{"id":1059,"date":"2011-04-02T10:09:38","date_gmt":"2011-04-02T18:09:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danamackenzie.com\/blog\/?p=1059"},"modified":"2011-04-02T10:11:38","modified_gmt":"2011-04-02T18:11:38","slug":"were-number-1290","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/?p=1059","title":{"rendered":"We’re number 1290!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just learned, courtesy of Bill Brock’s Chicago Chess Blog<\/a>, that the USCF member pages have added another new wrinkle: a line that indicates your ranking in the whole country. My current rating is 2093\u00c2\u00a0 \ud83d\ude41 . That puts me at #1290 in the country, which is actually better than I would have expected. However, the ranking only includes players who have been active in the last twelve months. So it’s #1290 out of 47,241 — not out of the entire membership base.<\/p>\n

Naturally I would like to get back into the top 1000, which currently requires a rating of 2139. To crack the top 500, it looks as if I would need a rating of 2230, or perhaps 2231. Mike Splane, a regular reader of this blog, is just on the cusp of the top 500, with a rating of 2229 (national ranking of #506).<\/p>\n

If you’re a junior, you can also find out your ranking among juniors in the country. I was quite surprised to find out that 73 percent of the active players in the country are juniors! A more depressing viewpoint is that of the 47,000-plus active chess players in the country, only a little more than 12,000 or so are grownups. I wonder if there will come a day when chess in this country is exclusively played by people under 21 …<\/p>\n

Finally, you can also find out your ranking within your state. According to my member page, I’m number 92 in northern California (which is treated as a separate state from southern California). However, according to the top-200 list for the state, I’m number 87. Why the difference? Well, the top-200 list is based on published ratings, which are only updated once a month, while the member page seems to be updated a lot more frequently. (In fact, within the last hour I dropped from #91 to #92! Jeez, I’d better get busy.)<\/p>\n

Just for fun, here is the current top-10 list in northern California, along with my lifetime record against them.<\/p>\n