Thoughts?
We use two formulas to adjust FIDE ratings to US Chess ratings for things like blended ratings and FIDE ratings adjustments (play in foreign FIDE rated events), they will probably need to be changed. I assume the Ratings Committee will make a recommendation on what to do and when to do it.
The re-scaling sounds like the infamous ‘fiddle points’ adjustment that US Chess did many years ago.
Raising the floor from 1000 to 1400 is inherently inflationary, but maybe that’s the point. I assume the mathematicians have studied this, I’ll be interested to see if it causes more problems than it fixes.
My understanding, however, is that rating floors are not the same thing for FIDE that they are for the US Chess rating system. Under the American system, 100 is the lowest possible rating and if someone’s rating would be lower than that, it is adjusted upwards to 100. In FIDE, if I recall it right, anyone whose rating would be below the floor would simply not have a rating.
As I recall, at one time the floor was 2300, it has been dropping ever since as FIDE tried to make FIDE rated events appeal to more average chess players.
But having a higher minimum rating below which one has no published rating at all then calling that anti-deflationary is rather like hiding all the short people at the back when taking the class photo, and then comparing photos from prior years to show how people are getting taller.
The 1000-1400 change will definitely have an impact on our players trying to get a FIDE rating in events like the World Youth.
Yes. In the FIDE system, you are unrated until you have a result at or above FLOOR, and go back to being unrated if you ever would drop below FLOOR. This actually is slightly inflationary around FLOOR, as players with a strength around that (or slightly below) will only get a rating when they have better than expected results.
I assume they simulated the effect of increasing FLOOR from 1000 to 1400. I would assume the mechanism by which they think it fixes things is that you will no longer have the leakage of points to players improving from 1000 to 1400. However, I find it hard to believe that that would have produced a systemic 400 point effect at the low end of the rating scale. US Chess pre-2001 (which, as in the current FIDE system didn’t have bonus points) didn’t have anything of that magnitude and had a much lower floor.