Arpad Elo
Arpad Emrick Elo (born Árpád Imre Élő[1][2], August 25, 1903 in Egyházaskesző, Hungary – November 5, 1992 in Brookfield, Wisconsin) is the creator of the Elo rating system for two-player games such as chess. Born in Hungary, he moved to the United States with his parents as a child in 1913.
Elo was a professor of physics at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was also a chess master who won the Wisconsin State Championship eight times.
Elo died in Brookfield, Wisconsin in 1992.
The Elo rating system
Elo is best known for his system of rating chess players. The original chess rating system was developed in 1950 by
Kenneth Harkness, the Business Manager of the
The first USCF rating statistician was Bill Goichberg. Goichberg often disagreed with Elo on details about how the system would be implemented.
In 1970, FIDE, the World Chess Federation, agreed to adopt the Elo Rating System. From then on until the mid-1980s, Elo himself made the rating calculations. At the time, the computational task was relatively easy because fewer than 2000 players were rated by FIDE.
Goichberg later demonstrated that Elo was giving US players lower ratings than they deserved. This matter was debated at the
FIDE Congress in
FIDE reassigned the task of managing and computing the ratings to others, excluding Elo. FIDE also added new "Qualification for Rating" rules to its handbook awarding arbitrary ratings (typically in the 2200 range, which is the low end for a Chess Master) for players who scored at least 50% in the games he played at selected events, such as named Chess Olympiads.[3][4] Elo and others objected to these new rules as arbitrary and politically-driven.
Books
- The Rating of Chessplayers, Past and Present (1978). ISBN 0-668-04721-6
References
External links
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