ELO Rating

[Roger de Coverly]

Sorry if this has been covered before, but as a player who as far as I am aware has never played an ELO rated game, I would like to know what the minimum number of Rated games that are required to obtain a rating

There are a number of rating systems which use methods originally developed by Professor Elo amongst them the international FIDE system. Assuming that's what you are enquiring about, the minimum number of games is nine.

Also if a person without an ELO rating plays in an ELO rated tournament are all their games ELO rated regardless of whether their opponent have a rating.

Under FIDE rules, in a Swiss or team event only rated opponents will count towards the 9. In an all play all, there is a special rule which says that only four from ten players need to be rated.

[IM Jack Rudd]

I guess that means that I could play in an ELO rated Swiss tournament and not play any games that could be rated.

You might, although a number of organizers will try to minimize the number of unrated v unrated games that occur in their tournaments. (A common way to do this is to seed all the rated players above all the unrated players.)

[Roger de Coverly]

Thanks for the quick answer.

I guess that means that I could play in an ELO rated Swiss tournament and not play any games that could be rated.

You could, but (as Jack comments) arbiters and organisers often note that unrated players enter these events with the intention of getting a part-rating and so use pairing schemes which try to pair rated against unrated. One approach is the rank the rated players first and then rank the unrated players ( using a conversion of the ECF grade). If the tournament has a 50/50 split between rated and unrated then the first round can become a match between the rated and unrated.