Hello,

Why is my rating on the new site lower than on the old site?

The old site had separate ratings for regular chess and Chess960. These are now combined on the new site, so the two values were averaged together when accounts were transferred. If you feel this calculation has unfairly affected your rating, we may be able to make an adjustment.

Will Apollo be added to this "Universal" rating too?

I did prefer the separate rankings, as I play mostly standard chess. One of my regular opponents likes the 960 variation, so I play it with them, but I do consider it a separate game. It seemed to me that the 960 rating was calculated differently, but that might only be my perception.

Apollo (and Apollo960) are combined with regular chess for rating purposes.

It's all a matter of practical tradeoffs, and trying to find the best compromise without having too many ratings to keep track of. It would be nice to have Chess960 and Apollo as separate categories, but then you already would have eight ratings even with just divisions for live/corr. Add in extra time divisions and it all gets unmanageable pretty fast. There's no absolutely right answer, but we felt that combining gameplay variations while separating important speed divisions was the best overall approach.

I can live with that. Thanks for the clarification.

How many games do I have to play to leave the provisional rating category? Thanks in advance for your help.

Currently it takes 10 completed games to receive an established rating, separately for each rating category. It really should be in the User Manual, but it's under review for possible changes so it may change. It will probably stay at 10 games, but we're considering making it so that the first rating you establish will transfer to other categories, e.g. when you complete 10 blitz games your newly-established rating will also become your established rating for fast and slow games (and maybe corr games as well). We'll add the appropriate info to the User Manual in the near future, thank you for pointing this out.