Dr Mehmet Mars Seven
Dr Mehmet Mars Seven is a game theorist and a lecturer in economics at King’s College London. He is the expert behind the Norway Chess Game Theory Corner and led the research and development of the Norway Chess Bar (Beta) and the Total Chess Rating, along with Norway Chess and its founder and CEO, Kjell Madland. The Total Chess Rating is the rating system of the Total Chess World Championship Tour.
In short
Game theory is the study of decisions when someone else is deciding too. In chess, your best move depends on what your opponent can do, and on whether a human player can find the right answer under pressure. Computers tell us the objectively best move they can find. Dr Seven looks at the human side: how likely a player really is to win, draw or lose, when sitting at the board with the clock running.
The Total Chess Rating is one number for how strong a player is across all three formats of the tour: classical, rapid and blitz. FIDE, the world chess federation, gives every player three separate ratings. The Total Chess Rating puts them together, so you can see at a glance who is strongest overall. Higher is stronger, and a player with the same rating in all three formats keeps that rating.
See the Total Chess Rating top 100
In depth
Chess and game theory
Chess and game theory have a long shared history. World Champion Emanuel Lasker wrote about a general theory of games, and in 1913 the mathematician Ernst Zermelo published a paper on “solving chess”, widely seen as the first academic work in the field.
At the top level, players don’t only look for the objectively best move. They choose practical strategies that put pressure on a human opponent in time trouble and tournament conditions. A position an engine calls equal can be very hard to hold over the board. Dr Seven’s work measures that gap between engine evaluation and practical chances.
The Game Theory Corner: Missed Points and Game Intelligence
At Norway Chess, Dr Seven leads the Game Theory Corner. Before each round, it gives the players’ chances of winning the tournament, taking the Norway Chess scoring system into account. After each round, it analyzes the games with two measures he developed:
Missed Points measure how much a player left on the table by deviating from the engine’s top line. Unlike conventional engine evaluations, they’re expressed in game points rather than pawns. 0 Missed Points is perfect play by engine standards. 1 is a game-losing mistake in a winning position, and 0.5 a game-losing mistake in a drawn position.
Game Intelligence (GI) measures a player’s ability to weigh risk against reward: when to press in complex positions and when to stay precise. It is standardised so that the human population average is 100, with about two-thirds of players between 85 and 115. Winners of major tournaments often reach 160 or more, and Magnus Carlsen holds the record at 161.
Missed Points and GI help explain how a result came about. High GI with low Missed Points is clinical play. High GI with medium Missed Points suggests well-timed risk-taking that paid off under human conditions. Low GI with low Missed Points suggests solid play without enough practical pressure, while low GI with high Missed Points suggests risk-taking that did not pay off.
This is why accuracy alone does not explain results. Wesley So had the highest accuracy at Norway Chess in both 2022 and 2023, yet Magnus Carlsen won the tournament in 2022 and Hikaru Nakamura in 2023. The model is built on more than one billion chess moves, over a million of them by the world’s top grandmasters, and on every World Championship game from 1886 to 2023. Move quality has risen over time as shown by falling Missed Points, and Viswanathan Anand is the most accurate World Champion by average Missed Points per game. Magnus Carlsen had the highest GI score.
The Norway Chess Bar
Kjell Madland told Dr Seven about his vision for a new kind of evaluation bar, and it took a long time to bring it to life. The Norway Chess Bar turns the engine evaluation into practical winning chances for human players, and it adjusts as the clocks run down, because the chance of finding the best moves changes with time. Where an engine shows “0.0”, a drawn position with perfect play, the bar might show that White has a 35% chance to win.
It made its public debut on the official Norway Chess broadcast in 2025, with Viswanathan Anand, Grandmaster Christian Chirila and International Master Anna Rudolf, and was soon nicknamed the “Magical Bar”. It is still in beta.
How the Total Chess Rating is calculated
Take a player’s FIDE classical, rapid and blitz ratings, Rc, Rr and Rb. The Total Chess Rating is
T = 400 · log₁₀( (10^(Rc/400) + 10^(Rr/400) + 10^(Rb/400)) / 3 )
In Elo, 10^(R/400) is a player’s playing strength on the scale behind the expected-score formula. The Total Chess Rating is the rating whose strength is the average of the player’s strengths in the three formats. The result is a single Elo rating: a player rated 2700 in all three has a Total Chess Rating of 2700, and the difference between two players predicts their score the usual Elo way. If the combined rating is to keep the natural properties of the Elo system, this formula is the only one that does.
For example, if one player has a Total Chess Rating of 2800 and another 2700, the 100-point difference corresponds to an expected score of approximately 64% for the higher-rated player.
Intuitively, this approximates the expected score you would get by selecting one of the three formats with equal chance and applying the usual Elo formula for that format.
But simply averaging the three format-by-format predictions does not always give a consistent overall ranking. It can produce a circle, where X is favoured over Y, Y over Z, and Z over X. For example, this happens with players rated (2800, 2400, 2000), (2400, 2000, 2800) and (2000, 2800, 2400).
No single rating can reproduce that circle. Total Chess Rating instead gives all three players the same rating, since they have the same three strengths arranged across different formats.
Read the technical details, with the formula, an example and the proof.
The list is updated each month from FIDE’s rating lists, and the Total Chess Rating is published as a draft for public feedback until the pilot event in Budapest.
