41
votes
Are contemporary chess players now stronger than players in the 90's or 80's?
No. The vast majority of club level players still play like the vast majority of club level players always did. Changes in knowledge about chess mostly apply to high levels of play; the kind of ...
- 27.8k
36
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Advice for breaking Lichess's 2000 rating mark
"PhishMaster's Complete Guide To Improvement": What to study, and how.
Every player has times where they "plateau", and have trouble moving on, but they usually get past it eventually if they are ...
- 32.4k
35
votes
How many chess players are over 2500 Elo?
The website 2700chess.com has a database with the FIDE ratings (from May 1st, 2019). Their search form only offers the option to show the top 50 or 100 players satisfying the search results, but it's ...
- 24.8k
30
votes
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How do you register a FIDE rating?
how do I register an official FIDE rating?
You don't register a FIDE rating because you have no authority to assign yourself a FIDE rating. Only FIDE can do that.
What you need to do is play in one ...
- 94.5k
28
votes
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Why have engines not increased top rated chess players' Elo?
I think they certainly have increased their ELO, but more importantly, their overall chess strength. ELO is only a rating relative to others in the pool so it may tend to go up more slowly if everyone ...
- 32.4k
26
votes
How do FIDE rated players perform on lichess?
I went through the list of LiChess classical top 200 players and collected the FIDE ratings of LiChess classical ratings of anyone who I could verify on FIDE's website as actually having a FIDE rating:...
- 4,340
24
votes
Why is Magnus Carlsen's Elo rating not higher, given that his win rate is so high?
A 99% win rate is winning 99% of games played. Carlsen does not win nearly that many games, since at top level most games are drawn.
Carlsen's overall record in life is +1262 =1289 -454, which means ...
- 26.1k
24
votes
Wrong ELO calculation
The first thing to note is that FIDE make the rating calculations not Chess Stack Exchange. We can try and explain their calculations but we cannot change them or influence them in any way.
Here is ...
- 94.5k
23
votes
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Are Elo Ratings Zero-Sum?
Between most players, Elo ratings are zero-sum.
The formula for updating an Elo rating looks like this. Suppose player 1 and player 2 are playing a game. First, their ratings are used to generate a ...
- 346
22
votes
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Elo loss for resign vs checkmate
No difference whatsoever. As with tournament results, ELO (or Glicko, or any other chess rating system) counts all losses the same, all draws the same, and all wins the same. Doesn't matter if you ...
- 6,524
22
votes
What rating point advantage does playing White equate to?
I do not know whether any statistical analyses have been conducted using real games, but let me suggest the following (theoretical) estimation:
My Stockfish 15 gives White an advantage of 0.3. ...
- 6,010
21
votes
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Why is there a minimum rating gain when you win?
Fide has a rule saying that if one player is rated more than 400
points higher than his opponent, their difference should be set to 400
when calculating rating gain/loss. That means no matter how ...
- 94.5k
20
votes
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Why did I get only 5 points even though I won?
Most chess sites use some variant of the Elo rating system
If you have a much higher rating than your opponent, the expectation is that you will win. So if you do win, then we haven't gained that ...
- 3,166
20
votes
Are chess players getting better, given the same rating?
How would say a 1700 rated player of say 50 years ago who is no longer .around go against a 1700 player of today?
Speaking as a player who was around 50 years ago and was rated the equivalent of 1800 ...
- 94.5k
18
votes
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What was Arpad Elo's own Elo rating?
Arpad Elo was rated 2065 in the August 5 1960 Chess Life ratings list. I believe this list was the first he appeared in that used his Elo system rather than the previous Harkness system. Elo turned 57 ...
- 18.4k
16
votes
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How to get to 2000 ELO rating
The best thing to train is (almost) always calculation:
Get a set of maybe 1000 3-5 move combinations and go through those problems until you basically know them by heart. That's to enable pattern ...
- 19.2k
16
votes
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How do age and initial rating correlate to decline in playing strength with age?
I looked at the data briefly and got some interesting conclusions.
I used data from FIDE webpage for january in years 2006-2019.
I calculated each player's rating change in consecutive years and ...
- 276
16
votes
Why have engines not increased top rated chess players' Elo?
The question is apparently based on a misunderstanding of how ELO ratings work. There is absolutely no mechanism by which the overall increase in players' strength would lead to increase in their ELO. ...
- 1,772
16
votes
Are chess players getting better, given the same rating?
Everybody seems to agree that "ELO inflation" is real (I found an article from 20 years ago claiming this exists)...except scientists. Here is a 2011 paper that vehemently denies the ...
- 15.5k
16
votes
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List of female chess players by peak FIDE rating
The raw data which could be used to extract this information is available on the FIDE website (from 2001) and the Olimpbase website (before 2001). What you will need to do is clean the data (the older ...
- 94.5k
16
votes
Why is Magnus Carlsen's Elo rating not higher, given that his win rate is so high?
assuming this implies conservatively a win rate of 99%
There are a number of wrong assumptions in your question. First, at elite levels where players don't often lose it is draw rates that are high. ...
- 94.5k
16
votes
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What stops me from pumping up my rating by playing a 200 game match against a much weaker (>400 point difference) player?
Tournaments
Not all games affect the rating. FIDE rating is about games in FIDE-sanctioned tournaments pre-registered by the federation in whose territory it is held. In addition, they (FIDE ...
- 328
16
votes
What stops me from pumping up my rating by playing a 200 game match against a much weaker (>400 point difference) player?
Yes, it is possible. And it has been done.
At the highest level such practice would be frowned upon, to say the least, and would only be harmful for the grandmaster gaining valueless rating points ...
- 15.8k
15
votes
Elo rating and fide rating
The Elo rating system is a rating system for two-person, zero-sum games based on the assumption that performance is normally distributed. That is, a player's performance is expected to follow a normal ...
- 94.5k
15
votes
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How are online tactic exercises ratings calculated?
A typical way to do it is to treat puzzles the same as players and rate them based on whether they "win/lose" and the rating of the "opponent"
ChessTempo has a nice explanation here copied below:
...
- 5,096
15
votes
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What happened to the WCC?
The WCC was the "World Chess Council".
It was formed in 1998 by Kasparov after the collapse of the PCA (Professional Chess Association) in 1995. It was Kasparov's fourth attempt at an organization ...
- 32.4k
15
votes
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Worst grandmaster by rating
The new, munged* FIDE rating website still has the old "Advanced Search" option, but the page doesn't have its own URL. There you can search for GMs from all countries sorted by rating ...
- 94.5k
15
votes
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How high of a rating do I need to play in a OTB tournament?
There still aren't as many OTB tournaments as there were in 2019, but they're starting to come back. You can find USCF rated tournaments at this link. Just make sure to set the "Online" ...
- 18.4k
15
votes
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Do you lose/gain rating if you withdraw in the middle of an OTB tournament?
The simple rule is that FIDE rates games where at least one move has been made and the FIDE Laws of Chess applied. You can read the full rules here. That means that his next FIDE rating will be based ...
- 94.5k
15
votes
I can play the London system exclusively up to what rating?
Problem with London is not that it gets bad at certain rating - problem is that it's very monotonous opening, so you don't get to experience many structures (variety is crucial for improvement).
What ...
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