Hi

Are the chess.com ratings based on elo or uscf?

Uscf i think are about 100 points higher than elo.

so if i am 1700 elo i would be 1800 uscf.

Or are chess.com ratings using another system.

Hi Orientpal,

Chess.com uses an elo rating system.  It is generally acceptted (but unconfirmed by Chess.com) that the online ratings here are about 200 point HIGHER than USCF ratings.  It would be nice if Chess.com could/would confirm this.

Watch your backrank.

Thanks jchurch5566 for the very quick reply.

my rating is about 100 higher then my uscf at the moment anyways

chess.com uses a glicko system.  Its ratings are typically about 100-200 points higher than ratings given by the USCF, which use a glicko-elo combination.  In turn, USCF ratings are typically 100 points higher than ratings given by FIDE, which uses the ELO system.  Confused yet?

FIDE ratings are sometimes called ELO ratings, though it's incorrect to pose the question the way you asked it.

Elo is a person, not an acronym.

His name was Arpad Elo, and he came up with the system that bears his name.

Whatever system you use, keep in mind that the whole purpose is to provide a number that shows the relative ranks of the people playing.  Your rating here will not be the same somewhere else, because the stats underlying it are different.  If you click on "View Players" on the Online Chess page of the My Home tab, you can see the ranking curve.  That is the curve that the system was picked to model.

Chess.com uses Glicko because it is actually more accurate than other systems and suffers a little less from inflation/deflation.

Im actually rated +- the same here or in fide 1830 but online chess tend to be inflated most of the cases and if I understud the question correctly

Are the chess.com ratings based on elo or uscf?

USCF as far as I know uses the Elo system to estimate a player strength there is no USCF system

I don't have a USCF or FIDE rating, but I am sure I would be atleast 300, probably more like 400, points higher on this site than I would be in real life. I bet others are this way too. Think about it, we can use databases and books to look up openings well over 20 moves, there is no time pressure, we don't have to sit across from some stranger but instead make the moves whenever we want in our own home, not to mention all the wins on time.

wahh my head hurts why cant we all adopt a stupid standeredized rating (ssr) lol

Well said slycooper

i try to keep it simple :P

The reason the ratings are inflated is that everyone here starts at a rating of 1200, no matter how good or bad they are.  A person rated 1200 in the US Chess Federation has some positional sense, will only blunder a piece or pawn about once a game on average if they are playing over the board, and will know their most used openings 6 or 7 moves deep.  And if they start a tournament game they won't abandon it.

Most people here take a while to get to that skill level, but since they start with a 1200, the overall ratings numbers are shifted upward.  That is OK, since this rating system shows the relative skills of people within a group, but it is hard to correlate the numbers to rating systems used by other groups.

There are also other factors that influence ratings, such as how much time you spend on a move, or how many times you lose on time, that don't have as much to do with your innate chess skill.

I am just under 1800 USCF, but here I have gotten above 2200, because I rarely time out, and I am pretty obsessive about thinking through my moves.  Most people have a smaller spread between their OTB rating and their chess.com rating.

Don't forget, your opponent has the same advantages that you do.

My experience is that midrange ratings here are USCF + 300.  For the higher end, I would say it's more like + 200 (look at my own for an example).