Players who are very under-rated will generally move up quickly due to the bonus formula. We have seen many players have gains of 200 or more points in a single event and we have seen players gain 1000 points in 12 months. How much of that was due to being under-rated and how much of it was due to improved chess skills cannot be readily ascertained from crosstables.
Players whose initial rating is too high are more of a problem, because there is no corresponding ‘deflater’ formula, and once such a player reaches 26 games and has an established rating, ratings floors can keep such a player from dropping much further.
Oooh. Never thought of that. Yeah, sounds like a problem.
It’s a pity we need ratings floors at all. Yes, without them some people would cheat, and that would be a problem, but the fact is that some people just aren’t as good as they used to be, and so they ought to be rated lower than their floor. I know that can’t be done because of sandbagging, but it’s a pity.
The guy who scored those thousand point upsets at my last tourney moved up 400 points, and my guess is that he’ll move up another 200 or more at the next one. He achieved a category 4 norm at the last event, despite starting with a rating in the low 300s, and ending with a rating just under 800.
Of course there is also the ego factor. The GM who is now 1700 strength may be too embarrassed to play with a rating that shows him at, say, 1900. Floors give him a way to protect his ego, and hopefully stay active. If he’s more interested in having a chance to win prizes, he can petition the office to lower his floor.
The claim that rating floors stimulate play among players whose strength has eroded to the point where they are at their floor may be difficult to prove empirically.
There are active players (including a number of OLMs with 2200 floors) who are at their floor, but the USCF also hears from players who will not play because they feel their current strength is below their floor and they don’t feel they can compete for the prizes available to them. (And, yes, those players CAN request that their floor be lowered, but only if they’re aware of that and are willing to make that concession to age.)
Prizes, schmizes. It also means that he has to walk in and get his butt kicked because he’s playing in a section where everyone’s better than him, because he’s not eligible for the section that really represents his current ability.
And then he has to go begging somewhere to please be acknowledged as a master who isn’t a master anymore?
Well, there’s no better way to do it, at least not that I can see, but it is a pity nonetheless.
One thing that would be cool would be if the lifetime titles become more widely recognized by the USCF, and then instead of having U1600 prizes, we could have Category 2 and under prizes. Once established in a category, you are forever ineligible for those prize levels under your category, but your rating can be used to accurately reflect the real world as it exists right now, and so be used for proper pairings. Sandbagging, meanwhile, would be not very profitable. At the very least, it would have a limited time value.
However, I don’t know about elsewhere in the Chess world, but the “category” titles don’t seem to have made much of a splash. I’ve had to explain to more than one person that they hold them, and they were confused about the whole concept.
There are currently three types of ratings floors:
Peak rating based floors. These go from 1200 to 2100 and are based on the player’s peak post-event established rating. Someone who has a peak post-event rating of 1800-1899, for example, has a floor of 1600.
Money prize floors. These go from 1200 to 2000 and are based on events in which a player earned $2000 or more (as reported to the USCF by the organizer.) Someone who earned $2000 or more in an Under 1800 event or a Under/1800 prize would receive an 1800 floor.
OLM floors. A player who has at least 300 games with an established pre-event rating of 2200 or higher is an ‘Original Life Master’, which includes a floor of 2200.
A player who has been at or near his ratings floor for an extended period of time can request to have his or her floor lowered. The office will review the player’s tournament history and decide whether the request should be granted.
Likewise, a player who plays in a USCF rated match (ie, an arranged multi-game event against another member) and is at his floor for that event (either pre-event or post-event rating) is considered to have made a request to have his or her floor lowered by 100 points. There is a monthly ‘floored player matches’ list that is generated for the ratings department that is used to determine which players should be reviewed.