I recently achieved a 2200 rating (USCF ID 126 30 415). It is however hard for me to be proud of the title since I reached it by playing several people who were at their (high) floors. 16-6 vs a Life Master and 5-10 against another.
Does anyone know of a tool I can play with to determine the effect of my playing them on my rating? One thing I’d like to know is, what rating should I hit to really “isolate” their effect on my rating? 2220? 2250? Another way to phrase the same question is, since their inflating effect is included in my rating, what “inflated” rating to I have to achieve to make it equivalent to a non-inflated 2200?
Given the way the USCF rating system works, it isn’t really possible just to take a starting rating and a series of game results against players with known ratings and compute the rating that you would have had if certain games were omitted. The same series of of individual results grouped differently into “tournaments” with different overall tournament results will have a different outcome.
It does look from the MSA that you went from 2100 to 2200 in less than a year on the strength of playing the same two over-rated guys repeatedly, and winning far more often that the ratings differences would predict. That is not your fault, but the fact that the rating floors can rob people of their sense of accomplishment is a good argument for doing away with the rating floors.
Looking at your most recent events, games against floored and provisional masters did help your climb. If the events has been a half-dozen tournaments farther in the past then any discrepencies would have been likely to be overshadowed by normal noise. Note that you were sometimes playing against a master that moved off the floor in the tournament, meaning you played a floored master that was playing like a normal master during those events.
Usually people playing in a club setting complain about their average opponent being underrated (semi-isolated group of players that are learning and improving, but that don’t play as much against outside players to actually pull in the rating points that their improved strength would garner). That is the normal deflationary aspect of people already having ratings and then improving their skill.
It is a bit refreshing to see somebody saying the group the person often plays in is actually overrated.
I suppose you could run the floored players’ events through the rating estimator and see what their ratings would have fallen to, if they weren’t at their floors. Then you could use those ratings when you calculate yours.
The best way to determine how valid your rating is compared with others is to go out and play in other states and in bigger tournaments. Comparing your results only within the narrow pool of players in your area is going to make it difficult for you to know whether your jump to 2200 was a breakthrough or an aberration. If you cannot play out of your area, then holding and improving your rating across a number of tournaments, ie. staying above 2200 for a bunch of tournaments will make you feel more comfortable with the validity of your rating.
A wise player told me many years ago that there are two ways to attain and keep a 2200 rating. The first was to beat up a lot of B and A players and a few experts and masters, gaining a few points at a time until you cross the barrier. He called that way of becoming a master the “bunny basher school”. The second way was to face up to master level competition in a big way, competing in the biggest tournaments you can find, avoiding class sections and fast time control tournaments, and playing in opens. You take some severe heart wrenching beatings along the way, but you find out what it takes technically and psychologically to be a master level player. Then there is no question as to whether your 2200 rating is valid. And you are less concerned if it dips below 2200 because you know what it takes to go back over. At this point you should think less about your rating and your opponent’s rating and more on developing your will to prepare and how you deal psychologically with victory and defeat.
One way to predict a player’s future rating is to see what he does after the game. If he runs to the wall chart to compute his new rating, he is less likely to improve than if he immediately plays over his losses to figure out where he went wrong.