Chess Ranking Assistant

The Chess Ranking Assistant add-in for Microsoft Excel creates internal chess rankings for chess clubs. It is menu-driven and easy to use. It works only on PCs, and it is free forever.

The Chess Ranking Assistant uses the Glicko rating system developed by Mark Glickman, described best by this paper.

With the Glicko rating system, if a player plays a stronger player and wins, their ranking goes up significantly. If they play a weak player and win, the ranking goes up only a little. The system encourages you to play stronger players to improve your ranking the most.

To use the Chess Ranking Assistant, you will need Excel for Windows. After running the installation program, a new ribbon tab appears:

The Chess Ranking Assistant is fully menu-driven. First, use the option “Create Workbook”. This creates a new workbook with three sheets: a player list sheet, a match sheet, and a form to record matches played at your club. Use Add/Edit Players to add players, then Add Matches to add matches. Once that is done, run Update All. A number of sheets are created: a wins & losses sheet, a ranking by rank sheet, a ranking by player sheet, matches played, and individual player sheets showing who they have played.

You can display results sheets (wins & losses matrix, ratings by player, ratings by rank) either for all players or for those who have played in the past X days — you control the X.

Any or all of the sheets can be exported as a PDF file using the Export as PDF option, and the PDF can then be e-mailed to players. Printing the wins and losses matrix sheet on a color printer and taping the pages together is a great way to display standings at your club; for even more impressive output, print at 125% of regular size.

The Chess Ranking Assistant works in Microsoft Excel and Office 365 for Windows. It does not work on the Mac. If someone wants to convert it to the Mac, we will provide the source code, as long as the converted product is free.

Suggestions on improving the Chess Ranking Assistant should be sent to us via our contact form.