English Chess Forum

One of the most commonest asked questions (after how the hell did u do that?!) Is what is your grade? Anybody supply a wrong answer? Do Grandmasters get asked this before games ? Maybe in context of: " Nigel Short...hmm name sounds familiar. Got a grade?"

Here is an amusing conversation that I overheard at the beginning of a match between my team-mate rated over 200 and a precocious junior.

Precocious junior. What’s your grade?
Team-mate. I am a person, not a number. Ask me my name.
Precocious junior (after five seconds thought). OK but if I ask you your name will you also tell me your grade?

At which point my team-mate surrendered.

I've taken to asking my opponents this question before a league match simply to save me time looking them up when inputting the game when I get home. The last game I played was slightly amusing as my opponent was too embarrassed to tell me his rating. It wasn’t until I got home and realised there was 500+ (Elo) rating points between us that I fully understood why.

Do people mind being asked? To be fair I rarely get a sensible answer. Many people claim to not know their grade and just play for fun yet in my experience most people have a pretty good idea what it is, certainly when the new lists are published at the very least.

I have replied "Yes, I got D+ for Technical Drawing in 1976"

That normally shuts them up!

This reminds me of one of the Marlwood tournaments I attended. A Scottish kid was asking his (Southern) English opponent his grading. The English kid couldn't understand what on earth he was saying. Over and over again he asked, "What's your grading?" "Do you have a grading?" and back came the reply "What?" Eventually I became so irritated that I had to interrupt and 'translate' the question for him. Bloody foreigners.

I once had a conversation that went

Opponent "What's your grade"
Me "165"
Opponent "Ok. Thanks"

Then, after a slight pause

Opponnent "Don't you want to know my grade?"
Me "No"

The advise that we give our juniors at 3Cs is to never ask your opponent for his grade before the game (obviously in tournaments you normally know before hand), sometimes knowing your opponents grade affects the way you play, being unaware means you just play your own game and not the strength of your opponent

I was very surprised when Yang-Fan asked me this before a London League match last April. Annoyed too, though that was probably largely due to the fact that my grade happened to be its lowest for seventeen years (and at that stage, it is inevitably a somewhat sore point however little one tends to think of such things).

Jonathan Rogers wrote:I was very surprised when Yang-Fan asked me this before a London League match last April. Annoyed too, though that was probably largely due to the fact that my grade happened to be its lowest for seventeen years (and at that stage, it is inevitably a somewhat sore point however little one tends to think of such things).

You could have replied that you were a tenth Dan in full-contact Origami and that paper cuts can be dangerous things!

Now you tell me

John Upham wrote:I have replied "Yes, I got D+ for Technical Drawing in 1976"

That normally shuts them up!

That was the way I got people at school who claimed they were good at chess to demonstrate they probably weren't, by asking "What's your BCF grade?" to which the response was usually "A".

To ask a common question for recent years, is there a date (and if so, when) for the publication of the January 2011 rapidplay grading list?

Richard Thursby wrote:To ask a common question for recent years, is there a date (and if so, when) for the publication of the January 2011 rapidplay grading list?

Might be

Re the grading question, the simple reply "Higher than yours" should do the trick.

It might be a good idea to check that beforehand though...

It must be quite rare nowadays to play a game without having any idea of the grade/strength of your opponent. It only happens to me occasionally and unless it's in round 1 of a tournament you have some idea. Even in a league game I would know the minimum/maximum grade they could be by who they are playing below/above. It's probably quite refreshing just to play the game without having any pre-conceived idea about what result you should be happy with.

There was one league game last season where I made an unfortunate comment after offering a draw in a worse position which was accepted. On finding out my opponent was 10-20 points higher than I thought I mumbled some comment about I wouldn't have had the cheek to offer a draw if I'd known he was that close to my grade

I've also remembered that after playing an unusually smooth game with black to beat a junior graded about 160 in a cup match between Division 2 teams last season the relieved look on my opponent's face afterwards when he realised I was a bit higher than the 150-170s he was used to playing in the league