The Russian Chess Federation rating (FSHR)

The official database is ratings.ruchess.ru, in the players section. Every player with a Russian rating has a card there.

• Search by surname and first name. The interface is in Russian, so the name has to be typed in Cyrillic.
• If several people share the name, narrow it down by region and year of birth - both are shown in the list.
• The card holds the player's FSHR ID, current ratings and the list of rated tournaments.

The FSHR ID is the reliable way in: it is a permanent number in the system and never changes, so it survives spelling variants and transliteration. What the columns in a published list actually mean is covered separately - how to read a rating list.

Nothing found under the name usually means there is no FSHR rating yet. That is normal - a rating only appears after playing an event submitted for rating.

The national rating is kept separately for three time formats, so a card shows three numbers:

The three are unrelated: a solid classical rating and almost no blitz games is a common combination. Which list an event feeds is decided by its time control - time controls explained.

For a player the sequence is short, and there is normally no application to file:

• Find a tournament submitted for FSHR rating. The regulations of the event say so. Ordinary club and city tournaments qualify - the bar is lower than for FIDE.
• Play it to the end.Withdrawing midway damages both your result and the organizer's report - what happens when a player withdraws.
• Wait for the calculation. The organizer files the report afterwards, and the card appears once it has been processed.

The starting figure depends on what the system already knows about you. An existing FIDE rating can be taken as the basis on entry; with no rating at all the count starts from somewhere around 1500. The exact rules live in the current FSHR rating regulations, and those are worth checking directly rather than through second-hand summaries.

How the number moves afterwards, and why it swings harder for newcomers than for experienced players, is the Elo machinery itself - the Elo rating and the K-factor.

Both run on Elo, but they serve different jobs.

In practice the national rating comes first, and the FIDE one follows once a player starts entering internationally rated events. The two numbers almost always differ, and that is not an error: different pools of events, different opponents. What an event needs in order to be FIDE-rated at all is a separate matter - FIDE requirements for tournaments.

Three different things get mixed up here. A rating is a number that moves in both directions after every rated event. A FIDE title - CM, FM, IM, GM - is earned once and kept for life. And Russia also keeps a domestic ladder of sports categories, awarded for meeting a norm and likewise never taken back.

So a player holding a modest category can perfectly well have a higher rating than someone a step above them. On the international titles - FIDE titles and how they are earned.

The usual reasons the database still shows the old figure:

• The event was never submitted for rating. A friendly or corporate tournament counts for nothing by default; rating has to be arranged in advance.
• The report has not been processed yet. Ratings move after the calculation, not on the day of the game, and that takes time.
• You were entered as somebody else. A misspelt surname or a wrong ID in the entry list sends the games into another card - or creates a second one for you.
• Wrong format. Played rapid, looking at classical: those are separate numbers.

If it is a data error, the person to contact is the organizer - corrections to the report go through them, not through the player. Getting the entry data right in the first place is exactly what the entry form is for - the tournament entry form.