I'd like to have a go at working out the ratings of British GM Luke McShane
who has afaics played a lot of games recently and seems to be performing
very well. Anyway I Goooooogled for an online ratings calculator but then I
came up against K factor. Can anyone here explain K factor to me and what
values I should enter for a game between two GMs or a GM and an IM?

cheers

dd

According to Jeff Sonas, and an article in Squares Magazine issue #2,
the K factor used for FIDE ratings is 10. If you type "Jeff Sonas"
into Google you'll probably find more info.

Howard Goldowsky

"DDEckerslyke" wrote in message ...
I'd like to have a go at working out the ratings of British GM Luke McShane
who has afaics played a lot of games recently and seems to be performing
very well. Anyway I Goooooogled for an online ratings calculator but then I
came up against K factor. Can anyone here explain K factor to me and what
values I should enter for a game between two GMs or a GM and an IM?

cheers

dd

Someone once explained it to me as the chessic equivalent of Einstein's
cosmological constant.

"DDEckerslyke" wrote in message
...
I'd like to have a go at working out the ratings of British GM Luke
McShane
who has afaics played a lot of games recently and seems to be performing
very well. Anyway I Goooooogled for an online ratings calculator but then
I
came up against K factor. Can anyone here explain K factor to me and what
values I should enter for a game between two GMs or a GM and an IM?

cheers

dd

DDEckerslyke wrote:

came up against K factor. Can anyone here explain K factor to me and what
values I should enter for a game between two GMs or a GM and an IM?

The K factor is a tweak factor, typically in the range 10 to 32.
A high K gives more weight to the most recent performance, while a low
K gives more wight to earlier performance. FIDE ratings are fairly stable,
so they use a low K (10 I think). I believe some other rating system is
used for USCF now, but when they did use the Elo system, they used 32.

In your case K, I suspect you should not use 10, or you run the risk
of confusing your results with FIDE ratings. But you probably know better
than I what you are trying to do.

--
Anders Thulin http://www.algonet.se/~ath

For players who have played few games (30?:check fide website for this),
K=25.
Then K=15 until you hit 2400, when your K factor becomes 10 forever
"DDEckerslyke" wrote in message
...
I'd like to have a go at working out the ratings of British GM Luke
McShane
who has afaics played a lot of games recently and seems to be performing
very well. Anyway I Goooooogled for an online ratings calculator but then
I
came up against K factor. Can anyone here explain K factor to me and what
values I should enter for a game between two GMs or a GM and an IM?

cheers

dd