Unused rating/rank fields in API

(Full disclosure, there was a question on this same topic 2 years ago that went unanswered, but figured I’d give it a try.)

In data returned by the API, there are some fields which don’t appear to be used anymore. Looking at an example player’s /games page, the fields include:

  1. black_player_rating
  2. black_player_rank
  3. white_player_rating
  4. white_player_rank

For all 4 fields, the mode value is 0. The average rating is 490 – values appear to be distributed normally around that point. (The mean current Glicko rating is about 1500.)

Are these fields from the system used before Glicko was introduced in 2017?

Yes.

You find the player ratings in historical_ratings

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Thank you!

I assume the same is true of the various fields in the player API. The ratings[overall] field is correct, but not:

  • rating
  • rating_blitz
  • rating_live
  • rating_correspondence
  • ranking
  • ranking_blitz
  • ranking_live
  • ranking_correspondence

Back in /games, even under “historical_ratings”, the “ranking” field is also from the old system. Actually, it reports the current value, not the historical value – it doesn’t change from game to game.

The new ratings are “ratings”->“overall”->“rating”, same for historical_ratings.

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