English Chess Forum

I've downloaded the ECF rating list as of December 1st 2022.

I'm keen to understand the reason for there being

26872 rating codes starting at 100011B and ending at 352130J

followed by

7 rating codes starting at 903053A and going to 905266F

Here are the persons with the rating codes starting with 9:

903053A Symonds, Richard H
903210B Edwards, R
903718E Camilleri, Aldo
903753G Iwi, David
903840B Morgan, David H
904511K McIlveen, Liam
905266F Wainwright, Jonathan

Clearly I should have more interesting things to do with my time than ask silly questions!

John Upham wrote: ↑

Sun Dec 11, 2022 12:30 pm

7 rating codes starting at 903053A and going to 905266F

The 9xxxxx codes have been there for many years. There must have been a reason once.

Otherwise codes are alloocated in time order. Codes 100xxx up to about 127xxx are originals from when the national system started in 1986. The alphabetic code at the end is a check digit.

There are 1,119 IDs of the form 9xxxxx in the 1994 grading list downloaded from the ECF website. Of these, 5 are in categories A-C with the remaining 1,114 in categories D & E. There are zero such IDs in the 1995 and 1996 lists, with seven in the 1997 list.

My guess is that the 9xxxxx IDs were inactive players imported from a previous grading system and given such an ID to distinguish them from “real” active accounts. Over the years, a number of these IDs have been reactivated as players have returned to the game.

Thanks David!