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Subject: Re: How do chess federations calculate rating?

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 15:16:40 04/11/05

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On April 11, 2005 at 16:08:21, Uri Blass wrote:

>On April 11, 2005 at 14:29:04, Dann Corbit wrote:
>
>>On April 11, 2005 at 13:58:03, Uri Blass wrote:
>>
>>>As far as I know the Israeli chess federation bought in the past a program to
>>>calculate rating based on their database.
>>>
>>>They do not have the source of the program(but only the exe file) and today
>>>there is a problem because they decided to change the rules but they have no
>>>money to pay to the person who wrote the program so the old rules of rating are
>>>practically used and not the new rules.
>>>
>>>Note also that I thought in the past that it may be a good idea to let everybody
>>>to download a file with all the data that they have about results of games but I
>>>understood that it is impossible because the data is only in some excel file
>>>together with other details that they do not want the public to know so they
>>>cannot give people to download the excel file.
>>>
>>>I am interested to know how other chess federations calculate rating and if you
>>>have some good idea that I can suggest to the israeli federation.
>>>
>>>I thought about some ideas but I prefer to hear first from other people.
>>
>>This is how the USCF calculated ratings at one time (don't know if it is still
>>true):
>>ftp://cap.connx.com/pub/tournament_software/USCF.C
>>ftp://cap.connx.com/pub/tournament_software/USCF.H
>>I wrote this implementation and you can use it for any purpose you like.
>>
>>This is an interesting project by Royal C. Jones to calculate Elo Ratings:
>>ftp://cap.connx.com/pub/tournament_software/prog10.cpp
>>And here is his permission to use it:
>>ftp://cap.connx.com/pub/tournament_software/Re Your chess rating systems.txt
>>
>>Elostat is a binary to calculate Elo ratings that is popular:
>>http://wbec-ridderkerk.nl/html/download/other/elostat_13.zip
>>
>>This is a very interesting project by Rémi Coulom:
>>http://remi.coulom.free.fr/Bayesian-Elo/
>>
>>The FICS source code has the Glicko algorithm.
>>ftp://cap.connx.com/pub/chess-utils/fics.1.7.4/
>>ftp://cap.connx.com/pub/chess-utils/FICS.DIST/
>>http://sourceforge.net/projects/chesssrv/
>>http://sourceforge.net/projects/chessd/
>>
>>Recommended reading:
>>http://www.ratingtheory.com/
>>http://www.chessmetrics.com/
>
>Thanks for all the data.
>
>If I understand the program to calculate USCF rating is free source code by you.

Yes.
>I still did not look at your files.
>The main problem as I see is getting the data and not calculating the rating
>based on the relevant formula.

You just need to read the game headers.  If there are no Elo rating tags, you
can set it to whatever you want.

>As far as I know the Israeli program simply read the data about the results from
>a file but I do not know at this moment details about the file and I only
>understood that it is a big excel file that they cannot give to download because
>it contain personal information.
>
>How does your program get the data?

Passed in as function arguments.

>It is possible to give the program all the data manually but I think that it is
>not a good idea because there may be some programs to calculate rating based on
>the same data and if every program that calculate rating will need to get the
>data manually then it is a waste of work.
>
>It seems to me a better idea to have the data in some accepted format that every
>program that calculates rating get and there can be seperate program to collect
>the data and many programs to calculate rating based on the data.

It should be a simple thing.

You need:
1.  White and Black ratings (if any) paired with the players.
2.  Wins/Losses/Draws for each player.

From that data, you can calculate Elo ratings.  If no ratings are available,
then any Elo start figure will do.



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