PART 2 • Chess ratings – it ' s like“ what ' s your sign?” With numbers
a measure of intelligence, it ' s not a valuation of your worth as a human being – in fact, a chess rating doesn ' t mean a thing unless it ' s compared to another player ' s rating, and even then it ' s just a measure of a game ' s expected outcome. The bigger the difference between two players ' ratings, the more likely it will be that the higher rated player will win the game.
Every Chess King user starts with a basic rating of 800. The way to change this rating is to play rated games with Houdini( and we ' ll learn how to play games with Chess King in the next chapter).
I’ d like to share some comments about ratings and the engine included in Chess King. Regardless of which Chess King you have, the engine at its maximum strength is extremely strong. That’ s Houdini 2, 3 or 4 or 4 Pro. Any of them could likely beat any Grandmaster. Houdini plays at its true strength only when you select the strongest level. That’ s between 3000 and 3400 ELO. To save processing power, Chess King uses an opening tree, based on the GigaKing database so Houdini starts playing after the opening theory.
For playing at lower ratings, in any chess software, a program is used to « weaken » Houdini and to make mistakes on purpose so as to approximate a weaker player. So if you select 2200, there is a program which takes the( for example) 4 best moves( as chosen by full strength Houdini) and uses a probability percentage to decide which move to play( for example a player of 2200 may alternate between 1st best move and 2nd-3rd-4th best moves). When you’ re talking about a player of 1750, that player makes considerably more mistakes so some additional errors are introduced. In fact, if you choose any rating below approximately 1500, it’ s not Houdini at all playing, it’ s a weakened engine, as it’ s not possible to use a reliable statistics method to approximate a player of 1500, since there are too many errors that come up.
So while the ratings in the high range 2200-2600 approximate real USCF or FIDE ratings, for lower ratings it’ s not always the same. What’ s sure is that if you see your Chess King rating go up, that’ s a good sign. And if you find it too easy to win against the engine at any rating, just increase the rating little by little, and you will soon find a worthwhile opponent capable of giving you hours of learning and enjoyment.
237 chessking. com