- without ratings
- with ratings
please discuss
two cultures
…but one ring to rule them all.
Ratings make Chess more of a serious hobby. Without ratings, wins and losses would only have meaning for that event. With ratings the accumulated wins and losses have a lasting meaning per the rating. Without the ratings there would be no competitive hierarchy.
It also matters what your opponent’s rating is for any particular game. Last week the four top boards had rating upsets in the first round of a club night tournament. Fortunately for me, my game was a draw. Even so, it hurts to get a draw with an opponent rated about 400 points lower than you. Those darn kids, getting better so fast. My friend had even more upset losing to his opponent rated 300 points lower.
Also the rating makes the game serious. Without the rating most of us do not take the game seriously. Without the rating I certainly do not get that adrenaline rush either.
Ratings make it much easier to have class prizes that are trusted to be fair. Class prizes often make it more likely to have class players enter. More entries can support a better venue and/or larger prize fund.
Early last century I think it was Marshall who was playing in an event where the organizer assigned varying points for results based on the difference in rankings. Marshall was the only person who won every game but he did not take first because he was ranked at the very top and wasn’t getting as much for his wins as other people were getting.
Golf and Bowling have handicaps. Other sports have skill-based divisions. Chess ratings are likely more exact (at least I hope they are).
The old soviet system had titles: Master, Candidate Master, 1st Category, 2nd Category, 3rd Category that could be earned by scoring norms.
All players who were not yet 3rd Category players were non-category.
Players were placed in round-robins of players of similar strength. A norm would be achieved at a certain score. I’m not sure what the required scores were, but I believe expected score would be 50% at the same level, and 75% one level down. So if you played a nine round tournament, where six players were 3rd category players and three players were 2nd category players. The required score for a 2nd category norm would be (60.75)=4.0 + (30.5)= 1.5 = 4.0+1.5 = 5.5/9. Maybe with an added 0.5 point to make sure the tournament wasn’t a fluke.
Mikhail Botvinnik worked his way up the categories in 1924 and 1925 (when he was 13 and 14 years old). In 1925, as a 1st category player, he was allowed to participate in the semi-final of the Leningrad Championship, which he won 1st place and played in the city championship. Presumably he earned his candidate master title in 1926 at one of several regional tournaments he played in, and then earned the master title in the 1927 USSR championship by scoring at least 50%.
Without ratings: to make the chess team, I had to defeat the eighth board of my junior high team. To advance in position, I had to defeat the respective boards in order. Once I became first board, the team disbanded and reorganized.
With ratings: there were “ringers” but the playing experience was vastly superior to the capricious non-rated events of my youth. I celebrated upset draws and felt pretty dismal when I was upset (with one exception). I had white and opened with g3. I was rated in the 1900’s and expected my opponent to lie down and die. In only 9 moves I had lost my queen and my 1300 rated opponent was about to get another. I wish I had the score of this game because it was like a composition. I resigned this first round game and stuck out the tournament. I ended up winning $50 and I learned to look at the board instead of the rating. In short: Not rated, inconsistent. Rated, consistent.
I tend to look at the OP’s title about eras in more of a historical perspective. Most of the posters on this forum began playing with a rating system in place and have known nothing else. The onset of official ratings set the USCF on a course of distinguishing players on the basis of more objective criteria. It forced tournament directors to make rational pairings that could be explained and replicated. That meant less funny business or biases in making pairings. Playing under a rating system led to changes in tournament formats to increase entries. Ratings led to clearer national rankings for the purpose of determining who would be invited to the various national championships.
In perusing the old magazines and dusty books on tournaments on the shelves of the Pittsburgh Chess Club, I found that reputation and subjective assessments were more prominent criteria in the non-rated era. Gaining an invitation to a tournament was as much based on proximity to the venue, how well you were known in the area, and sponsor’s whim. For the top players, that was not to hard, but for an up and coming player or for someone who did not live in a major urban center, that was not so easy. Strong local or regional players often never got the chance to play in a national event unless they were affluent or knew someone.
There are also many stories of TD bias in pairings. The biography of Dr. Joseph Platz has a few memorable tales of having to deal with TDs who made harder pairings for him than for some of his rivals. In an era without ratings, this was easier to do. The establishment of a rating system and regular pairing rules sanctioned by the USCF and written down made biased pairings a harder thing to do. After looking at a bunch of crosstables from some Pennsylvania tournaments in the non-rated era, I could see why some of the players were not smitten with a couple of the TDs of the time. My mentors who introduced me to being a TD always warned of not pairing or running tournaments like, well we will just let those names go in history.
There are at least two phony masters that i know of that teach in the DFW area. It seems to me pointless to make such claims in the era of the internet when they can so quickly be proven false. With the FIDE
and USCF data bases such claims are generally easy to either prove or
not. Now, I have heard when researching the bona fides at the request of a player many years ago, that at some point, for whatever reason, FIDE lost a good many records. However, this was well more than a decade ago, and and you would think that affected players would have
contacted FIDE and corrected such errors by now. Secondly, in regard to USCF those who achieved such titles prior to 1982 and have not played since may also not be listed. Still, there are several very reliable sources for old USCF records, some that i have used.
The relevance of this to this thread is this: What makes a master??
There are many who i know whom have made various claims–i am a Turkish master, Russian Federation Master, etc. Some of these federations have accessible data basis, some do not.
What constituted a ‘master’ in the days of Morphy?? Public perception?? Look at the multitude of ways to become a ‘master’
today— from OTB to on-line.
Rob jones
I think there are 4 eras of chess, and not related to ratings.
Before computer chess. Although we can argue it started this and that, I’ll say when Chessmaster 2100 came out as the turning point. It was the first PC program that had a master or close to a master performance on a personal computer, and had widespread acceptance in the general public.
Then came databases, not sure when, mid 90’s I think.
Last came Fritz 5.32 the first 32 bit version of the chess engine that could play at a grandmaster level on a personal computer.
I won’t include dedicated chess hardware in my “eras” Obviously you had stuff like Deep Thought, Deep Blue, etc. I think even Mephisto had tabletop chess that played around 2000 earlier than Chessmaster.
The convergence of a grandmaster level PC program and good chess database created, for the first time, the start of an era where not only grandmasters, but kids and average everyday joes could plumb the depths of chess.
Also, as a side note, computers also allowed chess theory to be accessible to everyday people, and computers also were instrumental in solving various endgame problems, and finding cooks and new solutions to endgames that previously were thought to be a forced win, or draw or losing.
Chess theory and computers continue their relentless quest to find new ways to play various chess positions.