The website has been updated recently to include the new school year-groups. This will help organisers and selectors. Ratings on the site are currently those held when the arrival of Covid put a halt to all over the board competition in Wales. These are unlikely to accurately reflect standards when play restarts, with some players playing little or no chess for a year and a half and others playing a lot of on-line chess during a stage in their life when rapid improvement often occurs. It is also likely a number of players on the list will not resume playing. It is therefore my intention when over-the-board chess restarts to treat all players as ‘new’ players with no rating and use their results when they start playing again in conjunction with their most recent rapidplay and full time limit ratings to give initial estimates of their rating strength. For those playing actively I would expect their ratings to arrive at a ‘correct’ level fairly quickly.
John D Thornton – junior rapidplay rating officer
