I've played chess for a number of years, now. Sick of the increasingly outrageous ICC membership fees, I found chess.com a couple of months ago and have started playing in this community instead. Whether it was configurable or not (unknown to me), my initial rating was set at 1200. I have a good idea of what my rating will be. But can you, through taking a look at my online games guess what it will be when it settles?  Post your rating and your guess as well as any interesting positions that occured that led you to your decision.  Will we find player rating correlates with estimate accuracy?  This could be an interesting experiment.

A. 1700-1799

B. 1800-1899

C. 1900-1999

D. 2000-2099

E. 2100-2199

F. 2200-2299

G. 2300-2399

F. 2400+

wouldn't this depend on how much you study?

I'm not sure I know what that means. I'm not a beginner who is currently studying chess if that answers anything. What I mean is this: my rating on chess.com is artificially low for 2 reasons:

1. They start you at 1200

2. It goes up significantly if you can beat much stronger players. Unfortunately you can't set a minimum rating for a seek at higher than your current rating.

So you are forced to play people at 1200, 1300, 1400, etc. until your rating gets high enough that someone stronger will be interested in playing you. How high will my rating get before I am finally playing people who are beating me instead of the other way around? What's your guess?  Obviously not for what my rating peak over my entire lifespan would be.  That's ridiculous.  I'm curious about the question: 

"Based on a set of games of a player with unknown rating versus one with known rating, can you tell from the quality of moves what the rating of the unknown opponent is?"

this would indeed be an interesting experiment, but requires a lot of time, and some luck to be accurate, mostly because we don't know if you have blitzed in some of those games or not. I'm in the exact situaton as you are, I haven't yet lost any games except timeouts, I haven't drawn any neither.

I'll try to make an estimation when I have time in a couple of days. until then, try not to lose any games, since it would be a huge hint. :) (I'm not counting the time-outs).

I looked at your game against maniac2008 though, and his/her level of play was sure wasn't at 1780 level. It resembled more of a mere 1200 something, mainly chesswise, but also for not having the foundation of etiquette to not resign in totally lost position.

Playing blindfolded, my wild guess is C. Based mainly in the way you "speak" chess rather than play it (don't have the time to go through your games pal).

I agree with diskamyl that it would be very tough to make an accurate assessment based only on your current game archives. For your avg. opp. rating is only around 1350 and your only losses were based on time-outs. I will say that you have a very good understanding of openings and middle-game from the three games I briefly looked at:...where I believe the Caro-Kann, the Queens Gambit declined, and the Scotch were played. If I had to go out on a limb I would say your rating will level out between a C and D range.... but like I said, it is way too early to tell.

Most people higher than 2400 on the Internet use engines--so maybe 2000.

That's really interesting.  Do you mean "speak" in this forum topic?  Or did you find some game notes?  I've definetely noticed a trend in the differences between the way strong players speak about chess vs. the more average-ly inclined.

I wish my average opponents were higher.  That would make this task much easier.  It's more a result of the fact that open seeks don't allow you to set a minimum rating greater than your current rating (which for me was 1200).  That, and I also thought it would be rude to challenge some stronger players without knowing them first.  So I figured I would just work my way up through the ranks with some games.

I do, tend to agree with diskamyl's earlier post regarding the maniac2008 game being not up to 1800 level.  I don't have the game in my archive anymore, but if I remember correctly it was a scotch where 5. Nf3?! was played after 4...Bc5.  After which, white's position is much worse.  There was some compensation for the pawn, but because of the white DS-bishop absence, not nearly as much as required as the DS-bishop would be needed to defend white's dark square complex as well as the blockading square for white's remaining isolated pawn.  Then after Bxf3 I was shocked to see Rxf3 losing a piece.  I wouldn't expect an 1800 to make this mistake.  But the only other player close to that in my experience on this site trapped his queen on something like move 10.  Incidentally, how closely related to "real-life" OTB 1800 is 1800 on this site?

I reckon you're good enough too get too 2100.

I'd say 2100 according to the current sample of games, but you'll need more games against people in the 1800-1900 range for this to be confirmed.

And if you look for stronger opponents, why not join a tournament, instead of only sending seeks ?

Yea that's what I say 2100, but seriously you don't have too be joining tournament's.

 and your evidence for this is what exactly? I agree there is probably a significant amount but to say *most* is pushing it a bit.  On this site for example you have to show ID and chess history once you reach a certain level and many of the top players have their games analysed to check for engine use...some have been banned as a consequence.  Besides diff websites have different rating ranges, I know two people on this site who have been in the top ten rated 2400-2500 here at the time and were 200-300 points higher on a rival site.  There just numbers and you can't compare 2400 here with 2400 elsewhere or with USCF or FIDE ratings.

To answer the original poster I'd say you'll definitely get to 2000+ but I'd need to see you play stronger players to be sure you would go further, of course you can only beat what you are up against...I never thought I would get as high as I have.

edit: to answer your other question how close a 1800 here to 1800 OTB, not very imo.  It's a lot easier to get to 1800 here.  Staying there my be tougher. I would say most 1800OTB players could be 2000-2100 here no problem, and if they really like correspondence and use the analysis board etc they can do better.

853

I'm almost sure of one 2500+ being a cheater here.

Just out of curiosity, how would you go about proving this?  I remember when Topalov-Kramnik was going on and Kramnik was accused of cheating.  The Topolov team showed that in one game there was 80% correlation between the moves played by Kramnik and another strong engine.  But what does that prove, really, besides the fact that Kramnik is a strong player?  Maybe you could take a look at blitz performance, expecting it to be high as well.  But like MM78 says on his profile, not everyone is good at blitz.  Take me for instance.  I'm a pretty decent slow player.  But when I play blitz the same scenario happens over and over:  I get a winning position, get into time trouble, spoil the winning position, and lose on time.  I simply don't have time to go through my "proof" process during blitz.  This keeps my blitz rating pretty low.  Sometimes cheating is obvious, though, right?  I would think it's pretty obvious in the case you're describing.  Otherwise, why point it out?

my evidence is that he has a higher rating than many GMs and IMs on this site, but he doesn't have any norms, and more curiously his real name shows absolutely no information about anything related to chess (no tournaments, no games, no elo, no fide membership, nothing) on google except some warez sites where you could download all kinds of pirated engines like rybka, hiarcs, etc.

C

Your Blitz rating is to low for you to be in the upper levels. But it's hard to say... your opponents have been low-rated  and your 1700+ opponents played bafflingly badly.

I've been wondering about this too.  I tend not to play blitz well because of time pressure.  I'm guessing that I'm around 2150-2200 on this site.  I think that it would be much lower on other sites like Freechess.org.  We'll see in a few months....