SCID Feature – Personal Chess Rating Graph

I have always been wondering why many commercial chess programs don’t let me visualize my rating progress from my own database of games, and was glad to find that free chess database software SCID has this feature. Here are a couple of my charts:

My ICC rating for games with “standard” time controls (15 min+):

The drops usually correspond to times when I had to re-start my ICC account and gradually grow the rating from scratch.

My CFC/FIDE rating:

These graphs not only shows periods of rating rise and fall, but also periods of declined activity, not bad at all for a free program! My CFC rating clearly shows that most of my chess growth happened in 1998-2001. That time range coincides to lot of data points, confirming that to improve – you need to play more!

Chess metrics - monitoring personal progress - Part 2

Here is another graph I generated based on my personal collection of games - this time it's my rating fluctuation on chessplanet server in the year 2007. And that's something that Chessbase or similar products I am aware of don't even support. It's interesting to see that the peak comes in May - the time when I was preparing for the Keres Memorial in Vancouver, so I put a bit extra time into studying chess - and I suppose that extra effort caused my blitz rating to go a bit up as well.