LIVE ratings suspended

Under changing circumstances, chess.liverating.org devotes special attention to secure the live rating of planned elite events. Having noted the difficulties that arose when FIDE decided to drastically change the World Championship Qualification cycle (despite binding contracts with the Grand Prix participants) and in order to eliminate future uncertainties, the Webmaster decided to strengthen chess.liverating.org and its finances.

From now on it’s certain that chess.liverating.org will temporarily stop rating the games of the chess elite on a day to day basis. This will remove all uncertainty about someone’s live rating according to chess.liverating.org – as it will simply remain fixed at its current number. However, since this will only indirectly strengthen our finances (due to having more time for doing other stuff), and we are a modern, flexible organization, we ask for your contribution in the following way:

Write an email to FIDE, directed to either

• the President
• the World Championship Committee (c/o Mr Azmaiparashvili)
• the Treasurer
• or the pick of your choice from the Presidential Board

In your email, you can write one of two things: We would prefer you to tell them that it’s quite unacceptable to make huge changes to an on-going qualification cycle, and that this decision needs to be reversed as soon as possible. However, if you consider the chance fairly low that FIDE would ever do anything like that, you could instead ask the Treasurer to simply make €50 000 payable to the Webmaster of chess.liverating.org – you know, to remove future uncertainty and improve our finances and so on.

Here at chess.liverating.org we live by certain principles, and one of those is that if other instances get something to play along with FIDE’s sudden rules and regulation changes, then we want something too. Lots and lots, actually.

For more information about the issue in question, please visit for instance Mig’s blog (see the first article and the follow-up) and the original announcement from FIDE.

NBNBNB It appears that some people have interpreted the above as if I actually want money from FIDE, an organization that constantly lacks money, unable to support all its basic functions appropriately. The short version: I don’t want anything from FIDE. A slightly longer version where my sarcasm is explained, can be read on www.chessgames.com.