After a major screw-up in rating the games from the 2002 Bled (Slovenia) Olympiad it appears that FIDE will have to recall the January list. Hundreds of players were given free gifts when the chief arbiter in Bled counted all the unrated players as having 2000 ratings. Since most are far weaker than that, someone who scored 1/5 against 2143 average-rated competition ended up with a 2036 rating thanks to wins against unrateds!
Unrated players are usually counted as 2000 for seeding purposes, but of course that number should not be used for calculating rating changes. All the details and the full correspondence dealing with the mess are reported in the Chess Scotland website. Several other FIDE rating errors are documented in the same report. None of this should affect the top 100. Thanks to John Henderson for the link.
All of this can't but help provide impetus to the Kasparov-backed World Chess Rating project (which I worked on), which plans to blend in rapid and blitz ratings, make the formula more dynamic, and, one hopes, run it all competently! Maybe FIDE can take over the elections in Florida.
