I recently found out about a new chess site called Chessgraphs. It does exactly what it says in the name: it allows you to see a graphic progress of the rating of any rated player for any given period of time.
It is strange that this obvious idea hasn’t been put into practice earlier. Nowadays we have graphs of pretty much anything, but chess ratings haven’t been given the proper graphic exposure they deserve. OK, you can actually have a rating graph on FIDE’s website, but first of all they have started requiring a registration for that (insert expletive here) and second, their graphs aren’t really nice.
The website also allows you to look up the ratings and compare multiple-players’ rating histories on the same graph. Unlike FIDE, there is no registration required and it works with all ratings: classical, standard and blitz. It is a “one-man project for the love of chess” by John McNeil. I don’t know John personally, but I think he has done a great job. The next time you need to lookup chess rating you know where to go.
