What's with the crazy ratings?

I think I might be getting better at the tactical puzzles, but Tactics Trainer says my rating is only 605. Well, that's still better than 482 that it was earlier today. Seems like I have to solve those tactical puzzles very fast or I get negative points, even if I get the answer right. Call me an iPhone dork, but it is nice being able to use Tactics Trainer on my iPhone.

For some stupid reason Chess Mentor has my rating as "1741" which is obviously wrong. It seems to calculate "ratings" in an overly simplistic manner or something. I stopped using the "adaptive" lesson selection and am just doing everything in sequence. I guess as soon as I get to lessons where I start having difficulty then the rating it uses will start to better reflect reality.

Shredder is rating me at 1083 after a few more games of me winning one, losing one, and stalemating another. All that really means is that I seem to win about half the time when it's "strength" is set to "1083", whatever that means. I'm being very lazy with it, playing rather fast, and not thinking too hard though. I kind of wonder how accurate its strength setting is.

Most encouraging is the fact that johnallengay the greeter dude (one of the people who automatically challenge you to your first turn-based game when you register) says he's actually having to think which he apparently doesn't usually have to do with new people. I guess that means I must be doing something right.

A player with a rating (on the server) of 2300 offered to play a teaching game with me.

I finished the exercises in Chapter 6 in Susan Polgar's book and made the usual 2 errors out of 20 exercises.