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It turns out that taking the average the performance ratings of all "provisional" games (opponent rating +400 for a win, opponent rating -400 for a loss, and just opponent rating for a draw) and averaging them produces the same result (though you have to have the complete history of the player's provisionally rated play, which may not be ideal).
A while ago there was a site made by NM Jonathan Hilton's father that did some analytics on player's USCF rating histories. I thought it was a pretty good site, but it disappeared. There are still some tools like that floating around. I was wondering if there was some sort of USCF API, or how that sort of data might be grabbed.
When a USCF rated tournament is submitted for rating, the tournament director submits to the USCF a set of dBase III files (.DBF files) that include the tournament data. I've never seen a description of the structure of those files anywhere - I mean, I know they're dBase files, but as far as the fields and such.
Note that players have an established rating after completing 25 games. USCF Active Players Established Ratings 46,574 Players 1315.99 Mean Rating 1390 Median Rating Provisional Ratings 33,692 Players 537.09 Mean Rating 410 Median Rating All USCF Rated Players Established Ratings 252,989 Players 1165.77 Mean Rating 1148 Median Rating
From the USCF's web site, this text appears in every player's rating record online: The ratings shown on this page are official published ratings, which US Chess issues 12 times a year. As of September 1, 2013, Official ratings lists are generated on the 3rd Wednesday of each month and become official on the 1st day of the next month.
LASTNAME,FIRSTNAME(S) USCFID EXPIRYDATE STATE RATING OTHERRATING. These files have certain limitations. Only room for 2 ratings, so 2 files is provided with either speed or blitz rating as the 2nd. Fields have limited lengths, so long names might be cut off. Rating numbers can come in many variants, 1234/12 means the rating is
Then, in the June 1961 issue of Chess Life, there was an article by Arpad Elo describing the mathematics of the USCF rating system (I'm presuming this was about the time of the transition between the old Harkness rating system, and Elo's new system), and the highest title it listed was the "Senior Master" title, for players with USCF ratings of ...
Speculation is all well and good, but I wanted data. I selected an OTB quick tournament from February and compared final scores with initial quick and regular ratings. After removing any previously unrated players, (surprisingly, everyone who previously had a regular rating also previously had a quick rating) the scatterplots looked like this:
Firstly, chesscube only has one rating (except if you are a premium), so I would say online ratings are quite unreliable to compare with real life chess ratings. For example, chesscube and other chess sites ratings often start with 1500, and adjusts from there; whilst in real life, you start from 700 rating points, and then adjust from there.
It's not zero-sum in the USCF. Due to the rather convoluted way K is calculated, it's likely that the lower rated player will have their rating change more than the higher rated player. For example, a 1700 player in a 4 round tournament might have a K value of 33.33, while a 2355 player might have a K value of 14.81.