Change to US Chess Ratings: Bonus Threshold Lowered

Excellent tournament performances will be getting extra rating recognition as the result of a change to the bonus points system.

The change is effective immediately and will be retroactively applied to all tournaments that ended on or after Jan. 1 of this year.

Some players may see increases in their ratings, and all updated ratings should begin to appear on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week. We will be re-rating all rated games from this year, with changes showing up in next Tuesday's rerate. 

The change follows a recommendation from the Ratings Committee earlier this year, after they found “ratings on average continue[d] to deflate over time and are well below rating levels at the end of 1997.”

For those interested in the specifics of the US Chess rating system, the specific change made to the bonus threshold is a lowering of the constant "B" that appears in the final two formulas of Section 4. The value of this constant was previously lowered (from 14 to 12) in 2023, and has now been lowered from 12 to 10.

The constant is a factor in determining how many points you need in a tournament to qualify for bonus points. Generally speaking, take the square root of the number of games you played in an event; multiply it by the constant B, and that’s the threshold for earning bonus points. A lower constant will mean a lower threshold. (Some restrictions and caveats are covered in the linked explanation). 

The Ratings Estimator has not yet been updated to reflect this change in formula, but will be soon.