Rating adjustment to Oleksandr Bortnyk's blitz rating

[LawrenceCooper]

https://x.com/BortnykChess/status/1972746172029936024

[Jon D'Souza-Eva]

For those who don't have a twitter account: Oleksandr Bortnyk has for years been playing hundreds of blitz games against much, much weaker opponents (e.g. 1000 points lower) in order to increase his blitz rating. FIDE introduced a rule to stop this (but only in blitz and rapidplay games) in December 2024. However many of Bortnyk's blitz games since December 2024 were rated, presumably due to a glitch in the system, and when FIDE noticed this they retrospectively removed these games from Bortnyk's blitz rating calculation.

[NickFaulks]

FIDE introduced a rule to stop this (but only in blitz and rapidplay games) in December 2024.

Did they? Can you supply a link?

I have just seen this

https://www.fide.com/fide-council-appro ... egulation/

FIDE Council has announced on September 29th a change in the Rating Regulations which will take place, with one month's retrospective effect, on October 1st. This is utterly typical of their cavalier approach to regulations.

I do not know whether the Chair of Qualification Commission, supposedly in charge of the Rating regulations, was even informed of this change. As a Councillor I certainly wasn't, although I am beyond caring about this playground shambles.

There is a long history leading up to this, about which I may write later.

[Ian Thompson]

Did they? Can you supply a link?

In the comments on Bortnyk's X post, Sutovsky has said

FIDE never applies the rules retroactively. What happened is as follows:

There was a special provision in effect since December 1, 2024 related to rapid and blitz only. That was aimed vs farming points, and at that time it stated that games where opponents had 600 points of rating difference are not counted for FIDE rapid&blitz rating as long as one of the players has 2600+.

It was published in Oct'2024 in FIDE Handbook, and it was publicly accessible throughout.

[Roger de Coverly]

Regarding Rapidplay and Blitz, I found this
https://handbook.fide.com/chapter/B02RBRegulations2024
from which

7.3.1 For each game played against a rated player, determine the difference in rating between the player and their opponent, D.

A difference in rating of more than 400 points shall be counted for rating purposes as though it were a difference of 400 points.

Effective from 1 December 2024: Games played between players with a rating difference of 600 points or more shall not be rated if at least one of the players is rated above 2600 on the relevant list.

That's a different, perhaps weaker, implementation of the Nakamura rule. Although if a game isn't rated, would that exclude it from activity requirments?

[NickFaulks]

Although if a game isn't rated, would that exclude it from activity requirments?

They will presumably follow the normal decision process of working backwards from their desired outcome to produce a rule which gets there.

[LawrenceCooper]

FIDE introduced a rule to stop this (but only in blitz and rapidplay games) in December 2024.

Did they? Can you supply a link?

I have just seen this

https://www.fide.com/fide-council-appro ... egulation/

FIDE Council has announced on September 29th a change in the Rating Regulations which will take place, with one month's retrospective effect, on October 1st. This is utterly typical of their cavalier approach to regulations.

I do not know whether the Chair of Qualification Commission, supposedly in charge of the Rating regulations, was even informed of this change. As a Councillor I certainly wasn't, although I am beyond caring about this playground shambles.

There is a long history leading up to this, about which I may write later.

"I'd like to thank FIDE QC for the fruitful joint work on the matter." https://x.com/EmilSutovsky/status/1972587479858360416

[LawrenceCooper]

"All in all, only three players lost significant amount of rapid/blitz ratings due to adjusted calculations: Bortnyk, Danya and Shirov.

That is because each of them played over a HUNDRED of games vs opposition of 600 and more points below. Dozens of which happened to be played after Dec 1, 2024, the cut-off date." https://x.com/EmilSutovsky/status/1972822804396638464

[Roger de Coverly]

From the posting

Now, what happened is that the algorithm was poorly adjusted and kept calculating ratings as if such a provision did not exist.
This is our fault. But this technical mistake is totally different from applying the rules retroactively.

It had exactly the sane effect. It may have been better to implement it to apply at the same time as the Nakamura provision. Also why have differing rules for Blitz and standard?

At least it provided some publicity for the change.