rating adjustment with unrated players

As I started getting beat by a player who is 'unrated' I checked out how it would effect my rating to lose the game. I saw that it was -12 for losing, and +3 if I won. I can't begin to see how that makes sense. I think it would make more sense if that game did not effect my rating at all. As it is I certainly will avoid playing unrated players , or will try even harder to avoid them, as I have never seen a reason to have them, or to play against them. 

So, play unrated games with unrated players.  Problem solved.  [Adjust your Seek Ad for a specific rating range that excludes 1200, that ought to do the trick.]

sftac (please do not erase this post)

sftac - do a lot of people erase your posts after you belittle their concerns and give out obvious advice?

Unrated players are given a provisional rating of 1200 for the purposes of determining their opponent's rating adjustment until they become rated. So what you are seeing is what the change would be if you were to play against a 1200 player.

I don't really see what the problem is, to be completely honest.

None that I'm aware of.

sftac (please do not erase this post)

The problem is that the opponent isn't really a 1200 player. He could be a 2000 player first starting on chess.com, so he wipes you out. Then your rating drops as much as if you had just lost to a 1200 player.

Agreed, but at the same time it would be absurd to assume that every new player is rated 2000, no?

I'm not saying the system is perfect, just that it is unavoidable.

He could also be a 100 strength player, yet you are getting the same points defeating him as if he was 1200.

Inidividual dings here and there dont matter in the long run; your rating will settle to where it should be. If you suddenly lost 200 points, you would gain it back in short order, because you would be getting far more points for defeating the same players who used to be 200 points below you, and are now equal to you.

Thanks for the comments here.

First, I should have prefaced anything I said, of this nature, with a comment about how much I enjoy chess.com, and how well it works compared to other websites I have played chess on. I wouldn't care, or notice, if there wasn't a chess.com page up on my computer almost all the time.

Of course I could have limited the nature of my open seek, or carefully read every open seek I take - though that is difficult when I do it with my iphone. Generally I do put a mininum number of games when I do a open invite. And I could easily not care. Why even care about my rating anyway? I mostly don't. I know I'm a weak player. Its just that it doesn't make any sense to me, and I like to understand things. The numbers are significantly more than if it were based on a 1200 player.Also I thought the system was to start everyone at 1200 and have his or her rating change game by game from there and that unrated players were people who chose not to use the rating system. 

But, again, no big deal, and I love chess.com. 

it reads

Win: +3   Loss: -12

Either the opponent's skill is around 1200 and you win/lose the correct amount of rating

or

The opponents skill is low and when you beat him you get more points then y ou would have. Or when you lose to him you lose fewer points then you would have.

or

The opponents skill is high and when you lose to him you lose fewer rating points then you would have.

All of those are in your favor. The only one not in your favor is if the person is of very high skill and you beat him you end up gaining fewer points then you normally would have, but hey at that point you still have the fact that you beat him so it is all good.

That isn't precisely true. A new player, which is currently listed as unrated, has a high rating deviation (Glicko RD listed in their stats) and that will impact the amount of ratings change. A 1200 rated player with a low RD will impact your rating differently than a 1200 rated player with a high RD (such as an urated player)

Take a look at the help topic about ratings if you want to find out more. There is a link on that page that will take you to an article that goes even more in depth.

I only knew about the ELO system. This is a good improvement on it.

Ignoring the rather facile "don't play them" type comments, there really is a very simple solutoion to this problem. 

Let's say that 10 games gives a "reasonable" view of a player's rating.  While those games are being played the new player should be flagged as having a provisional rating.   Games against players with a provisional rating should not affect the opponents rating unless they themselves are provisional.

Still not a perfect system, but a distinct improvement.

I played on a site that did that. It can work, but the current method, with the ratings deviation, isn't really too much different. If you lose a game, you lose rating points and if you win, you gain some. The magnitude of those changes will be smaller when one of the players has a large RD.

It would be intersting to see how much difference it would actually make in practice though. Personally, I think the number of rating points would end up being a wash in most cases.

The trouble here is that this is not about accurate maths.  It's about how people perceive the system.  At present it seems wrong.  This discussion is really about chess.com employing a little political nouse and keeping the masses happy.

It will all work out in the end, but very few concentrate on the end as they're too busy worrying about now.

I completely agree with Martin_Stahl's point.

The rating system used here takes into account how fresh your opponent is. The fresher he is, the bigger his initial rating adjustment, and the smaller yours.

And of course there is always at least some, if relatively small, rating adjustment for you, so that there is a natural incentive for you to play with your normal strength, so that the fresh player's rating can approach an appropriate value quickly as he plays and finishes his first games.

I just played against an "unrated" player; he beat me & then his rating "popped" up as a 1560 & I lost 14 pts. for playing an "unrated" player.  My question is:

Did that just "happen" to be the 1st game he played as an unrated player?  Now I see he's a 1560; can he ever play as an unrated player again?  Another words, I hope a player can only play ONCE as unrated right?????????????????????????????????????

I think they have a few games where they are unrated and then all of a sudden they get a rating, but it seems the player who took them on and lost ends up  having their rating negatively effected based on an unknown formula. In the end it all balances out, but it is annoying.

right. From his large rating jump on the first game, you see how quickly the rating is approaching a better value