Perpetual Chess Podcast

Jeff Sonas is a software engineer and database consultant who is also one of the world’s leading experts on chess ratings. As you may have read, FIDE recently proposed some changes to its rating system (partially due to Jeff’s advice). . In our conversation, Jeff explains the background of his work on ratings, and why he feels that changes to the system are necessary. Following a detailed and fascinating conversation about chess ratings, we discuss Jeff’s excellent historical chess site, Chessmetrics.com, which compares the relative strength of top chess players across eras. Due to his expertise on the topic, I also invited FM Nate Solon to co-host this episode. Nate writes about chess and data on his excellent blog, Zwischenzug.As always, you can find timestamps of topics discussed below.  Sign up for my newsletter, The Perpetual Chess Linkfest here:  https://benjohnson.substack.com FIDE Press release about Proposed Rating Changes- https://fide.com/news/2538 Jeff’s paper-  https://www.fide.com/docs/presenta