ICC News Item #1160

NEWS 1160 (21-Mar-99)
Loser's chess ratings and other rating system changes

There is now a new rating category just for loser's chess (wild 17).
This was the most-requested feature on ICC.  See help wild17 for
the rules to loser's chess.

Everyone will start from scratch in that new rating category.
But "from scratch" now means that you start with the rating that you
gave when you registered (min 800, max 2200).  This initial rating
only carries the weight of one game, but we still hope that it will
help make provisional ratings more accurate in most cases.  You may
ask an administrator to change your initial rating if it's far off. 
Of course, we are trusting you to be honest when estimating what your
rating should be.  If you didn't give a numeric rating at registration
time, it starts at 1400.

Crazyhouse (wild 23) games will now be rated in the bughouse rating
category.  While we recognize that they are different games, they
have enough in common that we think that the extra data points from
w23 games will probably improve the accuracy of bughouse ratings.

The wild rating category will continue to be used for the other
variants such as kriegspiel (w16) and Fischer Random (w22).  w7
is no longer rated, nor are material or time-odds games.

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