In a recent 5SS g15;d3 event, two unrated players played their first five quick games. Their new ratings were printed in the form of “Q: Unrated->1712P15” Why are these P15 and not P5? By the way, other players who had provisional ratings went from, for example, P4 to P9.
Note there was something unique about these two players compared to the others (not that they have FIDE ratings) but I’d like to hold that back so answers won’t be guided.
Did they have established classical ratings?
From Section 2 of the US Chess Rating System (with some editorial comments)
If a player has no rating under a given system (ed. in this case the Quick), as many as seven other sources may provide rating information: the five other US Chess ratings, FIDE (Section 2.1) and cfc (Canadian, Section 2.2). These may vary in quality because of the number of games on which they are based, the age of the ratings and general quality of the rating system or its conversion. A weighted average of these will be used as an initial estimate of the player’s rating—the weights will be expressed in terms of the number of “games” worth of information the rating provides. If none of these ratings exist, the initial rating will be the age-based rating (Section 2.3) with the tournament games having been played, N , set to 0. (ed. only if there is no other prior information).
Those other pieces of information available (presumably including an OTB regular rating) are averaged together. The number of prior “games” for rating purposes is capped at 10 which is what you are seeing.
And more at this very website - Clarification on game counts for provisional ratings - which is linked from the member page of any member with a provisional rating under “See Clarification on Provisional Game Counts”.
…and yet more under the FAQ link from any tournament at US Chess MSA - Main Page
It’s clear as day now. Thanks. Yes, both players had established classical ratings.
Is the cap of 10 games meant to avoid gaming the system by, say, a blitz wizard establishing a high rating, then playing classical games?
My first quick tournament was in March of 1993 and I went from unrated to p15 provisional after the five round tournament.
https://www.uschess.org/msa/XtblMain.php?199212176040-10336015
PS I am one of the probably few players that have established regular and quick ratings and have never played in a dual-rated event.
Blitz and quick ratings actually top off at 5 when used to initialize regular ratings. Regular OTB ratings are treated as being generally more reliable indicators.
Because this is using a rating for chess, but chess played under different conditions, there is a limit as to how accurate the other ratings will be in predicting strength in the new system.
The following could be a new topic but based on provisional game counts, I’m adding it here.
Several months ago, I paired two players unrated in US Chess but with FIDE ratings and they got /P6 US Chess ratings. For example, one is: https://www.uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlMain.php?31770732
This week I paired an unrated US Chess player with a 1954 FIDE rating. He played one game and has 1711/P1 after the event. US Chess MSA - Member Details (Tournament History)
When is his FIDE rating accounted for, Tuesday rerating?
Do you know when the FIDE ID was added to his member record?
The ratings system does not access the live membership database because since July of 2020 it is on a server at a different data center and remote accesses for every member record would slow the ratings process down by several orders of magnitude, so it has a copy of the membership information that is updated twice a day, at around 3AM and again around 6PM. This is an issue that we hope we will be able to find a better solution for in the Leago system.
If the FIDE ID was added after 3AM today, the ratings server wouldn’t know that until about 3 hours from now.
So, it should get fixed on Tuesday.
@nolan His FIDE ID was added when I processed his new US membership before submitting the event the same evening.
Then it was almost certainly a case of the ratings server’s copy of the membership database not having his FIDE ID yet.
The player’s record was updated today to /P6. 