What is URS?
Does URS do what it claims?
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Yes. Universal rating system. Does anyone know if it has ever been tested? The claim seems to be that classical chess strength can be better estimated by including chess 360 and rapid and blitz games then only using classic games alone.
I would like to see if that claim has merit by testing the predictions that system makes as compared to the other three options.
The URS claims that it can more effectively estimate a players classical chess strength by using non classical time controls.
They actually do at least 2 things differently than fide. First, they include games other than classical games to their rating - I think they may even include chess 360 now. Second, they put more weight on recent results.
I think both of these aspects should be teased apart and analyzed in an objective way. What are the predictions for the classical and what effects do these 2 changes have? This could be done by predicting outcomes of classical games under 4 different systems:
1) URS
2) FIDE
3) FIDE if it just added other types of chess
4) FIDE if it valued the more recent results similar to URS
The fourth may be more difficult since we only have classical games. But I think we can assess whether the FIDE would be improved by putting more weight on recent games. I suspect that it would. When I see a player like Nakamura listed as number three on URS despite having pretty bad classical results lately which put him at 20th on fide listing I also suspect adding the variations of classical chess is not best at determining classical chess strength for many players. Although generally players tend to have similar ratings there are some players who for whatever reason excel at one or the other form of chess. I suspect that the urs system is very inaccurate in those cases. So while it may add a tiny bit of accuracy in many cases for some it is off the mark.
Again what I say above is speculation true. But that is my point - lets do some testing. Lets take the URS and now and see if the top 20 or 30 actually play classical chess closer to the urs prediction or the fide prediction. It would be nice to know the recency changes as well and see how that factors.