I would like to thank Paul for his many years of service to the CFC. I am not running against him. The CFC needs every current and future volunteer to work together in order to reach the 10,000 member goal.

Here are my ideals - The CFC rating system should do the following and no more:
  • Track improvement or deterioration in playing strength.
  • Be mathematically sound.
  • Only as last resort, take inorganic action in order to avoid significant inflation/deflation.

The CFC rating system should not:
  • Need to be protected except against unsound rating mechanics such as participation bonuses.
  • Lag the strength of an improving player because that player should "earn it".
  • Discourage participation with mathematically unsound clauses such as the maximum number of games per day.
  • Need performance bonuses, when the organic mechanisms function well. In particular, the bonuses are excessive for tournaments with many rounds because the bonus threshold barely increases with number of rounds.

Issues With the Current System

1. Lack of a supporting anchor of stable adult players. We have fewer than 1000 active players, and most of them are improving juniors or declining seniors. Ratings will drift randomly until we get enough players with stable playing strength.

2. The bonus system is deflationary at the lower end and inflationary at the upper end. This is because it pumps the same number of points to players of all strengths to reflect their improvement (with a lower bonuses for over 2200 that is consistent with the lower k factor). However, improvement occurs much more at lower ratings. This has resulted in inflation at higher ratings (obvious by comparing CFC spread vs FIDE spread), and deflation at lower ratings.

3. The current rating system has no mechanism to deal with the improvement in the player pool's playing strength that happened and will happen while OTB chess is shut down for 1-2 years, and is not ready for the shock when OTB chess returns.

Proposed Solutions

1. Embrace the real core of the future CFC- adult players and stabilized juniors rated between 1200 and 1600. We can do this by the following:

  • Provide them value for their weekend. 5 games is not enough. Segregating them into quick rated games is not enough. We should provide them double rounds - 10 games in a weekend, at 1 hour time time control. The current system does not allow this by arbitrarily restricting the maximum number of games per day to 4. We should discuss removing the restriction, particularly at lower ratings (e.g. 1200 or 1400 cutoff), as the 1 hour minimum time is enough for predicting players' strength.
  • Allow them to see their improvement by starting them off at their real strength. Increase the maximum reduction in the provisional rating formula from 400 to 700 (a la FIDE). Right now a player with strength of 800 can walk into a club of 1400-1600s, lose all their games, and start with an 1100 rating. When they work hard and get to 1100 strength in a few years, their rating will barely change. Hard work and lack of visible improvement is hardly a recipe for membership renewal.

2. Remove the bonus system, and increase the k-factor for juniors. This means that points are only pumped into the system when juniors outperform adults relative to their ratings. Simple and organic. No need to calibrate the threshold for bonus or multiplier for number of rounds in a tournament.

3. Introduce a 12-month, 100-point rating floor when OTB reopens. Since a 100 point decline in playing strength is unlikely over a 1 year period, this should provide stable players protection against extremely underrated players when OTB returns. This will be a temporary measure to fight rating deflation.