Lets say a player had a rating from the 1960’s or 1970s and you can’t find his or her rating and they say they were 2200+. How would you go about getting the proper rating for that person ?
The MSA will not cover ratings before 1990. However, many of the December issues of Chess Life & Review (as it was called back then) from the 70s had an annual rating list in the back of the issue. Also, you can try to find someone that still has some of the old paper supplements. Again the annual list will likely have the player if they were still active in chess that year. I personally have a few of the old paper supplements, but not going back that far. Do remember that an annual list may or may not have a rating for the player you are looking for, and that it will not be 100% accurate. Also, it is possible that even if you can dig up and provide this information that the USCF will still treat the player as an unrated new member.
Larry S. Cohen
I wonder if any library might have micro filch of old Chess Life magazines. I’d think if there was, it might be in the NYC library system, which is legendary for it’s size, if you include the entire system city wide.
I don’t live in NYC, but hopefully a USCF player from the NYC area could look into it.
This is my opinion, but I would think someone of a certain rating, 1600 USCF, although it could be applied to most players regardless of ratings, would have to play considerably stronger to qualify for that rating today.
I played an old chess computer from the 90’s a few weeks ago that was supposedly rated a bit over 1600 USCF, but I’m with the impression that a current player around 1400 would be able to win, and probably over 50% of the games, if the machine was set at the max level.
It’s not rating drift as much as the ease of being able to learn chess nowadays, with software and practically unlimited online resources, much of it free.
Is guy coming back to chess after such a long absence?
2200+, even back in the 70’s was nothing to sneeze at, and even today that is way more than a respectable rating, it’s downright good.
Is there a particular reason you’re trying to verify his rating?
This is not true. If the office is provided with evidence of last year played, name, and state, they will re-initialize the player’s tournament history with that rating, provided that all the games since have been played within the re-rate window. I have had many players come back after a long layoff, and some of them have played many tournaments before disclosing the fact that they had played before. Always the ratings have been found and the tournaments have been re-rated accordingly.
Alex Relyea
P.S. I’ve found that most people who haven’t played in a long time have an inflated memory of what their ratings were.
The office has, I believe, two complete sets of printed ratings lists dating back to the 1950’s, all the supplements and the annual lists printed in Chess Life.
Contact them with the player’s name, state and when the player last played, it may take a few days, depending upon work schedules, but they’ll attempt to look the player up.
A few TDs have complete or nearly complete sets as well. (John Hillery had one, I don’t know who got it when he passed on.)
There have been some discussions about scanning those ratings lists and putting them online, I don’t know the status of getting that project funded.
Yep, I still have those old printed annual ratings lists. The most valuable was the 1989 cumulative list (a huge volume of all available ratings up to that point in time–but sometimes, rarely, I need to still look at the annual ratings list in old magazines). And I am pretty sure a few other posters here have yet to chime in about their copies of those lists.
I believe there is also a project underway to scan old Chess Life’s and perhaps also to digitize some of those old lists.
Yes there is. The communications department is running that project.
The really old Chess Life, Chess Review and Chess Life & Review (up to 1975, I believe) were scanned about 10 years ago and could be bought in a 3 CD set. I don’t know current availability of that set of CDs.