USCF or FIDE events, mostly because the prospect doesn’t interest me for various reasons, but also because few such events are held within driving distance of where I live.

My online chess ratings vary from server to server, and I have serious doubts about whether or not they correspond to or reflect my chess-playing abilities. I’ve soundly thrashed players rated 1800 or more and I’ve been soundly thrashed by players rated 1200 or less. This makes me doubt the accuracy of their ratings, much less the rating I’m assigned after I’ve played these games.

Also, I use most of my online games as an opportunity to learn new openings. This means I expect to do rather poorly, lose a lot of games, and earn a rather tepid rating, but with the idea of learning from each loss, improving as a chess player, and winning more often when I play what I consider my “serious” games: unrated correspondence games at the “It’s Your Turn” server, informal “live” games (online or OTB) against friends, and occasional participation in the Online Chess League tournaments when I have the time and energy to do so.

I suspect that when people ask me what my rating is, what they probably really mean is: “Hey, Evan: Who the heck are you to be giving out chess instruction and advice? Are you some kinda Master or something?!” Well, as it indicates on the “About Us” page, I’m just another average chess player like most of you, trying to share some information which I’ve come across and found useful.

Anyway, I bring this up not so much to talk about myself, although that’s always fun . . . Rather, it leads to an interesting topic: what’s the deal with the ratings we are assigned by online chess servers? Are they accurate reflections of one’s chess playing abilities? There have been some interesting discussions about this topic at various online chess discussion groups I’ve participated in or followed, so I thought I’d summarize some of the key points of these discussions, which largely point to the conclusion that we shouldn’t take these online ratings too seriously.

First, ratings vary greatly from server to server. The main thing to understand about ratings is that they are a measure of your performance relative to the people you play against. If different servers have different populations of players, possibly skewed one way or the other in ability, then you could end up with very different ratings. As an extreme but clear example, imagine you are playing on a server that includes only really, really bad chess players. Even if you are only of intermediate ability, you’d win most, if not all of the games against these players, and over time, you’d earn a high rating relative to that population. On the other hand, if you were playing in a population of really good players, you’d lose most games, and score a poor rating.

Also, different servers might use different formulas for determining ratings, so the very mathematics can be quite different. On a related note, there is what is known as “ratings inflation.” Some servers might use a formula which tends to make everyone’s ratings higher than on other servers. The people who run the server know that players like to see a big number next to their name, so they’ll be more likely to play on their server rather than take their business elsewhere. A lot of chess-playing programs do this too, with the idea of getting more people to buy their product.

Also, some players artificially inflate their ratings by only playing against lower-rated players. They may only pick up a couple of rating points per game this way, but make up for it in the large number of such games they play. The result might be (for example) a 1400 level player with an 1600 rating. Thus, any wins you score against such players (and any rating points you pick up in the process) will not truly reflect your chess abilities.

Also, there are tons of new people logging on to these servers every day. These people will have provisional ratings, which have a tendency to change drastically from game to game, until they level out around game 20 or 30 (that’s just the way the mathematics of the ratings works). Thus, their rating at any given game may be hundreds of points different than it will be later on, and a win or loss against such a player (and any rating points you earn in the process) might not reflect your true strength.

Also, most online play is rapid or blitz games, and few people play as consistently at quick time controls as they do at longer ones. So what you have isn’t really a rating, so much as it’s a rapid/blitz rating, which might be very different from your rating at longer time-control games. In fact, most professional chess players achieve their official ratings at long time control games in which games can last 4 or 5 hours or more! It’s rare to see anything longer than G/60 or so being played at the major online chess servers, so the relation between a rating earned at one of them and one earned at USCF or FIDE tournaments is tenuous at best.

Also, there’s good reason to believe that some people cheat when they play online, using a computer to help them play. Obviously, this means their rating will be higher than their true strength, and it means you’ll lose online against players you’d cream in real life. So once again, the online rating doesn’t seem to correspond to reality to any great degree.

Given all of that, I think it’s a great idea to completely ignore your online rating. After all, the point of playing chess is to enjoy yourself and to improve as a chess player, not to earn some arbitrary and quite possibly inaccurate number. On that note, let me end this with a great quote from a contributor to a Chess Café discussion:

“Before Prof. Elo stamped numbers on our foreheads, people played to win tournaments or place as high as they could in the standings or simply win as many games they could. Forget ratings. Play to win and let others figure out how good you are.” Leon Poliakoff [7-3-01]

Well said.