The Ratings Committee (RC) was involved in several challenges this past year. Two of our main tasks were in response to issues brought up on previous occasions. First, the ratings committee was tasked in 2018 with proposing a method to characterize uncertainty in chess ratings which could then be reported as part of rating computations. As of now, a proposal is being considered by the RC and the Executive Board (EB). The second is a follow-up on awarding the master title to tournament players who had last competed prior to December 1991 when tournament crosstables were available only as hard copies. In addition to these two main tasks, we also continue to monitor the rating system for systematic changes, and we describe below the results of this year’s analyses. Going back to the 2016 US Open, interest was expressed at the ratings workshop and elsewhere that ratings should be accompanied by a simple measure of ratings uncertainty. In early 2018, the EB charged the ratings committee with the task of proposing a method to develop a concrete proposal. The goal was to produce a measure that 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. The RC chair guided an independent study with a senior undergraduate student at Harvard University during the Fall 2018 semester to develop a proposal. After some refinements during the Spring of 2019, a proposal was shared with the RC and the EB liaison to the committee. The proposal itself can be accessed at http://www.glicko.net/ratings/uncertainty.pdf . The proposed method reflects the following three guiding principles: (1) the greater the frequency of games played, the less uncertainty (typically) in the rating, (2) the more time that has elapsed since the last time a player has competed, all else being equal, the greater the uncertainty in the player’s rating, and (3) the greater variation in a player’s rating over time, the greater the uncertainty in the player’s rating. Over the following year, we expect to work with the EB to determine whether the specific proposal, possibly with any suggested refinements, can be implemented for use by US Chess. Periodically the US Chess office has been receiving petitions to retroactively award the life master title based on tournament activity prior to 1992 when crosstables were not saved in computer-readable form. The office typically works with the player to find tournament crosstables, often stored as hard copies or saved on microfiche, to be able to reconstruct past results. Over the years, various computational algorithms have been proposed by the RC to approximate the requirements for a life master title, as well as other performance-based titles, so that the search for pre-1992 crosstables could be avoided, but none of these proposals gained any traction. In April 2019, Mike Nolan suggested an approach which was subsequently refined by the RC chair, and then presented to the RC for evaluation. The recommendation was that players who have been inactive since the start of 1992 can use 75 pre-1992 rating supplements where the player's rating is above 2200 as evidence for being awarded the original life master title. Also, a player can earn the life master title if their rating is 2400 or above in 25 pre-1992 rating supplements. These specific proposals are in addition to the current approach used by the office to determine whether players should retroactively earn the life master title through finding relevant crosstables. The rationale for the 75 supplements with a rating of 2200 or above is that on average this means that a player's rating would remain above 2200 for (typically) 350+ games, well over the needed 300 for a life master. For the criterion of having a rating 2400 or above over 25 supplements, Mike Nolan determined that for recent players who have had a rating of 2400 or above over 25 bimonthly intervals, every one without exception had the current life master title based on the norm/title system. The proposal was shared with the entire RC, and a majority were in favor. Those who were against objected not on the technical merits, but because they preferred not to retroactively award titles without exact data and using the exact specifications for the award. The proposal was shared with the EB liaison to the RC as well as the US Chess executive director. The RC chair was asked by the EB liaison in early December 2018 whether the RC had an opinion on whether online games played at regular time controls, and under proper tournament-director supervision, negatively impacted the integrity of the US Chess over-the-board rating system. The RC was not generally aware that this practice is being carried out for some online events, especially because US Chess already has a rating system for online-only competition. The unanimous reaction of the RC was that it is an ill-advised idea to rate both online game results with over-the-board results under one rating system. Several reasons were cited for why rating online games under the over-the-board system is a poor idea. First, there are serious arguments about whether chess strength is the same when playing on a physical board with actual pieces versus playing a chess game on a computer screen. Second, some of mechanics of online play are sufficiently different than over-the-board games. It would be easier to avoid detection of shady behaviors such as clicking on a piece and moving it to a square without releasing the piece, and thereby gaining a half-ply advantage of a position relative to what occurs in over-the-board games. Finally, a suggestion was made that to the extent there has been fraudulent behavior by some tournament directors in over-the-board events, the ability to detect such activity by tournament directors in online play would be much more difficult. 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. The current bonus point threshold is B=14 and given that rating levels have mostly stabilized we recommend no change to this value. Some of the RC members observed that the variation in ratings among this “stable” group of players, particularly at the extremes of the distribution, has been increasing over the last few years. This is a feature we will examine further if the increase in variation continues.