We currently have our city championship going on in Peoria, Illinois. We have 2 sections of 6 people each playing a round robin to decide one from each section to have a play off for the championship, best of 3 games or first to 2 points. Not all the games have been played but we have a clear winner of each section so Wayne (wzim) has submitted the results for rating of the first part. He also posts the pgn of the games with a viewer on the club’s website (gpcf.net). He has accepted individual’s annotations as part of the pgn game.
We have one particular newer player that is currently at game 24 of his provisional rating. He is doing alright and his rating is now in the low 1500’s. Our resident expert, whose floor is 2000, was in our section and played this fellow last Monday and attempted an interesting gambit that didn’t work out in the Scandinavian Defense. The expert also played some very poor moves and lost the game to this young man. This young man submitted his win over the expert with annotations. What I find interestingly humorous is a comment he made in his annotations at move 31., “I am under rated; however, white still had possibilities here.” To give you the picture, this guy is easily in his twenties and the expert is in his sixties. This young fellow did have some nice wins against the other lower rated players in our section. However, he lost substantially to me the previous week and also lost a very winning game to an 1800 a couple of weeks before that. Both the 1800 and I pointed out how much he was winning to him in the post mortem. In the post mortem of our game last week, he said he just didn’t know how to handle the Benko Gambit.
Haven’t we all either said ourselves or known others that claim to be under rated? Yes, I am one that has made that claim in the past, many times. This got me to thinking, you never hear anyone say they are over rated. I think that will be my new motto, “I am over rated and really shouldn’t have this high a rating.” I decided to go back to an opening I haven’t played in awhile, about a week and a half ago (yikes) and brought it out this last Monday against a 1500 that I have a good record against. I’ll be darned if I didn’t win a center pawn and then proceed to miss that mate in one, of his to me, staring me in the face. Yes, I lost in about 19 moves and my rating plummeted about 23 points for the 3 games I played in this championship. Oh well.
In talking with my friend Wayne, we got to thinking of some options for the rating system that we could have Mike Nolan institute in the software:
-
Make it so that a person can “wager” a certain amount of rating points on a specific game that he is about to play. Let’s say that I know that I am under rated
and can easily beat this fellow that is much higher rated than I am. In this instance I want to wager 50 rating points for the win instead of the 20 or so I might get from the current rating formula. Why not!?! Sure, if I lose, then I would lose more than the 10 or so I normally would, but that’s life in the chess wagering scene. -
We could also give people a much higher rating to begin with instead of having them start from nothing. As it currently is, an unrated player begins with no rating points to lose and his “number” is based on his wins and losses to other rated players. Wouldn’t it be better to start all unrated players at about 1900 rating and give them an opportunity to lose those rating points to others if they might lose a game? This would be good combined with the official Chess Rating Altruistic Point Wagering Adjustment System To Entertain (CRAPWASTE for those in the biz).
-
Then Wayne and I came across a very lucrative thing for the USCF as an organization that would also promote and further chess activity. We realized that if a player had a bad string of wagering luck, they might lose most or all of their rating points. What to do then? Why the USCF could then sell points to individuals. EUREKA!!! Of course the USCF would not be so base as to sell rating points directly. No, they would sell something called “Centroniums”. One Centronium would be worth 100 rating points to help in the rating point wagering. The cost of a single Centronium of course would be whatever the market would bear. Also these Centroniums wouldn’t be added to the rating but be used as a rating tender for wagering.
I can only imagine the difficulties such enlightened things as above will run into with the highly bureaucratic system that is the USCF, Rules Committee, Rating Committee, Delegates and the Executive Board, so I do not have my hopes up too high and will continue to express my new motto,“I am over rated…”
By the way, I would like to point out that today is Friday and its raining in Illinois and my next patient isn’t for another 1/2 hour and…
.