BCF - ELO conversion?

Does anyone know how to convert from one rating to the other? It's confusing at my chess club, as most British players only know their BCF and most Europeans only know their ELO.

Originally posted by untergang
Does anyone know how to convert from one rating to the other? It's confusing at my chess club, as most British players only know their BCF and most Europeans only know their ELO.

I think a rough approximation can be found using:

ELO = (BCF * 8) + 600
or
BCF = (ELO - 600) / 8

Incidentally not all British players use the BCF system. In Scotland we use ELO, I guess that makes us more European than British! 🙂

Edit - SicilianMaug's answer (posted at the same time) seems more complete.

I heard somewhere recently (perhaps in the forums here) that the calculation had been modified to ELO = 1250 + (BCF*5) which would have the effect of increasing lower and reducing higher BCF ratings in the conversion.

Originally posted by davidmacc
Incidentally not all British players use the BCF system. In Scotland we use ELO, I guess that makes us more European than British! 🙂

The BCF never had any say over what happenned in Scotland, so they renamed it the ECF last year to finally admit to Scotland's chess independence.

The post that was quoted here has been removed

Certainly my rating here equates more to 1250 + (5 * ELO) having hovered amount 142 - 148 for about 10 years before a run of poor form in the past few years sent it plumetting to 125. At the moment I feel confident my efforts here will have it back to the 140s again in the near future. If I can break 2000 here I might even be hoping for 150+.