PART 1 • To rate or not to rate? That is the question...
It's up to you, and depends in large measure upon what your particular
chess program offers you. Some chess programs provide a rating slider
so that you can choose the approximate strength of your opponent –
the stronger the opponent, the more rating points you earn for a win
and the less you risk for a loss. However, some programs' sliders will
only go down to a certain point in a rated play mode. If your program's
lowest rating setting is several hundred points higher than your actual
tournament chess rating, I see no point in even bothering to play a rated
game which you have little chance of winning. Note that many programs
allow the use of “modular” engines, meaning that you can “unplug” one
chess engine and use a different one instead. Different engines usually
provide different ranges of ratings, so you might want to try multiple
engines to see how the ratings differ. But if you're a 1400 rated player
and the lowest rated game level is 1850, there's not much point in playing
around with it. You might win, or course, but since most programs won't
offer an “official” rating until many games (usually twenty) are played, the
exercise may not have much of a point.
On the other hand, some programs do allow the slider to go quite low;
for example, Chess King's rating slider can be set as low as 700 Elo. In
this case, you might want to play a lot of rated games against a variety
of opposition levels. I suggest that you try the rating slider in several
casual games to get a feel for the difficulty before launching into rated
games. Programs like Chess King will always display your rating as part
of your on screen user profile (you'll learn more in Part Two of this book),
which might encourage you to try raising your level (especially since
every player starts with a default rating of 800, which is very low). My
“Chess King friends” are perfectly happy to play mostly unrated games
and seem unconcerned about their on screen ratings, worrying more
about who has “leveled up” past them.
Bear in mind that the rating you earn in your games against any chess
software program are nothing more than a measure of your performance
while playing that program, and may have nothing to do with any rating
you may earn using another program, playing online, or competing in
tournament games.
The choice is yours. You shouldn't feel like you must play rated games
against a chess engine, but the option is there and you can often learn a
lot about your play from games when you don't have access to takebacks,
the engine analysis panel (to see what the engine is thinking), or other
hints.
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