What is Chess ELO?
Chess Elo is a way of giving players a rating that is universally used in the chess world. It is not however exclusively for chess and can be used in a number of 2 and over player games such as computer games and football.
The Elo chess system was named after an Hungarian born American physics professor Arpad Elo. Previous rating systems proved inaccurate and therefore it was inevitable that someone would come up with a new and improved rating scale with which we could compare chess players. Elo's system was based for the most part on on statistics. Elo's main hypothesis was that the individuals performance in each match is a normally distributed random variable. The assumption was that players might have good games and bad games however, their overall "true skill" will not change a great deal and therefore can be used in the calculation.
That said, there is another problem. How do you measure a chess player's performance apart from saying he won and therefore performed better than his opponent. Or she drew therefore performed the same as her opponent. Or he lost and therefore performed worse than his opponent.
Elo's basketball therefore, was to make it simpler to estimate the "true Skill" of a player by calculating the amount of games a player is expected to win comparing the ratings of the player to that of the opponent. This gets quite complicated but put as simply as possible a player is given a projection of how may games he or she would be expected to win. This is generated from the player and his opponents rating. In essence, if a player won more matches than what his or her projected winning rate was calculated at, their rating would increase and vice versa.
One benefit of Chess Elo system is it helps to eliminate uneven matches between players. Rather like a golfers handicap, similar rated players can be matched against each other.
To initiate your own personal Elo rating you will have to play against middle ranked players with a score say around about 1150 to 1300. Once you have a rating try to play, and of course beat players with a slightly higher ranking as this will increase your score. Once you basketball to beat this group you can take on the next higher ranking players and so on. Don't bite of more than you can chew. pace yourself, or you may find yourself losing game after game and your score will drop.
If you want to see how they work out the chess Elo ratings click on the link below in the authors bio box.
The author has been playing chess for over 40 years and his site is dedicated to teaching others how to win at chess. If you want to find out how to calculate a chess Elo score click here
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