This past year saw a light amount of work for the Ratings Committee (RC).  Two issues were brought to the attention of RC this past year.  One involved a long-standing issue of how to award titles to tournament players who had competed primarily prior to December 1991 when tournament crosstables were available digitally.  The other is the reemergence of interest in characterizing the uncertainty in chess ratings.  We also continue to monitor the rating system for systematic changes, and we describe below the results of this year’s analyses.

From time to time, the US Chess office receives petitions to retroactively award titles based on tournament activity prior to when crosstables were saved in computer-readable form.  Typically the office makes decisions on a case-by-case basis to determine whether a title is warranted, occasionally with the consultation of select rating committee members.  Recently, a petition was made to the office that sparked renewed interest in developing an algorithm for awarding titles based solely on pre-December 1991 information.  Based on the RC discussions, there was general agreement that a simple algorithm could be developed and applied.  The RC agreed that such an algorithm should focus on awarding titles and not individual norms, and that the criterion for awarding titles given the lack of tournament game outcomes should be quite conservative.  The specifics of the algorithm are still an ongoing topic of discussion.

At the Ratings Workshop at the 2016 US Open, participants at the meeting proposed the idea that ratings should be accompanied by a simple measure of ratings uncertainty.  One such measure could be a margin of error, a commonly used measure in statistical contexts.  Such a measure would highlight whether a player’s rating was a reliable indicator of his/her playing strength, and could be used by players and tournament directors to refine the information available about player strength.  A proposal was made to the Executive Board (EB) stemming from the Ratings Workshop which was subsequently tabled by the EB.  In January, 2017, the RC chair raised the issue again with the rating committee’s EB liaison.  A motion was proposed by Mike Hoffpauir to the EB, but the motion was denied.  Several tournament directors and other stakeholders recently expressed interest in revisiting the possibility of computing and communicating rating uncertainty.  The EB liaison will be discussing this possibility once again with the rest of the Executive Board to see if this issue can be referred back to the RC for further study.

Each year the RC performs a set of diagnostic analyses to monitor trends in the rating pool.  Overall rating levels deflated from the mid-1990s through 2000 when rating floors were decreased by 100 points without a counteracting inflationary mechanism.  With the new rating system implemented in 2001, ratings started to re-inflate.  The RC’s goal has been to re-inflate and then maintain rating levels roughly where they were at the end of 1997.  Our analyses have focused on players with established ratings who have been active over the current and previous three years and who are aged 35-45 years old in the current year.  Based on our analyses of rating changes, recent increases in average ratings have leveled off to a large extent now that the bonus point threshold was increased last year from B=12 to B=14.  The RC recommends no change to the bonus point threshold this year, leaving it at B=14.  The committee will continue to monitor changes in the rating pool, recommending adjustments as necessary to keep inflation or deflation in check.