I am Useless! EDIT-4K

I had this experience with two games other than chess. As a kid, my family had both a pool and a ping-pong table. I grew up with these and I thought I was pretty good. I could beat all of my friends. I closed many bars in college holding the bar table undefeated. And I won a high school table tennis tournament.

well, when I got to graduate school, I met a guy who played on the Taiwan table tennis team. I couldn’t score a point against him. And I met a professor who lived in the pool halls after class (he gave grad students the number of the pool hall if he wasn’t in his faculty office). He could blitz me in any form of pool. What I thought was pretty good was basically at the novice level for serious competitors. In my chess career, I have seen the same thing many times.

To be fair, if he is in that national team, you not scoring a point doesn't say much about your skill. You might still be an excellent amateur player, as that wasn't really a fair competition. He is a very good pro.

That guy is probably in top 100 in the world, as they always have a couple of people like that, sometimes they have people in top 10 as well.

One have around the same chance of beating an above average NBA player in 1 on 1 basketball. This is how difficult that would be.

And the point is clear, there are so many levels to chess, and expecting too much from yourself if you haven't dedicated a lot of time to it is unrealistic.

I'm sorry, but there is WAY too much of this "nothing to see here, look at yourself first" kind of bs when regarding unfair play suspicions. If you're not IN their elo range, ***you're not playing in the same pool of opponents***-- isn't that the go-to line that you guys like to use. I'm not a fan of fueling cheater paranoia, but I'm also not a fan of people being outright dismissed and told "skill issue; git gud", in a chess meta environment in which an engine cheating scandal just happened at the most elite levels of play.

One of the problems of this site is that they have changed accuracy in 2021. in order for lower rated people to feel better about their games.

I had a game where I had below 20 accuracy back then, and it is now judged as 50+.

This increased accuracy make people believe that their opponents are playing well, because they do not posses the knowledge to see that one can have 70 accuracy and have a terrible game (it lasted for about 10 moves, my opponent blundered material 3 times and got around 70 accuracy, because other moves were regular ok opening moves).

When someone like @mikewier looks at the games of 300 - 500 rating range, what do you think he will see?

He will see bad moves galore, almost every move or every other one, not even the basic stuff is implemented. He will see problems since the start of your games, for you and your opponents.
That is why I offered to analyze a few of your games, to show you how many mistakes are there actually.

How do I know this? I played a lot of games, unrated ones, against people below 1 200, analyzed a lot of games between novice players because I wanted to help some of those people who wanted to get better.

Nobody is saying that there is no cheating. There absolutely is. Tens of thousands of people are caught every month. But in all reality 95% or even more of people at this rating range are playing fairly, as they play so badly (it needs to be said as it is) that pointing out cheating at this level as a reason for not getting better is just not justifiable.

Online cheating is a much bigger problem on let's say 2 300 - 2 400 rating level, and especially on master level because of the money events.