One of the first and essential building stones of the Dojo Training Program was the creation of a universal rating system. It was a bit like creating a universal currency from about eight national currencies. Obviously some of these currencies will inflate and some will deflate, so there will never be a fixed rate of exchange. And if you'll let me play this analogy out a little further: in March the central bank of Fide dramatically loosened its key interest rate. And it was this action which forced us to reevaluate our exchange rates.

Let me describe what happened. When I was a kid (in the last millennium), you had to have a rating of 2200 to get a Fide rating. But then, partly out of democratic impulse, Fide gradually lowered its floor to 1000. The problem with 1000 is that several young and quickly improving players can achieve it. Imagine thousands of young Indian kids, all rapidly improving. If they mostly play each other, they will all remain around 1000 despite being around 1600 strength. And if that 1000 rated player plays a game against a 1900, then deflation will start. So, if Fide had kept the minimum rating at 2200 there would not have been an inflationary impulse in the first place.

Their controversial solution is the following formula: (0.4) x (2000-rating). So if you are 2000+ you get nothing, whereas if you are 1000 you get catapulted to 1400. This is how we end up with the new floor (1400). It's controversial as it adds a ton of points into the system and we don't know how it will play out, especially at the top. Will Magnus eventually be 3100 now?

For the Dojo rating system it's a real problem. We based our rating system on the currency of Fide to begin with, but now our cohorts from 1000-2000 can't use Fide as its base currency anymore because that 1000 point range has been compressed to a 600 point range (1400-2000).

So, what we've done (potentially as a temporary measure) is to base the currency of the u/2000 cohorts on chess.com ratings. If the Fide ratings eventually sort themselves by points trickling up the ladder, we may switch back to using Fide.

We knew about this Fide problem when we decided to redo the translator. We did not realize however how severe the inflation problem with Lichess had become. Lichess gives every player who shows up on their site an initial rating of 1500 and this has driven those ratings up significantly since we did our first rating translator several years ago. And the vast majority of the “demotions” that will be taking place inside the Dojo are associated with this Lichess inflation.

This is all a layman's conversation about this difficult topic. You can delve deeper into the details on our Discord and you can see the complete new rating table here.

The Dojo heartily thanks Michael Franco, AKA NoseKnowsAll, for running the numbers for us!

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