The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in two-player games such as chess and Go.
"Elo" is often written in capital letters (ELO), but it is not an acronym. It is the family name of the system's creator, Arpad Elo (1903–1992, born as Élő Árpád), a Hungarian-born American physics professor.
Elo was originally invented as an improved chess rating system although it is used in many games today. It is also used as a rating system for competitive multi-player play in a number of computer games, and has been adapted to team sports including international football, American college football and basketball, and Major League Baseball.
There are two ways to define the RATINGS in Chess
- FIDE ratings
- Performance rating
FIDE ratings
For top players, the most important rating is their FIDE rating. FIDE issues a ratings list four times a year.
The following analysis of the January 2006 FIDE rating list gives a rough impression of what a given FIDE rating means:
- 19743 players have a rating above 2200, and are usually associated with the Candidate Master title.
- 1868 players have a rating between 2400 and 2499, most of whom have either the IM or the GM title.
- 563 players have a rating between 2500 and 2599, most of whom have the GM title
- 123 players have a rating between 2600 and 2699, all (but one) of whom have the GM title
- 18 players have a rating between 2700 and 2799
- Only 4 players (Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik, Veselin Topalov and Viswanathan Anand) have ever exceeded a rating of 2800, and none do in the latest (July 2008) list.
The highest ever FIDE rating was 2851, which Garry Kasparov had on the July 1999 and January 2000 lists.
In the whole history of FIDE rating system, only 48 players (to October 2007), sometimes called "Super-grandmasters", have achieved a peak rating of 2700 or more.
Performance rating
A "performance rating" is a hypothetical rating that would result from the games of a single event only. A performance rating for an event is calculated by taking (1) the rating of each player beaten and adding 400, (2) the rating of each player lost to and subtracting 400, (3) the rating of each player drawn, and (4) summing these figures and dividing by the number of games played.
FIDE tournament categories
FIDE classifies tournaments into categories according to the average rating of the players. Each category is 25 rating points wide. Category 1 is for an average rating of 2251 to 2275, category 2 is 2276 to 2300, etc.[1] The highest rated tournaments have been Category 21, with an average from 2751 to 2775. The top categories are as follows:
| Category | Meaning |
|---|
| 21 | Average rating is in range 2751 to 2775 |
| 20 | Average rating is in range 2726 to 2750 |
| 19 | Average rating is in range 2701 to 2725 |
| 18 | Average rating is in range 2676 to 2700 |
| 17 | Average rating is in range 2651 to 2675 |
| 16 | Average rating is in range 2626 to 2650 |
| 15 | Average rating is in range 2601 to 2625 |
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