The self-justifying Elo rating system

Abstract

We suggest an improvement of the Elo rating system. Whereas Elo's theoretical background remains unaffected, we significantly change the way in which rating values are adjusted. It turns out that the modified system behaves much more naturally, and that it offers several advantages over the classical one. The key idea is a fixed point approach to the definition of the rating values. We provide an algorithm for the purpose of their computation.