tonyh: Hmmm, which value should be shown if a game was played for 6 months and your BKR had changed 20 times during that time range?

Fencer: That's a fair question! But I think the rating as it was when the game finished. If I wanted to see what the rating was when the game began, I guess I could look at another of my past games and look for a similar date.
I suggested this, because I would guess that the programming involved is not too arduous.

Fencer: One reason to see the rating at the time of the game is to better understand why a player has a certain BKR. I saw one player with a rating of over 2000 after four games but he had not beaten anyone over 1500 and had lost one game to a 1600 or so player. In addition, it would better help players gauge the difficulty of a player. Personally, I would like to see- if it were possible- the rating at the time the game started or ended, and the current rating.

tonyh: Do you mean that when you accept a game at say 2200 bkr each then the game drags on forever and the person drops to say 1300 (because of say timeouts and not lack of ability ) ,then you end up with a loss to someone with a low bkr and will take alot of points from you ? . If so keeping the same bkr from the start of the game to the end of the game (the proper bkr would still be displayed but the origanal used for calculating) could be a usefull idea .

Jason: It's not quite what I meant; I just want to see the final rating as it was when the game ended.
You have a fair point, though and I know of another game site where the original ratings are used to calculate the new rating. Anyone know what happens in correspondence games?

tonyh: gogul made this proposal only recently, but with not much response ;-) I don't want to repeat that thread, but I would prefer to see the ratings which were used for BKR calculation in all finished games. There are certainly some fluctuations during the course of a long game, but those ratings at least have something to do with that game. On the contrary it makes no sense to show today's ratings for games which were finished years ago.

kleineme: Thank you for that insight and the very valuable comment. As you say, whatever rating was used in the calculation of the new one, let that rating stay with the finished game forever. i think that covers fencer's point about which rating needs to stay with the game.
Excellent.

kleineme: I agree too. More meaningful ratings would also be useful to me when I am looking for nice games by strong players. This would for example avoid that Chessmaster1000's games show a low rating only because he lost a lot of games on time when he left.
Now I suppose that this would require to store information which is not currently stored (or is it?), so some more storage space, and it would still show "incorrect" ratings for games played before this new feature. Is it worth it ?

nabla: Surely the extra storage space is negligible, compared with everything else that is stored.
I definitely think it is worth it, for the reasons you state; it would give a lot of satisfaction.

nabla: There has to be a history table already, how else would it be possible to show those pretty BKR charts? Probably it currently contains information about player, type of game, date/time, BKR. If you add one more column with the game ID, then you've got it!

This would solve another inconvenience as well: currently it's the date/time of the last move made in a game which constitutes the end of the game. It would be more appropriate to show the date/time of the resignation or draw acceptance, which could deviate some days or even weeks from the last move made.

I think that the proper ratings and end dates should be shown for all games, including those already finished. Some months ago we had a short downtime when all ratings were newly re-calculated. If it's necessary to create that new column then I wouldn't mind another downtime in order to add this more meaningful information.

By the way: then the ratings could be added to the game scores as well. This would make it more easy to decide which games to look at, when you have downloaded hundreds of games from people you don't know.

kleineme: I would also like it very much if the accurate ratings were in the PGN files. As I am already automatically extracting the header to show the player's names and the result, I could very easily extract the ratings too and then filter the games by rating, which would be very nice.

nabla: I think this should be just for past games. Any currently running game should show there current BKR not what they had when they started the game.

mctrivia: Of course ! I thought all agreed that the most meaningful rating is the one at the end of the game, not at the beginning.