Inside Story: What Really Counts

Editor's note: this story first appeared in the June 2026 issue of Chess Life magazine. This issue focuses on questions of mental health in chess.

Today, enjoy an article by Assistant Editor Rick Massimo on the dangers of staking your identity as a chessplayer on your rating. Check out the first two installments here and here.

Consider becoming a US Chess member for more content like this — access to digital editions of both Chess Life and Chess Life Kids is a member benefit, and you can receive print editions of both magazines for a small add-on fee.

Plus: Download a high-quality pdf of the three-part feature here, no membership required.

How easy it is to be a slave to your rating, and how to break free

Psychologists and statisticians alike agree that ratings are extremely accurate for their real purpose — a broad estimate, similar to a batting average, that can separate classes of players and generalize broadly. But they also caution against obsessing on them. Granted, that may be hard to avoid when your rating is stuck on something98 or you’re trying to nail down a title, but it’s far too easy to let your rating stand in for your chess identity.

Benjamin Portheault, a London-based performance coach for chessplayers, agrees: “This a really important sociological classification, whether you want it or not. People will not say, ‘I have a rating,’ ‘I have 2000.’ They will say ‘I am 2000,’ ‘I am a class A player,’ ‘a FIDE master,’ and so on.”

Photo courtesy Lennart Ootes.

Scottish GM Jonathan Rowson writes, “From personal experience I can attest that it is not unusual for chess players to walk through a door in order of rating.”

Even Mark Glickman, chair of the US Chess Ratings Committee, agrees that the people who really understand how a rating system works are among the first people to caution against staking your identity and your enjoyment of the game on these numbers.

“If you want to be able to, for example, section tournaments and make sure players of similar ability are in the same section, that’s a reasonable use of ratings,” Glickman says. “Any kind of psychological aspect — you know, treating it like a measure of worth — is not really what it was intended to do.”

Keeping perspective

How soon after an event do you start looking to see how your rating has changed? How well do you remember the names of your past year’s worth of opponents, and how well do you remember their ratings?

Arpad Elo is of course considered the father of the rating system; he took it over from Kenneth Harkness in 1960. But even he warned against taking the numbers to heart.

Writing in ChessBase, Elmer Dumlao Sangalang, a family friend who corresponded with Elo often, said the professor at times “thought that what he had created with the rating system was some kind of Frankensteinian monster when he saw the young players so preoccupied with their ratings. They reminded him of racetrack habitués who go to the races and spend their time poring over the tout sheets at the betting windows — and never see a race.

“He was bothered by the inordinate importance being ascribed to the sporting aspect of chess. He regretted that his system contributed greatly to the prevailing opinion that regards chess as first and foremost a sport.”

Headache or heartache for GM Ian Nepomniachtchi? (Photo courtesy David Llada)

In his book The Moves You Make, Rowson, who also holds a Ph.D. in education, writes that while players know intellectually that ratings are merely an estimate, they still stick in one’s consciousness. “[A] chess rating says nothing of our style of play, how acute our understanding of particular positions can be, nor quite how dangerous we can be on any given day,” Rowson writes. “Even so, we are typically self-conscious about ratings, because they are such a clear marker of our relative status in a world that we care about.”

That can be helpful to the extent that it fosters healthy ambition, Rowson thinks: “The young child learning the moves is no less worthy of love and respect than the world champion, but it is no bad thing that she is motivated to play less like herself and more like Magnus.”

But two chessplayers won’t talk long before the question “What’s your rating?” comes up. And when the answer comes, “you don’t make a moral judgment,” Rowson writes, “but some kind of domain-specific pecking order is firmly established.”

It’s all about group identity, Portheault says. “There is this deep yearning … and this rating is really this validation that you belong to a group of such-and-such skill. So losing the rating creates massive anxiety, because people really feel as if they are losing like a part of themselves.”

I often tell students [about] a final round large prize U2200 game where a draw tied for first and a win got clear first. One player was a teenager. The other was an adult who clearly needed the prize money.
Before the game even started, the adult’s hand was shaking during the handshake. It was obvious to me the teenager would win at that point. The adult’s voice cracked when he offered the draw. The kid played on and won.
Many chess games are lost emotionally before they are lost on the board. Chess is difficult enough without added pressure. I try to teach students to focus on the moves, not the off-the-board consequences. This isn’t boxing; when you lose, you won’t go home with a broken nose. And there are easier ways to earn money.
-Brian Karen

WIM Denise Bouah, a three-time South African women’s champion, chess coach and counseling psychologist specializing in sports psychology, says that keeping an eye on one’s rating is “a natural way to see things. I mean, what else do you measure your progress by? But it’s not something that you should get fixated on, because I think you can lose the joy of playing chess very easily.”

They both emphasize that your rating is the result of — well, your results, and that your results are the thing you can’t control.

Portheault points out that unless passing a rating milestone gains you a title, it probably won’t gratify you any more than any of the others you’ve already surpassed: “Something external can’t give us lasting satisfaction, because otherwise, all the stuff we wanted in the past, and that we got — they would have gotten us lasting satisfaction, and they didn’t.”

All that said, it’s easy to tell someone not to worry about their rating and “just play chess,” but Bouah and Portheault, as players themselves, know that’s not practical.

“That’s not really good advice, right?,” Portheault says. “It’s like saying, “Have you tried not worrying instead of worrying?’” He advises instead to “dive into” your rating fear: “Where is this coming from? Why do you play chess? … People can only answer for themselves. Once people can see the big direction of what they want to achieve and what they want out of chess, then they can overcome the bumps on the road and the rating losses and such.”

“Rating will sort itself out at the end,” Bouah says. “I tell chessplayers a lot that if you’re going to focus on the result, you’re going to skip on the things that you’re supposed to do to actually get the win. You should have a healthy perspective on where you are with your chess — why you are at that level. Because otherwise the comparisons will drive you mad.”