Heads up: This page is very info-heavy. It’s a deeper explainer of chess off the board.

The Rating

Every chess player is given a rating – my official one is about 2200. A rating is a measure of a player’s strength. If you win games, you gain rating points, and if you lose games, you lose rating points. How many points depends on the strength of opponent.

There are multiple rating systems: FIDE, the world chess governing body, runs the internationally recognized system; the Chess Federation of Canada (CFC) runs the national system; and Chess ‘n Math runs the scholastic system in Canada. They aren’t identical, but for this page we can treat them like it.

The average junior’s first rating is about 400-500. Don’t worry if it seems low – it can grow in a hurry! The average adult club player’s rating is about 1700. The best players in the world – Grandmasters – are rated over 2500, and the super-elite are over 2700. At any given time about 40 players have a 2700+ rating. Magnus Carlsen, the best player in the world, is usually about 2850 and has a peak rating of 2882 (achieved in 2014 and 2019) which is the highest of all-time.

Grandmasters and the World Champion

When a chess player gets to be very skilled, they can earn a title. The best of these is Grandmaster. Most commonly there are also International Masters (IM), FIDE Masters (FM), and in Canada, National Masters (NM) and National Candidate Masters (NCM). Semi-officially we refer to players rated over 2000 as ‘experts’.

To earn a title a player needs to reach a certain rating, sometimes with other, more complicated conditions. GM – 2500. IM – 2400. FM – 2300. NM – 2200. Those four are the most universally recognized. There are only about a dozen GMs in Canada.

Chess has a World Championship with a long and complicated history. Nowadays it is a 1-on-1 match (14 games played over about 3 weeks – professional games frequently take well over 4 hours to play and so they only have 1 game per day) played every second year between the defending champion and a challenger decided by an extremely difficult Candidates tournament. While Magnus Carlsen (Norway) remains the best player, he gave up the World Champion title he held from 2013 to 2023. In the most recent title match, Gukesh D (India) defeated Ding Liren (China) to become the newest – and youngest – World Champion.

Tournaments

There are all kinds of chess tournaments held locally, nationally, and internationally. Grandmasters usually play against other Grandmasters, but in Edmonton we have people rated anywhere from 1000 to 2400 playing in the same tournaments. Most of the games you play are against people with a similar rating.

There are also specialized junior tournaments just for kids. They have sections either by rating or sometimes grade or age.

(See the Tournaments page for more local information.)