Separate from any USCF, FIDE, or CFC rating your members carry, Rook Ready can calculate its own rating from games played at your club. It’s off by default — turn it on under Settings → Club Rating — and once it’s on, every rated game at every completed tournament and club night your club runs feeds into it automatically. This guide explains how the number moves and what the settings around it do.
Elo, in plain words
The club rating uses the Elo method — the same kind of formula chess federations use. The idea: every player has a number, and that number is a prediction. Two players rated the same are predicted to score 50/50 against each other over time. A 200-point gap predicts the higher-rated player wins about 3 games in 4.
After a game, each player’s rating moves toward what actually happened, compared with what the rating predicted. Beat someone you were “supposed to” lose to, and your rating jumps. Beat someone you were “supposed to” beat anyway, and it barely moves. Draw against a much stronger player, and your rating climbs — a draw beat the prediction.
What a K-factor does
K controls how big that move is. A higher K means a single game swings the rating more; a lower K means it takes more games to move the same distance. It’s the dial between “reacts fast” and “settles down.”
Worked example
Two players are both rated 1500. Being rated the same, each is predicted to score 50% — a coin flip. One of them wins.
- At K = 40: the winner gains +20, moving to 1520. The loser drops the same amount, to 1480.
- At K = 20: the winner gains +10, moving to 1510. The loser drops to 1490.
The shape is always the same — beat the prediction and move up, fall short and move down — but K sets how far each single result carries you. The formula behind it: move = K × (actual score − expected score), where the expected score comes from the ratings gap between the two players, and a draw counts as a score of ½. A rating never drops below 100, however lopsided a run of results gets.
Two K-factors: new players move faster
Rook Ready actually uses two K-factors, not one, and switches between them automatically per player:
- A higher K-factor for a member’s first games at the club — the “games until the normal rate” setting decides how many.
- A lower K-factor after that, once a member has played enough games for their rating to have found roughly the right level.
The reasoning: a brand-new club rating is a guess — usually a default, or carried over from a federation rating that may not reflect current club-day form. The first handful of results should correct that guess quickly. Once a player has settled in, you don’t want one lucky (or unlucky) evening to swing their rating around, so the rate slows down.
Rook Ready’s defaults are K = 40 for a member’s first 20 rated games, then K = 20 after that — the same K = 40 / K = 20 split in the worked example above. You can change either K-factor or the game threshold under Settings → Club Rating; each field takes a value from 1 to 200 (0 to 200 for the game threshold).
Choosing your own values
The defaults suit most clubs. A few reasons you might change them:
- A more casual, social club might lower both K-factors so ratings drift less from week to week and stay closer to a “who’s roughly stronger” signal than a precise ranking.
- A club running frequent, competitive events might keep the defaults or raise the “after that” K-factor slightly, so ratings keep tracking real form rather than calcifying.
- A longer or shorter “first games” window — raise the games-until-normal threshold if you want new members’ ratings to keep settling for longer before the rate slows down; lower it if your club plays often enough that 20 games goes by in a few weeks.
There’s no wrong answer here — it’s a judgment call about how much a single night should move someone’s number. If you’re not sure, leave the defaults and revisit them once you’ve seen a season of results.
Where a starting rating comes from
The first time a member has a counted game, Rook Ready needs a rating to start them from. It looks in order:
- A club-recorded rating on their roster entry, if you’ve entered one.
- Otherwise, their rating from your club’s first enabled federation system (USCF, FIDE, or CFC, in whichever order you’ve enabled them), if they have one on file.
- Otherwise, your club’s default starting rating — a setting you control, also under Settings → Club Rating.
A member with no roster rating and no federation rating on file starts from the default. From that point on, their club rating is calculated entirely from games played at your club — it doesn’t track their federation rating afterward.
Rating past tournaments
Turning the club rating on doesn’t only look forward. By default, every completed tournament your club has run counts toward it, including ones that finished before you turned the feature on. If you’d rather it only rate tournaments from a certain point forward, set “Rate past tournaments from” to a date — only tournaments ending on or after that date will count. Leave it blank to include everything.
What doesn’t count
Not every result in a tournament feeds the club rating. Excluded:
- Guest games — either player without a membership in your club, or a visiting member from a different club, and the game doesn’t count for either side.
- Byes, forfeits, and unplayed results.
- Playoff or tiebreak games, once a section moves into a knockout stage.
- Any pairing a director has marked unrated.
- Tournaments excluded from the club rating — a tournament has its own switch for whether it counts toward the club rating at all.
Everything else — a completed, rated game between two members of your club with a recorded result — counts.
Recalculated, not patched
The club rating isn’t kept incrementally. Every time something that affects it changes — a result correction, a tournament reopened and re-completed, a tournament’s rated status flipped, or a settings change like a K-factor — Rook Ready replays your club’s whole event history and rebuilds every member’s rating from the start. That guarantees a correction to an old result reaches every rating calculated after it, the same way it would have if the correction had been in place from the beginning.
Admin corrections
An admin can override a member’s club rating directly from their profile — useful for a data-entry mistake, a rating imported from elsewhere, or any case where the calculated number needs a manual fix. A correction is recorded with a reason and shows up in that member’s rating history alongside their tournament results. Corrections are only available while the club rating is turned on.
Who sees ratings
Every member can always see their own club rating. Whether members can see each other’s ratings is a club-wide switch — “Let members see each other’s club ratings” under Settings → Club Rating. Admins and coaches can always see every member’s rating, regardless of that switch, and a parent or guardian can always see the rating of a child they manage.
What’s next
- Defining custom fields — if you’re tracking a federation rating as roster data.
- Running a tournament — the events whose results feed the club rating.
- Run a club night — weekly paired nights, whose games between members count too.
Questions about your club’s specific numbers? support@rookready.com can help.
Updated September 29, 2026