Chess-o-meter

Chess is one of the most famous board games, if not the most. There are a lot of wargames, but it is considered the most elegant too, probably because of its long tradition of players. Unlike most board games, it has an official version, while other board games lack it: black square on the left, queen on her colour, and white starts the match.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t other games (Shougi, Xiangqi, Raumschach, etc.) or versions (Chess960, Weak!, Double chess…), But the well known international chess is the most played in the world.

We usually can say a person is a better player than other, however, how do we measure that? With the elo. The elo, invented by Arpad Elo, is a measure of how good are you at games such as chess. Actually, you can put on every game 1 vs 1, in which one’s victory implies other’s defeat: Chess, football, whatever; but it is famous for the chess rating.

Your elo starts in 1000 and it goes up and down, depending not only on the fact that you win or lose, but also on your rival’s elo. It has generally a limit on how it can go up or down, called “constant K”, which depends on your experience, elo, etc. Anyway, the rules for the constant K and for the elo are different among the clubs, so elo is just an estimation.

The elo difference between 2 players is the probability to win. More elo implies more than 50% chances, and a difference equal or bigger than 800 implies a result almost sure. The names below are the different categories acccording to the United States Chess Federation:

2400 and above: Senior Master
2200–2399: National Master
2000–2199: Expert
1800–1999: Class A
1600–1799: Class B
1400–1599: Class C
1200–1399: Class D
1000–1199: Class E
800–999: Class F
600–799: Class G
400–599: Class H
200–399: Class I
0–199: Class J