http://www.chess.com/members/member_countries.html

Country	Members	Percent	Avg. Rating	Top Rated
United States	2122194	42.55%	1280	HikaruNakamura (2700)

http://www.chess.com/members/view/HikaruNakamura

So why is he listed as top rated player from USA on this site with 2700 rating if he hasn't moved a piece over here?

Maybe he's busy?

may be the 90 day criterion applied to his games..(during non premium days)

Maybe he's rated OTB 2700? That shouldn't make a difference anyways.

Weird indeed. 

based on what?

Here he is beating former world champion Veselin Topalov in a blindfold game.  I believe he won the Tata Steel tournament last year ahead of Viswanathan Anand, Magnus Carlsen, Levon Aronian and Vladimir Kramnik.  He does seem to have a lot of potential, doesn't he? 

how these guys play blindfold... cant  even imagine

How did he get a 1280 rating here? They used to start everyone off at 1200 but now i think new players are listed as unrated.

it is to be construed as the the average rating for all users with country listed "United States"

say one guy is 2700 on top and 1000   players 990 rated will give an average of 991

I meant to say, why is he listed as top rated player from USA with 2700 rating in online chess when he hasn't played a single online game. Why not put someone who has actually played on this site and got rating?

You'll note that the rating is in parentheses, which is just a guesstimate of a rating based on his USCF or FIDE rating. So for a chess.com rating, it should be about 3000.

Still, what's really disturbing is that the average US player on chess.com is rated 1280!!

Topalov was not world champion... classical only please...

From 1999-2004, the FIDE world championships were I believe held at a time control of 90 minutes for the first 40 moves, but the 2005 world championship in San Luis which Topalov won was held at a "classical" time control of 2 hours for the first 40 moves.  Both Kramnik and Kasparov were sent invitations to play at San Luis, but declined.

I think NM reb here considers Topalov to be a world champion, but not the rapid knockout champions of 1999-2004.

i remember reading somewhere in chess.com itself a computation/ratio of converting USCF rating to chess.com.. May be such a formulae exists for FIDE too.. but i am not sure..

Ratings comparisons between different chess organizations and forms of chess are never particularly valid...too many variables.