Over the past few years the World Chess Federation, FIDE, has been lowering the rating floor, making it more attainable for class players to achieve an internationally recognized rating. Currently the rating floor is 1200.

There are still requirements for achieving your first established FIDE rating, which is based on a total of 9 games. If you participate in a Swiss tournament, then you must meet at least 3 opponents with an established FIDE rating and score 1 point out of 3 games (1 win or 2 draws). Using the Swiss style, you will generally need 3 events to pull this off as depending on the event size and such, you may not get lucky to be paired with more than 3 FIDE rated players.

The other way of doing this by holding a 10 player, 9 round, round robin. Per FIDE regulations, you need only 4 of the 10 players to have FIDE ratings, and the other 6 can have no FIDE ratings. As long as the 6 non-FIDE rated players scores 1 point or more against ANYONE in the field (yes this means 2 draws against non-FIDE rated players will work), then after the tournament is rated there would be 6 new FIDE rated players!

In my next posting, I’ll talk about how to design a round robin style of tournaments to help create more FIDE rated class players.

Good Chess to All,

Sevan A. Muradian, Founder
North American Chess Association
International Arbiter and International Organizer