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Calculate Your Chess Rating

By Mark Weeks, About.com

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Look up your winning expectancies

Rating differences vs. probable results

Rating differences vs. winning expectancies

From step (2) : The rating differences for your last event were +100 -150 -75 -125 -200.

Now you need to compute your winning expectancy for each game. The math for this is complicated, so we are going to rely on a table lookup. Note that the table, which is shown below, has two real columns. The first column is a number from 677 to -677. The second column is a number from .99 to .01.

The first column corresponds to rating differences and the second corresponds to winning expectancies. The first entry in the table (677 .99) means that when the stronger player is rated more than 677 points higher than an opponent, the stronger player has a 99% chance of winning the game. The last entry (-677 .01) means that a player rated more than 677 points lower has a 1% chance of winning.

The middle entry (0 .50) means that when there is no rating difference, both players have a 50% chance of winning. This is the same as saying that two players with the same rating are evenly matched.

For each of your games, use the table to look up the winning expectancy that corresponds to the rating difference that you calculated. The rating difference of +100 in your first game corresponds to a winning expectancy of .64. The difference of -150 in the second game corresponds to an expectancy of .29.

Continuing for all 5 games, we calculate that the winning expectancies were .64 .29 .39 .33 .24.

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