Rating doesn't change against engines

[Alexander]

Hi

Is the rating meant to change when losing a game against an engine if Play - New game - Rate game ticked is selected when playing against a chess engine?

I've played many games against various engines and mostly lost - yet my rating doesn't drop. However if I win then my rating increases! Or does the Rate game feature only work if playing the HIARCS engine?

Currently my rating can only go up!

This is on HIARCS CE Pro 1.2.1

Thank you.

[Mark Uniacke]

The rating definitely falls here, I just tested this personally with 1.2.1.

There are a couple ways I can think the rating would not change:
1) you do not have the game checked to be rated
2) or you are playing an opponent so strong your loss expectation is 100%. If you are playing other engines and they are rated more than about 800 Elo above you it is unlikely to change your rating.

I could answer better if I knew what rating you have in HCE Pro and what is the rating of the opponent engine you are playing?

My recommendation would be to play H15.2 and set the Match player strength option so it tracks your rating for better or worse and you are playing an opponent close to your own strength.

[Alexander]

Thanks Mark.

Actually I've looked a bit more and discovered it also depends which engine I think - some engines have the rating box greyed out like in the attached image. I had been changing the difficulty level on these engines (somewhere between 1500 - 1800 for me depending on how I feel and the engine) by the configure icon - which changes the difficulty although the game then becomes unrated. The engines where it's not greyed out allow the rating to change though. Not sure there's a lot you'll be able to do to fix this.

I'll give the adjust rating feature a go on HIARCS - thanks for the suggestion.

I quite enjoy changing between the engine so that they use a different book.

Cheers,
Alex.

[mrudolf]

The problem is that adjusting ratings makes sense only against engines with configured rating.
If you are playing against the engine with no rating set, your rating won't change, because:
1. Your opponent's rating is unknown.
2. Even if we estimate it, it is likely to be so high (like 3200) that you are unlikely to lose any rating points (unless you are Carlsen, but then you don't need to estimate your rating anyway).