Ratings - Overview

When registering a player you will usually include a rating. If the player is unrated, you can either use 0 as the value, type “unr.” or just leave it blank. If you want to estimate a rating for the player but show them as being officially unrated, enter a negative value. If you are running a section that only allows a certain rating range (e.g., a class section), you can set this range in the Multi-section tournament setup or Current section setup dialogs. If a player’s rating is outside the range, you will receive a warning when you try to register them.

If you want to register all the players in a certain rating range in the same section, you can combine the above range setting with use of the “Registration ratings rule”, available in the Environment Options dialog.

This automatically puts players you register in the proper section. (There is also an “Age/Grade registration rule” that does the same thing for a range of the players’ age/grade field.) You can inspect and print out several calculated ratings with the “Ratings” option in the Reports menu. Included here are a player’s original rating, a performance rating (showing how they did in the tournament), the new rating (based on whichever rating formula you have chosen here or in the Tournament Setup dialog), and the difference between old and new ratings.

Each rating system has its merits. The differences between them are mostly of a technical, mathematical nature, and it is not worth discussing these differences here.

But one rating system, the “Scholastic”, is enough different that it deserves a few comments.

The Scholastic system, devised by Au Diapason in Canada, has two characteristics that make it especially useful for scholastic organizations: Rating gains are not based on opponent ratings (which in many scholastic systems tend to be arbitrary) but on an absolute scale.

Secondly, though ratings can rise at very different rates, ratings can never go down.

The absolute scale for rating gains in the Scholastic system is as follows: Players gain 50 points for a win, 25 for a draw, 50 “participation points” just for playing, and 50 bonus points to those who wind up with a perfect score.

In addition, players are assigned an initial rating based on their age/grade value.

Grades 1-8 starts at 600 points, 9-12 starts at 800 points, and others start at 1000. When using the scholastic rating system, these initial ratings are automatically assumed if the rating field is left blank.

See also: Unrated tournaments: Cautions