I’m playing in ICC’s US Chess online blitz rated tournament today (7 rounds of G/5;inc2). It’s the first time I’ve played in one of ICC’s US Chess rated tournaments in about five and a half years. Online US Chess quick ratings and over-the-board US Chess quick ratings if a player has no online quick rating are STILL being used for pairings in their blitz events, as they were the last time I played. I brought this issue up to ICC five and a half years ago but it looks like it fell on deaf ears. Perhaps someone influential in US Chess could nudge them in the right direction here?
Did you mean blitz where you said quick in red above?
Since it’s a US Chess rated blitz event, it would be logical for ICC to use a US Chess rating (of some kind) to initialize a player with no previous US Chess blitz rating. Whether this US Chess rating should be OTB regular, online regular, OTB quick, or online quick, might be a legitimate issue for discussion. Personally, I’d like to see US Chess OTB ratings used to initialize all the other US chess systems, whether regular, quick, or blitz, and whether OTB or online. But that (perhaps) is a different discussion.
Bill Smythe
Nope, I meant quick.
Online US Chess quick ratings are being used for pairings by ICC in their online US Chess blitz rated events. If a player has no online US Chess quick rating, then their over-the board US Chess quick rating is used.
I don’t claim to know their reasons, but my guess is that relatively few online players these days have blitz ratings, either online or OTB, and that most of them do have quick ratings in one system or the other. If that is indeed the case, it makes sense to use the quick ratings, as they are the closest thing available.
I don’t know much about online chess, but I’m pretty sure that the majority of OTB players do not have OTB blitz ratings, as rated blitz tournaments are still pretty rare – and rating blitz is a relatively recent thing.
Organizers can use any rating they want to for prizes and pairings, as long as the rating used is not LOWER than a published US Chess Rating (for the type of event being run).
Well, sort of. They do have to be able to justify the rating. I can’t assign Allen Priest a 2600 rating because I want to make darn sure he doesn’t win a class prize. If I have a reason to assign him that rating, it’s a different story.
Alex Relyea
There are 1722 players who have been active since January of 2019 and have an established online-quick rating and 1300 who have an established online-blitz rating. 653 players have established ratings in both online-quick and online-blitz.
62 have an established online-regular rating, but that system has only been around since April.
In that same activity period, 8261 players have an established OTB-blitz rating, 45,612 have an established OTB-quick rating and 51,145 have an established OTB-regular rating. If we did not have dual ratings, the number of OTB-quick rated players would probably be less than the number of OTB-blitz rated players, because there are more blitz-rated games than quick-only rated games.
But you can observe the tradition that USCF President’s automatically get a floor of at least 1800.
As far as pairings go (as opposed to section eligibility or prize eligibility) in a Swiss system event, in most cases it makes precious little overall difference to a new player what rating is used for pairings.
Indeed, if you are put in at 1700 you might face a 1300 in round 1, whereas at 1800 you might have faced a 1400, but what if you are close to the middle line? Then, in a few rounds, a 100-point difference could determine whether your opponent is near the top or near the bottom. So it should wash out in the long run.
Bill Smythe
Here’s a scattergram of the players with both an established online-quick and online-blitz rating.
I TD these events. We use USCF blitz ratings for both
In the online blitz rated event I played in on Sunday on ICC, my OTB quick rating of 1777 was used for pairings.
When I ask people who work or volunteer at ICC why quick ratings are used for pairings in their US Chess online blitz events, the response I always get is basically “I don’t know”.
Micah, you have an interesting blitz tournament history.
You played in your first (two) online blitz tournaments before you played in your first OTB blitz tournament. U.S. Chess did not initialize your online blitz rating from any other system. Your pre-event online blitz rating is listed as Unrated in your first one, and your post-event rating therefrom was used as your pre-event rating in your second. I don’t know what rating ICC used for you for pairing purposes, but those events were both 7-player, single-section Swisses with about 80 players, so after a couple of rounds it would have made little difference anyway.
Then you played in a bunch of small OTB blitz events, all of which were double-round affairs with 10 rounds (5 double rounds, two games with each opponent). For the first of these, U.S. Chess initialized your OTB blitz rating from your OTB regular rating (based on 10 games), not from your OTB quick rating. Your remaining four events degenerated into round robins (or round-robins-and-then-some) due to small turnout.
I don’t see your latest event posted yet. Perhaps the organizer is having trouble getting it U.S. Chess rated, due to disagreements about who does the pairings or something like that. Keep us posted!
I strongly suspect that ICC initializes ICC blitz ratings from U.S. Chess quick ratings because U.S. Chess blitz ratings didn’t exist for a long time, and they haven’t gotten around to changing their policy yet. In any case, do you really care what your ICC blitz rating is? Isn’t your U.S. Chess blitz rating more important?
Bill Smythe
ICC doesn’t initialize their blitz ratings from any other rating system.
I don’t really care about my ICC blitz rating.
ICC blitz ratings isn’t what this thread is about.
I td quite a few. ICC uses your last published online blitz rating for all USCF online events. I’ve asked
the same question. I suspect it’s based on the fact that many more blitz games are played; therefore it is a better measure of playing strength. I will ask again
This is incorrect. In the two ICC-US Chess blitz rated events I played in recently, my OTB quick rating of 1777 was used.