Should Ratings Be Abolished?

Before I begin it is worth noting that these are just my opinions and I would love to see what others have to say about this topic. 

However, recently it has come to my attention of the not-so relevance of the Elo rating. Firstly the rating does not necessarily correlate with playing strength.  For example, let's take the place where I live, for example, Singapore. The standard for Singapore chess players is very high, but there are not many tournaments, therefore we start to see a trend developing where players are being rated 1500 or 1600 by the Elo points, but in comparison, with U.S chess players or European players they would be playing at 1800-1900. This has not only been noticed by me but also from other foreigners that travel to Singapore to play. Moving further with my argument, the rating does not correlate to playing strength because, in a game, you can dominate for 99 moves but if you just let your guard down for a minute you can lose the entire game. This therefore then leads to a drop in your rating. That means that the rating isn't measuring your playing strength like it is supposed to but it is measuring who can keep their cool for longer. 

Furthermore, I have found that a rating is simply something that people use to compare themselves with others without actually playing them. In extreme cases, this leads to the chess community to become very judgmental of each other instead of bonding with each other. This is commonly seen amongst mothers of young children where you see each mother bragging about how high their son's rating is, where his playing strength is very bad. 

The entire rating system has become too closely attached to each player that in certain cases players now only play for the rating points instead of playing because of the love of the game. This not only goes agaisnt some moral beliefs but it has also lead to severe corruption within some tournaments where certain people have bribed their opponents in order to get a better rating. The rating system has become the new identity of every chess player when it shouldn't have. Rather than playing someone to find out how good there are or their playing strength we now just rely on a simple number to tell that for us. 

These are just my opinions and I would like to hear what others have to say about this  

Ratings provide an approximation of playing strength in order to facilitate competitions.  Some people take them way too seriously.

Ratings do, in general, provide a good estimate of playing strength.  When there's a match between two teams and each team has 40 players, arranging the boards by ratings gives all the players a good chance to win.  That would not be the case with random board assignments.

I agree that measuring a player solely by his-her rating is pretty narrowminded. At the same time, rating does present a certain value. A person generally knows, for example, that there is little point for them to play with someone rated 500 higher or 500 lower than them; the levels of play are too incomparable. One shouldn't use rating as a measure of a player's strength, but, rather, the bracket the rating is in depicts pretty well the general ability of the player to compete.

No. There would be virtually no point in having competition whatsoever without some mechanism to pair fair matches against one another. It is also one of the most effective methods of measuring your improvement. The romantic idea that everyone is a winner and we are all equal in competition so why keep score doesn't hold out in the real world. If you don't like your rating, study and improve it. If you don't want one, play Bob down at the coffee shop and don't go to tournaments. 

Nope

I agree with maycaeser in that rating of OTHER players creates a bracket I can usually play a more interesting game within. If I go too high over my "comfort zone" then I lose and I cannot figure out exactly why. If I go too low I win too easily and it feels weird. But if I play a person four hundred pints higher than me and they want to tutor or advise me (maybe in an unrated game) that is cool. Same with some one 400 or so points later. It is more interesting when I offer up some tips since I am able to do so from our mutual positions that are based on our ratings. I notice I hover between 1410 and 1460 because I tend to play the same rating ranges from other players. Of course it is no exact science and yet I do notice I stay within those brackets so long as I play the same rating ranges of opponents.

I notice people who play the faster games (I like to do the ten minutes games once a day or so) of 3 minutes or so are really wound up tight and freak out on ratings and winning and losing more. Daily players, or one hour games players, seem in many ways to let it slide. We will always drift back to where we belong. I may go down to 1350 for a while but I will come back up, and I may go up to 1500 but I will come back down. One can always just send out unrated challenges if he is above all this mundane ratings stuff. 

Stamina is also a major component of chess. If you don't want to acknowledge that because you are so focused on trolling false explanations, play blitz, rapid, or G30.

I'd like to see where you could find proof for all you trolled up there.

One way to correct for the problem of players losing points after playing a game of excellent moves but then blundering on the last few and losing the game would be to base players' ratings on the cumulative average difference of al their moves..  To deal with the overemphasis on competition and hierarchies introduced by ratings, perhaps there should be more games available on chess.com which allow for unrated play against other players.

The rating is an accurate measure of your chance of winning.  It doesn't measure why you have a higher chance of winning.   Someone who times out frequently will have a rating often 100 points or more lower than it would otherwise be.  Someone who plays excellent mostly but blunders might very well have a rating lower than someone who is on average worse but more consistent.  And the reason for that is that the more consistent player wins more often because chess is mostly a game of least bad mistakes.  

Overall playing strength is reasonably consistent among humans and thus is measurable relative to one another in a playing pool.  That's all a rating asserts.