A couple of important rating lists were released yesterday. There was the FIDE list, as well as the Australian Rating List. The release of the FIDE rating list results in some extra work for me (due to my roles as QC Secretary), not so much the ACF list (having stopped being the ACF Ratings Officer long ago).
A lot of the extra work is due to people 'chasing' numbers. For example, I received a request to certify a player as the youngest ever player to get a rapid rating. 'Nope, not doing it' was basically my reply, as (a) this is something FIDE does not do and (b) such records are exploitative.
But a more general issue of this nature is players only wishing to play certain players or events. This is because they wish to maximise their chances of a rating increase. The flipside of this is that possibly maximise a rating decrease for an opponent, which should hardly be considered 'fair'. To paraphrase a popular saying 'ratings don't care about your feelings'. They simply measure your results against other players, and to be truly accurate, that group of players should be reasonably representative of the general chess playing population. 'Gaming' the rating system at best is a short term fix for yourself, but ultimately creates problems for other chess players.
