It depends what you are into the game for. Art or some aesthetic? Competition? The girls?

Which is the wrong one?

USCF ratings dont include random disconnects.

A player can be mislead by ratings . What it comes down to is what you do in the game , wither it's Kasparov or your kid sister.

I'm curious and excited to see what my USCF would be. I'll be playing in my first rated tournament in a few weeks. I played in an unrated one a year ago but the competition wasn't very good. Just from what I know and people who I can beat that are rated, I think I'd be about 1300-1400.

 No matter who or what you play always play good chess.

 This is a common misconception about Chess ratings. They don't measure chess skill or knowledge. They measure the likelihood that one player will beat another within a given population.

Rating are based on the populations they occur in.  There are a lot more people playing on Chess.com, and the population is world-wide.  The numbers don't necessarily reflect that people are "better" on Chess.com, and it doesn't necessarily reflect that the population here is making their moves more slowly or have access to reference material while playing.

It's very typical to obsess about rating, but rating is only a relative indicator of strength, and it means nothing outside of the population it occurred in.  For more information, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

HA! Ichabod had almost the same response as me, but he beat me by 1 minute.

A rating of 1600 on chess.com puts you in the top 20% of members.

Does this mean that only the top 20% of this site would have a chance to be rated 1200 or higher USCF?

I used to play both OTB and correspondence USCF tourmaments.  I haven't played USCF for over ten years, but my correspondence rating is about 150 points higher than my OTB rating @1825 versus @1675.  My chess.com rating is similar to my correspondence chess rating. I think it takes a little different aptitude to play correspondence , turn based chess and ratings will be different.

That said, my USCF Quick chess rating is also 1800+  so go figure.

I care not for the ratings.  So long as an enjoyable game is played. I never played uscf, fide, nor icc. Probably wont.. there's enough interesting players here that could humble me with ease. So let's play a fun game.. forget the ratings. They're only good when playing timed, face to face, encounters. No aides, books, kibitzing, etc. Just one brain against another!

Hi guys,

I sure wish Chess.com would do a little research and give us an answer to this question.  It comes up at least once a month.  Surely, Chess.com has enough data to give us some hard number crunching answers.

 I'm a statistician, I could run a regression on the data. Of course, there's probably some privacy thing such that they can't give me the data, even with any identifying information stripped from it.

thank you for your comments

Here are the datapoints for 7 people I know both on here and off here:

chess.com 'Online Chess' vs USCF 'Standard'

2250 1300

2050 1750

2050 1400

1900 1400

1800 1500

1750 1700

1400 1500

If you're under 1400 in 'Online Chess', you're probably under 1100 OTB because you still hang pieces. Beyond that I'm not sure there's much correspondence. That's also why I mostly play timed games rather than correspondence chess to prepare for OTB events.

Live 'Long' ratings probably correspond best to OTB ratings.

That data set is a bit small.

The best fit I've found so far(let U=uscf rating and C=chess.com rating) is

C=-7.3*10-8(U)^4+.000481(U)^3-1.1649(U)^2+1232.21(U)-478642

Yeah, it's nasty, not easy to write in a text editor, and R^2=.7966 so it's probably the best bet I'm going to find without getting out some serious computing power.

I was actually referring to likesforest's post, two examples isn't even worth running regressions on.

 Define "chess skill." Is how much sleep I got last night part of chess skill? Because I think it will definitely affect my chess performance, which is what the rating system uses to make it's estimates. Also, chess skill is different within different populations, and ratings are population dependent. Furthermore, since ratings are population dependent, it doesn't make sense to compare ratings from different populations. My Chess.com rating is not in any way "inflated." It is an unbiased a represenation of my performance within the Chess.com population. No, it is not a good representation of my performance in the USCF population. But it was never intended to be that, and it never claimed to be that. It is, however, a common misconception that it can be used in such a fashion. 

 Since the point of the original poster was how the ratings here equate with USCF, we had to try to answer even if they are two different populations, playing under different time controls and in very different settings. Ultimately an otb chess player with some years of experience notices when players here with a 1600 cc rating play with nowhere near the skill of the 1600s he is familiar with otb. So the comparison is made and the conclusion is that the 1600 here is "inflated" (not technically the right term but the one we use without much of a stumbling block) relative to the 1600 USCF. We also note that the chess skill of the obt-ers vs. that of the onliners isn't reflected in their similar ratings, as expected.

While ratings don't directly reflect a level of chess skill, as was stated, those adults with long-established ratings have an excellent idea what those numbers imply for those like them and serve as a fair predictor for the result of many games vs.many opponents of likewise established status.