A question about ratings

Out of the rated players, a lot of the accounts of lower-rated players are not very active. Amongst the more active ones, those typically of lower ratings tend to lose games by simply hanging pieces.

@eric0022 That doesn't answer my question. If ratings above 800 are above average, why are 800-1199 considered bad, when they clearly aren't?

It does answer. Part of the reason why ratings of 800 are average is due to these accounts being not active.

Without these, the average ratings are supposed to be higher.

As for the "bad" portion, like I mentioned, players of rating below 1200 have tendencies to hang pieces and overlook simple ideas.

In short, I expect much more mistakes at the 800-1199 level than I would for say 1500-1800. 

That said, I wouldn't call a 1000 rated player that bad, but more of inexperienced in general.

Take your game against mikethetop, for example.

13...Qxe4 is quite a blunder considering that the queen on b7 protects that pawn, but your opponent blundered by missing it.

Your opponent played an equally bad blunder with 15. Qxe4+.

16. Bxd8 was pretty obvious to be played, but it was not played.

These in itself are things which do not appeal to higher rated players when they make the conclusion "players under 1200 are bad".

If I had not looked at the rating of the players, I would have guessed that White was 800+ rated and Black was around 1000+ to 1100+ rated - not too bad in itself, but improvements are still possible.

So what is the average, then, if you remove these inactive accounts?

It could well to increase to, say, 950 or 1000. I am no Chess.com staff, so these are just my personal estimates. I'm sure the Chess.com team have published the number of active accounts and the total number of accounts created at some point in the last few years.

Noted. Also, I did not need you to criticise one of my games. I'll be honest, given the attitude of the majority of this community, I'm past caring. I'm not interested in improving much further. Maybe I've just lost patience, but whatever.

For the bolded point, your account is under 1 year old. Different players have different progression rates. Give yourself more time. You should be able to surpass a rating of 900 or 1000 within a few months,

I criticise games from time to time (and I have been on the receiving end of game criticisms of my own before), though I usually do not do so - I participate in other discussions more often than not.

Also, note that a player rated 500 would not likely call a rating of 1000 "bad". It's a subjective point. But if @tygxc comes in to this thread, you can expect him to mention something along the lines of "...do not make blunders and your rating will be 1500".

Hi,

There's a difference between the level of skill and the rating of a player in a specific pool of players. A measure of skill can be determined in chess by the quality of their play, such as with engine analysis as an example, while a rating is a measurement of a player's ability against others in the same pool of players. You can have a bunch of players who just know how the pieces move, a few players who have played a few years and know a thing or two, and put them into a rated pool and after a few months and several hundred games those few players will likely have high ratings in that player pool- but are they "good" chess players? No, their ratings reflect that they are better than the majority of others in their player pool. That's what ratings ultimately measure, not objective chess skills.

When you have a site like Chess.com with millions of users and accounts, and the vast majority of players are either new to chess, casual players who don't necessarily study but play occasionally, players returning to the game after many years, and so on, the majority of players will have ratings <1200 as we see on Chess.com now. When you take the average of those player pools then, the average is overall lower because the majority of the players ratings are lower. Now you can say 900 may be the 50 percentile of the player pool, but that's a reflection of their ability to compete and win against that player pool, it does not indicate their actual chess skills objectively. People infer a subjective opinion on ratings in regards to the chess skill of the player.

TL;DR: Ratings are not a skill measurement but a performance measurement against other players in that specific pool measurement, therefore being 50% in the player pool is not an indication of chess skill and why players may say 50 percentile players are still in the beginner category of chess in terms of their knowledge and skill at the game in comparison to the overall knowledge and skill possible in the game as we know it. 

Hope that answers your question, and if you ever want help working on your chess I'd be happy to! Chess should be fun! 

-Jordan

some exponential thing on rating system could solve the problem ig. This basically creates some concentration on certain levels and the shape is suitable to |x|^y solving. It would not solve 100% but would improve skill measurement. A player should have 3 ratings I think: Tournament rating, Pool performance and skill @jg777chess

A grandmaster will say an NM doesn' know how to play chess

A NM will say CMs don't know how to play chess

A 2000 rated player will say anybody below 1800 sucks at chess

People saying 1200s are beginners that don't know how the pieces move are just proud chess players who want to feel good about themselves.

If 800 is the site medium level, then a 800 is an average player. And I dare say better than the average human when playing chess, because the target audience of a site like this are bound to be better at chess than the average person.

I can say that most players under 1000 are indeed beginners, but they have no business calling you a "bad player" - that's a relative term, and you can definitely be personally proud of pretty much any rating.

true

@jg777chess spot on

YV,

With all due respect to the many opinions of others you have heard,

as is documented in the image below, when I go to your 'Rapid' games

> Statistics > Full Statistics your 806 rating puts you in the 54.9 percentile.

You are ahead of more that half of 'all of us.' ..... if I am correctly understanding this stat....

That is what I 'see' as Chess.com's explanation of the 54.9 stat when I hover my cursor of it.

If this is correct, how is better than half bad (no pun intended : ))))?

Hi,

I addressed this in my earlier post, ratings are a measure of your skill in relation to the player pool you’re in, not your objective skill at chess. 

-Jordan

And there are lots of inactive 400s if you only count active players most of them are ~1000 ig

Purr to all you paw(n)s 🐾😹, I have a situation with my ratings, well the real problème is the network. When i start a game and play a few moves, sometimes only the first move, because of reconnexion issues, the game just abandons, and it costs me my ratings. i've been trying hard to learn and improove my game but i just wish I could come up to the 400 that I started with. Any suggestions ? Anyone I Can write to like the moderators to scan my games and allot me the scores that I feel I lost in an unfair and annoyingly unjust manner... 😭

Do lessons, puzzles and play longer time controls. You have diamond membership.

10 minutes game at our rate is "guess" not "chess" . (I play blitz only for opening and will stop when I get the opening basics)