Ratings Are Great (Only our interpretation not)
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[00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to Next Level Chess podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noël Studer, your host. And today I wanna talk about ratings. And this is a very important episode because I feel a lot of people struggle with their relationship with ratings and me included. I had a lot of problems during my active chess career where I would take a lot of my self-worth from if I played a good tournament or I felt bad when I played a bad one or how high my rating was.

And in general, I always felt my rating was a bit too low. So I always was in this mode of I still need to prove myself, which is not a great mindset to be in. And today I wanna specifically talk about why ratings are actually useful. And what the problem actually is with ratings, which is our interpretation of them.

To really bring home this point, I sure wanna talk about a fictional world [00:01:00] where we wouldn't have any ratings in chess. And I've been there a lot of times that I thought, oh, actually it would be so much better if we just didn't have any ratings. But I don't think that's true. For example, when you are playing, when you play online, you just click play a game, you get a totally random opponent.

There is no rating, so you don't know how to match people together. And one of three things will very likely happen. Your opponent is way stronger than you and you just get crushed, and that's not really fun. Your opponent might blunder a queen because they are way weaker than you and they play on and they checkmate and it's not really fun either, and you waste a lot of time by this.

And the third thing is actually also very real, that if there would be no rating, you can feel that sometimes when you play unrated or anonymous online. Whenever your opponent gets a position that they don't like, they just simply resign or leave the game or whatever. And that's also not fun. So playing would be much less fun.

Let's talk about studying. Well, [00:02:00] without any ratings, there is no way to understand which resources are for you. The best indication is like, oh, this book is for X, Y, Z rated players, or if you want to reach 1500, then read this book or buy this course. So you would jump between books and resources that feel way too hard.

So you kind of stumble on things of that are for grandmasters. And then there are other things that are way too basic. So again, it's not a good idea to not have ratings because you can't figure out what is actually for you. And then the last thing is if you travel to competitions. If you play over the board chess, again, ratings are actually useful because if there would be no rating, you will travel to a tournament.

And the first few games because you're just getting paired based on your last name, for example, you get paired against someone that is either way too strong for you or way weaker than you. Again, you spend time, energy, money to travel to these tournaments and you might maybe get one game that is actually interesting and the [00:03:00] rest of the games would be either super boring or you have no chance at all, which is really not fun.

So, the rating actually makes chess a very fun and interesting game because there is something at stake and because you can play against players that are on similar level than you, which makes the game more interesting. And I really got brought to this idea to think about ratings because I had a similar experience in an other sport.

I recently started playing padel. That's a form of tennis that is quite booming at the moment. I really enjoy the game, but there is really a key problem is you usually play paddle in four and the game is really super fun if everybody is roughly on the same rating. If you have too much of a difference, then it's not really the same game.

It's not really that fun because, most of the time, let's say if somebody just makes too [00:04:00] much unforced errors, you don't really get into these long rallies. Or if somebody's just way too strong, they can just immediately make a point and don't really have to exhaust all their energy, which is also not fun for everyone playing.

And so with this problem in mind, the app I use, which is called Platonic, they created a rating system and first I was like, why would you rate people? But then I actually understood, this is super smart because you can create open matches. So you can play against anyone on the app. You meet there, you say, okay, this is an appointment.

This is my rating. People can join. And then you play against people that are living nearby and just wanna play this game as well. And you are having a good time because you know that everybody will be roughly on the same level thanks to this rating system. So it's actually amazing. Otherwise, if there was no rating I would just book myself in, then maybe one out of 10 times it would be really a fun match where all four players are just [00:05:00] randomly at the same level roughly.

But otherwise, it would suck a little bit because you'd be paired with way stronger, way weaker players. Same problem as in chess. And so I really love playing rated games, competitive games, they are called on this app because I was like, oh, I wanna understand where my rating is, so I will face more players that are on my actual rating.

But shortly, I was thinking like, am I getting addicted to my rating? Like, what? Why do I care so much about getting my rating to the right point? But this is actually just because I wanted to see where I'm at and to play against more people of similar strength.

So what is the problem with ratings? The problem is really our toxic relationship and more specifically, our interpretation of ratings, because at the end of the day on the Platonic app, it's just a number from zero to seven. It doesn't say anything about me, and in chess [00:06:00] it's just a number on a chess server, and maybe you even have a username.

Nobody knows. So it really doesn't say anything about you. But the problem is that our interpretation makes it so important and makes it so painful if we lose, or ecstatic if we win, which is by the way, also a problem. So if you feel some kind of anxiety when playing rated games, they have a lot of students that feel comfortable playing against bots.

They feel comfortable playing unrated games, but when it's rated, they feel so much anxiety. The problem is not the rating itself, but your interpretation. What happens is, consciously or subconsciously, you assign an emotional importance to your rating that is in your head. Again, this is not objective.

This is just an interpretation of a number. That doesn't mean anything in and of itself. It's just like, for example, money has value just because everybody agrees that [00:07:00] money has value. If you would go to a different planet where they don't use money and you would give them a hundred dollars bill, they would look at you and like, what the hell is this?

So humanity has found ways that many of us have kind of interpretation of the same thing, and then that's considered valuable. But in and of itself, a piece of paper doesn't have a hundred bucks value. It's just because we assign it. Okay, so back to chess. In your head, what happens is that you're thinking high rating genius or smart person, low rating, stupid.

And for every game, that means if I win, I'm smart. If I lose or make a big mistake or blunder, I'm stupid, or I'm worthless, or I can't seem to get this right, or whatever the story in your mind is. That's again, why losing a game in and of itself is not something that needs to be so painful. It's your interpretation of what that loss means.

It's your interpretation of what [00:08:00] blundering a piece means about you, your intellect, your self-worth, whatever it is. That stings so much. That's what makes it toxic. The rating in and of itself, no absolute value. It's just very subjective interpretations of that number. And I can prove that very easily.

My audience, especially on my newsletter, but also here on my podcast is very widely spread in terms of rating, where we start at basic, very, very low beginner level, and then it goes all the way up to 2,600 GMs that actually read my stuff and listen to my stuff frequently. So, if I would ask this audience, what do you think of a 2000 rated player?

The responses couldn't vary more. Because for someone just getting into chess at 2000 rated players like, oh my God, I would love to be there. Well, for a grandmaster it's like, yeah, I mean probably, grandmaster feel like doesn't understand so much about chess yet. Doesn't mean [00:09:00] that this person is bad or stupid or whatever.

But the grandmaster obviously being way stronger than 2000, doesn't have as high of an opinion of a chess level of 2000. So it depends on where you're at. It depends on what you're thinking when you think about a certain rating. It's not objective. What makes it more tricky, I think, than, for example, Padel, is that chess is so closely linked to intelligence, which there is some case to make for it, but it's not like a clear tie.

And I think overstated a lot. If somebody hears I'm a GM, they think immediately I have IQ 170 plus or whatever, which is just not true. And the opposite, it's even more important to say: just because you have a low rating in chess doesn't mean that you're stupid because most often, like 95% of the time,

the only reason that you have a low rating is either you haven't spent enough time training or you didn't train the right way. There's nothing about your intellect. [00:10:00] Imagine saying somebody that hasn't studied math and can't solve a difficult equation, like you're stupid. No. It's just like they haven't been taught the way to solve this equation.

That's all there is. There's nothing about the intelligence.

So what's the solution? Solution, as mostly, is pretty simple. It's not easy, but it's simple. It's to understand that the rating system is here to make chess more fun. It's not here to tell anything about your intelligence, to tell anything about your self-worth. It's just here to pair players of similar level so that the game is more fun.

It's just here to describe books and courses in terms of, Hey, if you're roughly in this range, you can read and understand this. That's all the rating system does. All of our interpretations, the ego, the emotion, the, I'm smart, if I'm good, if I reach this rating, I will have made it. Whatever it is.

[00:11:00] These things are making ratings toxic. So if you think about your rating too much, then just change your perspective of what rating is. Really see it as this tool of, hey. I just want to be rated roughly at my right rating right now, which helps me play against players that can have a fun and interesting game against me.

That's all there is. Whenever I get stronger, my rating will slowly rise, and I will have again, more fun playing against these stronger players. If I don't invest as much time, it's funnier to play against players that also don't invest as much time as me, and it will still be a fun game. That's all the rating does.

And this switch of mindset is super important because in sports, in business, wherever, we have these kind of seemingly objective ways to measure, which is rating money, whatever. You can find a lot of [00:12:00] people that have so much, they might be very close to the top in the world. They might be millionaires, maybe billionaires, but they seem very frustrated because the only thing they do is compare their money with someone that has more than them.

And they feel frustrated about it even though they are in the top 0.00001% of people in said field. So it's just a way to be frustrated and miserable all the time, unless you are the number one in the world of something. And then it's just creating a lot of anxiety because somebody might overtake you and you're thinking again that you're stupid, useless, worthless, whatever it is that the story inside your head is telling yourself.

So it's really important both to improve your chess and to be happy. You're seeing rating just as what it is. It's just a number that pairs you against people that roughly have the same number so you have more fun.