Chess.com vs. USCF Rating

As many have pointed out, this is a topic discussed almost daily. The latest thread with member and staff participation seems to be about half a year old. I think I've found a new approach to analyzing this topic. My son loves chess and he has a USCF rating of 713P15 but a ~1300 rating here for standard live chess (he plays 15|10 or 30|0). I think he is underated but can't help wondering by how much. He will go to OTB tournaments in a few weeks but I'd really like to know his rating range to place him in the right section. As previous discussions have pointed out, some people post their USCF rating here, but not many and few would update it often as their USCF ratings change. I did something differently. My son's rating was 1377 when I did this. I figured diamond members are more likely to pay for a USCF membership so I looked for diamond members with a real name, or at least what looks like a real name. If he/she also shares state of residence, I can then look for up-to-date USCF rating. With the combination of name, state, and a rough estimate of rating from chess.com, I was able to make many matches in the narrow range of 1372-1382 from chess.com player search. Here is the data with their chess.com username removed. I have a year rated column for USCF because many people have long expired membership and they haven't played a USCF rated game and the USCF rating may not be accurate. Overall, if a player is active at chess.com and at USCF, the ratings tend to match very well. And in several cases, chess.com rating is actually lower probably due to the seriousness factor.

chess.com    USCF    year rated    note
1378    1249    1985   
1402    1691    1990   
1381    1375    1990   
1402    1241    1992   
1375    1545    1994   
1380    1409    1998   
1378    1267    1999   
1374    1065    2004   
1372    875    2006   
1377    1742    2008   
1375    1014    2009   
1382    1390    2011   
1382    983    2011    1 game
1382    1386    2011   
1377    1247    2011   
1374    1608    2011   
1380    1332    2012   
1374    1699    2012   
1375    1542       
1372    1457       

Uh, put him in the rating section with the other class G players.

I say U1200.

It is much easier to figure out where to have your son play than trying to find some correlation between USCF and Chess.com ratings. Look at all the games he has played before and note the ratings of the players he has lost/won/drawn against.

I took a look, based on the information you gave above, and I would agree with c_pawn, U1200 if that is available or possibly U1000 if that is available.

Since he has only won one game with a player above 1200, I wouldn't think of putting him in any higher group (other than an Open) unless you just want him to get exposure to stronger players and he can handle the losses.

There really isn't a very good correspondence between Chess.com ratings and USCF ones. My Blitz here is close to my current OTB rating but the conditions of both styles are completely different and shouldn't be expected to match. Standard time controls are the ones that might tend to be the closest but with a different pool of players, they won't necessarily match there either.

He played with G & I players (400-799) and now is an F. We are a bit far from big city so not yet playing in an under-1200.

Definitely your son will be playing approximate fide elo 1150-1250. Because normally, chess.com rating is a little higher than fide/uscf by 100-200 minimum.

Both my USCF rating and Chess.com are above 1700, I haven't played live chess USCF since traveling to China, and my Chess.com rating has improved.

I think they can be very complemtary , online you can analyze the position, use opening tutors, but each player can do that, so there are fewer blunders than in live chess for sure.

I also found when playing over the board after having been awhile three things stood out. Getting used to playing on a real board rather than a computer screen really threw me off for a while. So now I practice ona real board a lot.

Online chess with 2 to 3 days to make a move helped me practice a lot, but I would often mix my games up in terms of what I was planning. Still I got used to being able to analyze the positions, and forgot how to do so at a good level in my head. My positional increased a lot, but my over the board tactical play dropped a lot.

playing over the board helped so much to simply slow down and calculate, shortly afterwards my online rating jumped and both my over th board play and online play were running around 1730.

Since being away from over the board my online has climbed to over 1780, but I miss the live play