A New Rating System
Sponsored by the Grand Chess Tour, the Kasparov Chess Foundation, and Chess Club and the Scholastic Center of Saint Louis; and devised by Mr. Maxime Rischard, Dr. J. Isaac Miller, Dr. Mark Glickman, and Mr. Jeff Sonas, the brand new Universal Rating System is now up and running.
It's probably not a coincidence that the sponsors aren't overwhelmingly enamored by FIDE. In fact, this is at least the second time Garry Kasparov has tried introducing an alternative rating list in competition with FIDE's. This doesn't mean that it's not better than the FIDE rating formulas - I'll leave an assessment of that to the experts. But it's pretty easy to be skeptical about whether it will have any effect in the chess world. Time will tell.
Meanwhile, if you're curious about it, the FAQs are here and the list of top players is here.
Reader Comments (2)
It's probably not a coincidence that the sponsors aren't overwhelmingly enamored by FIDE. In fact, this is at least the second time Garry Kasparov has tried introducing an alternative rating list in competition with FIDE's.
And yet... isn't the new Universal Rating System reliant on FIDE? Doesn't all the results data which it uses to compute its ratings come from FIDE? How has it gotten hold of the results data? Has it entered into an agreement with FIDE for provision of data and is it therefore paying FIDE? Or has it obtained the data surreptitiously? In which case, wouldn't the future provision of data be at risk?... It would be interesting to hear FIDE's take on the URS.
[DM: Why would their using publicly available rating lists be problematic? It seems very unlikely to me that there's any stolen data here.]
DM: Why would their using publicly available rating lists be problematic? It seems very unlikely to me that there's any stolen data here.
You can download a *rating* list but I don't think you can download a *results* list. You could replicate a results list by writing a "scraper" app to submit http requests (as a web browser does) for each player's results pages (sample results page: https://ratings.fide.com/individual_calculations.phtml?idnumber=1503014&rating_period=2017-01-01&t=1). Such an app could place a heavy load on the server which receives the requests and it would be easy to block the requests.