Last week, the USCF announced that they will be lowering the bonus threshold from 12 to 10, and that they will be applying this change retroactively to all events in 2025, and rerating them. In the same article, it was written that the change should be done by Tuesday or Wednesday (which was yesterday), but it seems based on my account that the rerate has not happened yet.
I understand that because a rerate of every event from 2025 is a more significant rerate than one that covers just the previous week and some miscellaneous events. Does anyone know when this update and rerate is expected to complete?
Could you please link the thread here? I canāt seem to find it.
Also, Iām not sure I understand-- I have been following my post-tournament rating record since the announcement of the 2025 rerate, and 20 events and 50+ games doesnāt seem to have affected my rating by even a hundredth of a point, despite the fact that I played several players who have performed well above their rating many times throughout 2025.
You push the image that looks like a link below the post. Mikeās post seems unclear whether that was the weekly rerate or the āall of 2025ā rerate.
I just got back home after being on the road for 10 days, as I recall the cumulative rerate back to January of 2025 was supposed to run last week, but I can check in the morning to see what was actually done in both last weekās and this weekās rerate.
Last weekās weekly rerate (starting on June 3rd) did rerate all the events affected by the bonus factor change from 12 to 10. Lowering the threshold increases the number of players earning bonus points, those who did not earn bonus points could still see minor ratings changes due to secondary effects.
For example, in the 2025 World Team, about 220 players earned bonus points in the last rerate of that event before the retroactive change, now that number is around 280. (The total number of players was around 1500.)
Also, I still think it would be good to put a link to the ratings estimator at the top of the US Chess home page under the āRatingsā tab like I suggested previously.
Also, the link to the āRating System Algorithmā at the top and bottom of the US Chess home page needs to be updated to his version, rating.system.pdf
Since we shut down all access to the Joomla backend, where pages are updated or added, for security reasons, there are no planned updates of that ratings estimator page or any other Joomla-rendered pages. The plan is for both the www.uschess.org and secure2.uschess.org sites to be phased out once Leago is operational, as updating pages there is even harder now than it was before we shut the Joomla admin mode down and many pages there are very out-of-date.
Moving things like the governance archives to a new location will need to be done before we can shut those servers down.
I donāt know when thereās an equivalent to the ratings estimator planned on Leago, though it was mentioned in the RFP, Iāll put that on the checklist.
The Ratings Estimator has been updated to use the current bonus threshold of 10 and tested against a recent event where it was within 1 point in estimating the new rating for a player who earned a little over 30 bonus points in the event. Thatās within normal expectations.
The link to the 2023 version of the Ratings Estimator was removed.
At the bottom of the US Chess home page, the link still says āRatings Estimator (2023)ā but if you click on the link it takes you to the 2025 version of the ratings estimator.
It would still be good if the link to the ratings estimator could be put at the top of the US Chess home page under the āratingsā tab.
For the bonus, I believe i read that eligibility depends in part on 3 games min and not having the same opponent more than 1x. Is that true of a double round robin and double swiss as well? and in those cases is it 3 games or 6 games? or are those types of sections not eligible?
According to the ratings formula (pages 8, 11 and 12):
Bonus points only apply under the standard ratings formula, not the special formula, which is used for any player with 8 or fewer games in that ratings system as well as for any player who has all-wins or all-losses.
If a player has 3 ratable games in a section, they must be against 3 different opponents to be eligible for bonus points. When computing whether or not there is a bonus, the computation uses 4 as the number of games rather than 3. This reduces the percentage of players with just 3 games who earn bonuses, about 24% of the time, vs 27% for players with 4 games.
If a player has 4 or more ratable games in a section, there is a limit of 2 games against each opponent. (That means a double RR event, even a double-quad, is eligible for bonus points.)
If a player is involved in an āextra gameā, how that is entered (eg, in the section or as an āextra gamesā section) can affect whether or not they are eligible for a bonus.
FWIW, events where a player has 3 games but more than one of them against the same opponent are fairly rare, in nearly 250,000 cases during 2024 of a player having 3 games in an event, fewer than 900 were ones where there was more than one game against the same opponent, though some of those were matches.
