If Anand only has a rating of 2850, why he the world champion? I saw a player on Yahoo! chess with a rating of over 5000. Is it a different rating system?
The highest ELO chess rating ever recorded is 2851, by Garry Kasparov, so I don’t know what “only” means in your context. Anand is currently rated 2817. If you saw somebody with a 5000 rating in Yahoo, and it’s based on ELO ratings, it’s a fluke or an error. That rating makes no sense.
Play on Yahoo!, there are plenty of them.
Or maybe the Yahoo! players are better, but I doubt it.
shrug I don’t play on Yahoo, so I have no idea what a 5000 rating means there, but, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it’s not comparable to an official ELO rating.
OK, I checked Yahoo, and, crimeney, it’s like going back 15 years in the Internet with that games website. Anyhow, I didn’t seen any one in the advanced lounges with over a 2100 rating. I’m guessing it is loosely based on ELO, and if you see something in the 5000s, there’s just some freakout in the algorithm they use, or there’s some cheating involved.
What 5000?! There’s no way that can be right.
Chess ratings are almost all figured out by wins and losses, compared to the score of the other player. The actual numbers are only meaningful relative to each other (i.e. +100 indicates a specific expected probability of winning).
The way someone can artificially boost their rating to be very high is by always winning. In a system like Yahoo games, I’d imagine there’s no real authority that forces players to go up against a wide variety of opponents. It’s probably not all that hard to generate a player that has never lost a game, perhaps by creating sock accounts. You might need to “break in” the sock with a certain minimum number of games, but if you do this repeatedly, you could get your power level as high as you want it.
You doubt it 
Give those yahoo lads some credit. Anand, Kramnik, Carlsen and the like aren’t all that.
Theoretically in the official ELO system, if you create a closed pool of players that only play themselves it is possible to artificially boost gradings. But to get to 5000 would sound like too extreme a boost to be likely.
I know nothing about chess on yahoo but my best guess would be that it is a different system at work.
Anand is still probably the best match play chess player in the world.
Experienced in the Y! rating system and used to exploit it (in my younger day).
It’s not really based on the ELO at all. You are always guarantee at least 1 point in rating for a win so long as the opponent you are facing is at least 1200 (the provisional rating). People just make multiple accounts and forfeit to themselves using multiple windows, hundreds of times per day. Viola, 5000. In fact, 10k, 15k, and even 20k was not uncommon back in the day. This is when Y! games was still booming with popularity. I have no idea why I bothered, but it was neat to have a 10,000 rating and getting all kinds of “how’d you do that?” messages. That was a long time ago, though.
Just click the person’s name to see their record. I’m willing to bet it’s something like 10,000-0. I know that’s how many wins it would take to get that kind of rating on there.
Right.
On that basis Yahoo is definately **NOT ** running an ELO type grading system.