Hello! I'm new to this forum but I've been playing chess with my relatives and a few friends for awhile now. I mainly play with my uncle, and he recently bought me a copy of the playstation 2 version of Chessmaster, the one with Josh Waitzkin. My question is, are the player ratings pretty accurate? If not, would you say that the ratings are too high or too low based on the difficulty level?

Ratings when playing against a computer program are even more irrelevant than any other type of rating. The only thing you can tell from your rating against the computer players in Chessmaster is how well you play against those particular computer players. It won't help you even approximate how well you'd play against humans, since the playing styles will be completely different.

Asking whether those ratings are higher or lower than ratings from your national chess federation or FIDE is kind of like asking if the number 5 comes before or after the letter h. They're not on the same scale, so you can't compare them.

--Fromper

I play Chessmaster 10th Edition and have beaten a 1700 on that program. There's no way I'd stand a snow ball's chance against an actual 1700. From time to time those computer personalities will do some really stupid things.

But then my computer is pretty old and I read a post in some thread that said that the better the computer the better the personalities will play.

Expect the ratings to be completely inaccurate and useless. I've played CM10 (Chessmaster personality) on my friend's desktop and crushed it several times. There's no way I can do that to anyone with a supposed 2600+ rating.

I'd like to think they are pretty accurate. I played Flohr and kept offering draws after about 10 moves and they were always accepted. Got my rating over 2600 before I got bored.:

Didn't GM Christiansen lose a match to CM9?

He did. A 4-game match hosted on the ICC if I recall. I'm guessing they used one of those super-computers (or something in that direction) when the CM team was playing Larry. Not a fairly weak laptop.

You're right I didn't think about it

(The games are included and audio-commented by Christiansen himself in CM10; that's where I saw them)

no actually it was just a laptop (unlike the deep blue case) it was a four game match played by 4 different personnalities: match 1 was the alekhine personnality, match 2 was the fisher personnality, match 3 was the Botvinnik personnality and match four was played by the chessmaster personnality the one you mentioned with the 2600+ Elo. Christiansen won the first, lost the second and third and drew the fourth(but of course it wasnt no 10-20 minute game it was a 1:30-3:00 game

I wish I could find that game for the PS2