Rapport vs Nakamura - looks mouth watering Creativity vs a maximalist....both needing full points to get out of their rut at the bottom of the table.

gary about to make comments on tata round 10 - I think it will be ~2.02hrs or there abouts slightly after if you do not catch it live.

Just waiting for him to enter studio

http://www.tatasteelchess.com/tournament/livegames

The others are partaking in an obligatory ass-kissing session. I imagine it was part of Garry's terms of appearance.

Gary stifled a few yawns - must be jetlag or he is getting old. Looks great for his age - it must be said.

40 points between Magnus and Aronian, 45 between Aronian and Caruana. Kinda cool that he's so "close" to Carlsen.

Thought this was interesting.

Holy rating gain, Batman!

Denis Khismatullin has picked up 43 rating points, and climbed from 75th in the world up to 30th, in the past month!

6.5/9 at the Ugra Governor's Cup, for +11.8 elo
5.5/6 in a match with GM Salem, for +16 elo
7.5/9 at the Dvorkovich Memorial for +15.6 elo

And not a single loss in those 24 games. Welcome to Super-GM status, good sir!

One frequently asked question around here is how ratings at various online sites correspond to "real" ratings like FIDE/USCF.

Here's a handy little chart showing just that, for chess.com ratings in all time controls. Loose estimate of course, but it's the best answer you'll probably ever get to the question:

http://www.chess.com/article/view/ch...ng-comparisons

Interesting stuff.

Just out of curiosity, for those of you guys rated UFCF/FIDE, how does it compare? (vs your online rating, chess.com or otherwise)

One important source of variance here is how seriously *you* play online. The more you do, the more these calculators will overestimate your strength, since pretty much everyone plays FIDE games seriously, but many people just coffeehouse online.

(Also, linear regression is absolutely not the right way to model this...)

Yesterday, Levon Aronian was on the precipice of becoming just the third player ever to pass the legendary 2825.95 elo barrier. Thanks to some tireless jinxwork in this thread and elsewhere, however, he committed a time-scramble blunder during his last-round game with Loek van Wely. Thus he'll have to settle for a teensy 13.7-point gain instead.

Well. There's always next month.

For me personally it lined up very well. My chess.com ratings of 1419 blitz, 1518 standard, 1333 bullet, were all within a couple lines of each other, and my 1806 online rating was just a little out of sync with them. Overall those four ratings, on his table, suggest a USCF rating of ~1550. I'm actually only 1447, but my recent sample size is small, and over my last few tournaments the rating has been trending upwards, so I'm pretty sure I'm still rated a bit below my "true strength" right now.

So it's certainly not a perfect measure (because everything Sholar said is dead on). But it's not a terrible place to start for some rough guesstimation.

In addition to all of the above, which is 100% right, it also matters how MUCH you play online. I suspect *most* players have a much larger sample of recent online ratings than they do of recent OTB games. So if someone is in the midst of a phase where their "true strength" is rapidly changing (usually this will be an upward trend, particularly for younger players) there's likely to be a lot more lag in their OTB rating (where you can easily stay underrated for a long time, if you don't play too many tournaments) than their online ratings, which should normalize pretty rapidly if, like many people, you play a lot of online chess.

mine was like 500 points off

Does anyone here know how to convert an ECF grading to a USCF rating?

I've Googled around and found a number of conflicting answers.

I incorrectly worked out my new rating a few weeks ago and just saw that my new ***official*** ECF is 175 which is equivalent to a National ELO of 2000 and a FIDE rating of 2050, but I think I'd be higher rated in the US no?

I think add 50-100 to your fide, should be close enough

Fair enough.

I might well play a couple of tournaments in the US much later this year so I was wondering what sections I'd have to enter, however I'll hopefully have a proper FIDE rating by then so it will be academic.

Your FIDE rating is >2000, so the USCF would give you an initial rating of your FIDE rating times 1.02, plus 20. So FIDE 2050 is USCF 2111 (treated as a provisional rating based on five games).

If your FIDE were to fall below 2000 before you play your first USCF event, the formula would change to be FIDE * 0.94 + 180.

If your FIDE goes above 2150 before your first USCF event, the formula remains the same but the initial rating would be set as provisional/10 instead of provisional/5.

http://www.glicko.net/ratings/rating.system.pdf

Edit: Just noticed that you don't actually have a FIDE rating of 2050 at this time, just a national rating that is equivalent to that. I guess that means that you would trigger this provision:

If the ECF > FIDE relationship you described is reasonably well accepted, then they'd probably convert to FIDE, then convert that to USCF using the above formulas, but leave it based on 0 games. With some wiggle room for differing opinions. You could almost certainly play in an U2200 section with no fuss. Almost certainly not in an U2000 section. If an event had an U2100 or U2150 section it might be organizer's discretion (if I were running it I'd probably say no to U2100, yes to U2150).

wow BBJ, thank you for this and all the other useful info you provide on this forum, it's appreciated

the ECF to ELO/FIDE has been around for a long time, ECFx8+600 gives a National Elo and ECFx8+650 gives a FIDE equivalent

If you guys ever have 40 mins of free time and can bear listening to my ugly voice, but for that torture hopefully hear some useful chess stuff here and there, check this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_GP-WK6HOQ

Great stuff so far. I'm at the ~14-minute mark right now.

Haha, I got the first move you asked us to guess within five seconds.

White to play and win.

I wish it was this easy in-game.