The point Stewart makes is an interesting one, namely that because you need to score at least one point and play against rated opposition, it could be difficult to find opposition poor enough to be able to score against.Stewart Reuben wrote:If a player scores 1 point our of 9, this means that he gets -351 of the average of his opponents' ratings. Let us assume it is 1800, then he will get 1449. If he scored a legitimate 0.5/9 it would be -444, then he would get 1356. In England, or elsewhere, you will find it very difficult to meet a field of U1600. Currently to get down to 1200 is therefore very unlikely. If you are under 1600 strength and playing in England, you are unlikely to get a FIDE Rating. Had what Mikko and I proposed been accepted, it would be much more likely. From 1 July 2012 the FIDE Ratings can go down to 1000. They won't for about 10 years unless 0.5 is agreed to and we won't agree to 0.5 unless iteration is agreed.
I think that's the case for Swiss events and possibly team events as well, but an empirical search on the FIDE rating site for the lowest rated ENG players found a few within sight of a 1000 . Sampling their rating histories showed that they had gained their ratings in one of the "get me a rating" all play all tournaments which are run by both CCF and e2e4. In these you only need 4 rated players, so all or some of the other 6 could potentially be very weak. The 1/9 rule is for the tournament, I think you can lose all your games against the 4 players with ratings. I'm thinking then that there will be players with International ratings down to 1000 rather sooner than suggested. Presuming that 1000 is going to be the all time minimum, you then need a rule which says whether or not the rating is scrubbed if it should dip below that point. It looks as if the rating is reset to zero. There's one example on the ENG list
Listing of ENG players with ratings of 0 to 1500
http://ratings.fide.com/advaction.phtml ... e&line=asc