Wednesday 8 June 2011

FIDE Ratings down to 1000

FIDE have announced the lowering of the Rating floor (the lowest publishable rating) down to 1000. They are also moving to monthly lists from July 2012.
I'm assuming that this will be the final change to the rating floor, although I had previously believed that 1200 was going to be the final floor. I would be suprised if it goes any lower than this.
The move to monthly lists has been applauded in most circles, as it makes the ratings more 'live' than previously. However while this may be important for rating 'watchers' (either players or journalists), I'm not sure this is that significant. What it may effect is the reporting process for tournaments, in that there will be less deadline 'angst' amongst tournament organisers, as if you miss this month, then next month isn't that long to wait.
Full details of this, and various other FIDE decisions from the recent Presidential Board meeting can be found at www.fide.com

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why not go lower?

Ian Rout said...

Why not go lower? Well low ratings are more likely to be inaccurate as players improve rapidly but their ratings only catch up as they play enough rated games. If you have a small number of inaccurate ratings the large pool of accurate ratings tends to fix them, on the other hand if there is a large pool of inaccurate ratings they randomise the accurate ratings.

In fact this will probably happen already with the 1000 floor, there aren't a lot of career 1000 players.

Paul said...

Ratings are subjective at best and a lot of chess players live and die by their ratings. I see it in tournaments all of the time.

Anonymous said...

Why not abandon Glicko and use FIDE ratings only? The ACF could operate a mirror system and publish those ratings below 1000.