FIDE Rating List 1969

Following is the third international rating list which now covers the period from January 1966 through the Spring of 1969. This list is by far the most extensive of the three and includes all masters, with or without FIDE titles, who participated in at least two events during the indicated period. Because of the expansion of the list a greater number of games were used in the evaluation of the ratings of the individual players, consequently a greater accuracy over previous lists is to be expected. This is also the first list which in a very large part is computerized. For some 200 players, whose ratings are marked with an asterisk (*) the ratings were computed by the method of successive approximations described in the brochure on the Rating System of the United States Chess Federation and previously distributed to the FIDE representatives. The ratings so obtained for the group constitute a self-consistent set. In most cases of the selected group, that is, the very active players, the game sample sizes approached or exceeded 100 games and in few cases even 300 games. Thus the inadvertent omission of results from minor tournaments should not have a significant effect.

The ratings must be regarded as evaluations of the average performances of the masters over the three year period and nothing more. Any association of the ratings with player strengths is left to the individual prejudices of the readers. The evaluations are expressed on the rating scale of the U.S.C.F., an arbitrary scale on which the 2000 level represents the lower limit of the expert or candidate master category and 2200 the lower limit of the master category. Thus 200 points represents the class interval which is also defined in terms of the statistical concept of standard deviation. Ratings are rounded to the nearest 10 points since greater accuracy cannot be claimed. The probabie error in the evaluation ranges from 10 to 30 points depending on the size of the game sample used in the calculations.