Expectations and Suspicions

There's SO much to learn and so many sources of information (both good and bad) a virtual beginner like me can easily go off on an unwise tangent and waste lots of time pursuing the answer to any single question. One of the most current topics of discussion in the chess community seems to be the prevalence of cheating with the aid of computer analysis so it's hard not to think about it. And of course, if you're a beginner and losing more than what you think are a fair number of games it can give rise to suspicions about your online opponents.

But perhaps your expectations are skewed.

I've just finished wading thru one of the forum posts and this is what I've taken away from it:

• When you first make a chess.com account your initial rating is set according to your choice of several options (like 'new', 'beginner', 'intermediate', 'master').
  A true beginner Elo rating is 100 - 300 on chess.com. They have set an artificial ratings limit which prevents you from going lower than that.
  Once your rating is at an appropriate level, you will start to win about 1/2 of your games. 
  Rating is not the best guage of improvement in the short term. Ask yourself if your current self could beat a version of yourself from a month ago.
• You can't compare accuracies across different games and across different ratings. You can't compare games with different degrees of difficulty and say that the player who did worse in the more difficult game was more accurate than the player who did better in the easier one.