What are your real world ratings vs your chess.com ratings? I've recently started to get more serious at chess and I'm curious where i would be if I participated in an actual  OTB  tournament.

Oh and BTW I know this isn't a completeley accurate way to predict anything I'm just curious.

For me the standard rating seems to be pretty much accurate - chess.com rating somewhere in the 1300s, first OTB rating 1326.

Correspondence and bullet ratings here are said to be inflated. I don't play correspondence, but my blitz and bullet ratings are well below my standard rating (around 1200) since I'm just very bad at playing quick.

[COMMENT DELETED]

I tend to do much better at correspondence chess as opposed to OTB...

 

I've never played rated games before, so does anybody else have an idea what ~1500 in CC and ~1300 Standard means in OTB?

Will the freshness of the oranges in my refrigerator give me a clue as to whether the apples have gone soft?

If you put the apples and oranges in at the same time, I don't see why not. 

Sure, they might spoil at different rates, but it's still a approximate gauge. Better, say, then closing you eyes and hoping for the best...

As an approximation, your blitz rating is a rough indicator of OTB, plus/minus 100 points or so, provided you have played plenty of games here and dont have an average opponent rating very low compared to your rating.

There is no accurate mechanism for such predictions. Those who have gathered data on the subject have found wide variances, although the averages mentioned by Rainbow Rising will hold true in some cases. I personally know people who are much higher rated than me here and substantially lower rated OTB--people who have played in OTB events in which have played. The reverse is true in the case of others in my circle of flesh and blood acquaintances.

 

I might put the apples and oranges in the refrigerator at the same time, but there are far more variables that will impact how long each remians fresh, including the kind of apple, the freshness when picked, the storage prior to arrival at my grocery, ... They are both fruit, just as the USCF ELO rating and the Chess.com Glicko rating are calculated with roughly similar formulae. They are both good for me too. But the performance of an orange will never reliably predict the endurance of an apple.

---

I liked this better as "flask and blood". :-)

---

iPad autocorrect makes me want to burn Steve Jobs in effigy. I had to turn on my desktop to fix it.

It does offer a new spin on an old metaphor. ;-)

Compare games, not ratings.

Here's a horrible OTB game with a shocking rating mismatch.

---

A single 6-round performance != rating.

---

Chess.com rating are inflated because it is free and the required commitment is low. Lots of really weak players have almost average ratings from beating even weaker players. ICC ratings are deflated for a similar reason--only serious chess players join.

---

 Even then that isn't a huge gap. I would say that a 1600 player and a 1700 to be more or less on the same level. I wasnt expecting chess.com to be accurate to less than a hundred points either.

I have two Yahoo! chess accounts, and they currently differ by ~150 points.

One I play at lunchtimes, and one I play in the evenings (they got set up on different computers, with 2 different default email accounts).

If 2 ratings for the same player can be so different under 1 system, should it be a surprise that 2 ratings under different systems, and under different playing circumstances should differ?

Interesting question. I believe that chess.com ratings may be slightly higher than OTB, but still a reasonable reflection of player strength.

As a rule-of-thumb I would say:

Bullet & Correspondance - Not comparable.

Blitz - Try hard to get a good blitz rating here, get used to the interface etc. Then minus 100 points from your average/consistent rating, 150 if you want to be cautious about it. That should be about your FIDE rating (USCF rating should be a bit higher than that).

---

Ziryab: no. How high ratings are has nothing to do with whether serious or weaker players are there. The chess site could inflate everyone or deflate everyone if they wanted to. It doesn't have anything to do with the level the average player is at. The average rating could be over 1800 at ICC if they wanted it to... they could add 200 to every player over night. 

The slightly deflated ratings at ICC and Playchess could be because serious chessplayers like to be more on the conservative side. They would like to be able to say: "okay, if I can get 2000 consistently on ICC blitz then I can do it in real life". They like it to be on the pessimistic side rather than the optimistic side.... nobody would like to think they're quite good at something only to find out differently in real life after hours of preparation.

Uhoh, nice picture! It is true that sites can manipulate their ratings, and some have. But there are other variables, too. Every one of these endless discussions has required pointing out that different pools of players differ. How does the chess.com pool differ from that on ICC? 1200 players on ICC have basic skills usually lacking among 1200 players OTB, and almost wholly absent from 1200 players on chess.com. I am speculating that cost is a contributing factor leading to the average player being better skilled. The ELO and Glicko rating systems assign 1500 to the average, and over time the site's pool may come close to that. If the various sites then manipulate their rating in order to enforce 1500 as average, the below average player at ICC, I suggest, will be better skilled than the slightly above average players at chess.com.

---

That's true, and it is complicated. My point is that it's too complicated to put it down to reasons like one group of players is better than another. At fics the human average used to be about 1423 and is decreasing all the time, now it's in the 1380s and they still won't inflate it... this does not mean that the best players are on fics, which is a free server.

So while they might tend to follow your scenario, I was just pointing out that it doesn't have to be that way as a rule.

I'm still trying to comprehend the strangeness I encounter at FICS. Players that exhibit notorious absence of basic opening and endgame skills handle complicated tactics extremely well. Perhaps CTS has contributed to aberrant skill development. I stopped playing at ICC several years ago, but returned for s few months recently--my rating is 300-400 lower now, while my OTB has gone up about that much since I stopped playing regularly there. The skill I'm seeing among some 1300 players the is astounding. 1300s in Live on chess.com are easy picking after a few glasses of wine.