[size=125]GET OFFICIAL FIDE RATINGS PLAYING CHESS ONLINE[/size]
FIDE ONLINE ARENA is the newest member of the Premium Chess community of arenas. Thanks to Premium Chess’ advanced anti-cheating technology, members are for the very first time able to obtain official FIDE online ratings, with a planned merging of online and over-the-board blitz…
Next below are forums topics that discuss these rated online chess playing initiatives by the USCF and FIDE. FIDE’s plan to eventually ‘merge’ the ratings of OTB with online - bothers some forum participants on ChessPub .com:
This is apparently an “old news” or in other words, FIDE arrived in that space before the USCF, somewhere Spring or Summer 2014. They offered 1-year free to IMs and GMs and 1 month free for anyone with a FIDE id (even unrated). It is Euro 30 per year for everyone else.
I took advantage of 1-month free for Fide id holders promotion and played on their zone and obtained some ratings. They have some strong players there including IMs and GMs, but you have to build your rating to be high enough for those players to accept your challenge. I saw no benefits to continue once my month was over. It is not much different than ICC or PlayChess and since I already paying to ICC, I felt no urge to pay to FIDE.
Once my month over, they immediately removed all my “official” acquired ratings.
With regards to rating merge, while I can be wrong, my understanding is what they do is they display online ratings as a part of your fide record.
Until recently your FIDE record if existed consisted of only OTB classical time control column, later they added OTB rapid and OTB blitz columns.
With a “merge”, you get six : Three OTB and Three online. I have seen records of some US players with all six of those columns having some values.
My personal opinion is that your online results should not affect your OTB rating and vise versa.
With online play at the current state of technology, there are ways to cheat that is hard to detect.
I played in all four “ICC for USCF” events and couple of times I was simply amazed by level of skill displayed by some players with very low OTB ratings. In one extreme case, I was playing against a fellow who outplayed me in the opening and middle game and obtained a winning position, I was expected to go down in a few moves, then suddenly my opponent traded all of the active pieces and forced a draw. I was very happy for this outcome, until I examined the OTB record of this player. His only OTB record was U800 (it is U800 not U1800!) section of National Chess Congress 10 months earlier where he lost first two games and withdrew.