Chessmetrics - Perceived Disadvantages

Perceived Disadvantages

Chessmetrics occasionally gives strange looking results, particularly for players with long periods of inactivity. For instance, World Chess Champion Emanuel Lasker was inactive for much of 1912–1914, and as a consequence dropped from #1 to #12 in the world in the Chessmetrics rankings, just before his famous victory ahead of all the world's other leading players at the 1914 Saint Petersburg chess tournament.

Chessmetrics can only be used to compare the level of a player against their peers; it is not appropriate to use Chessmetrics to compare players of different era. For example, GM John Nunn has highlighted the absurdity of attempts to compare the objective playing strengths of players from different eras: He used the example of Hugo Suechting, world ranked 27 and rated 2559 by Chessmetrics in 1911, after the Elite tournament in Karlsbad. An analysis of Suechting's games from that period suggests that his level of play was at best 2100 by today's standard.

Chessmetrics, like any other ratings system, can only be used as a guide.