A question about ratings

We learn from critiques, It's a skill.  Some criticism could be interpreted as not being constructive. Always something you can learn from. I think it was great of "eric022" to put in the time. you posted this comment, "eric022 responded & it must not have been what you wanted to hear.

Depends on what you consider good.

Two points raised that I'll try my best to chip in:

1) If 800 is roughly better than 50% of players on chess.com, why do higher rated players say a rating of 1000-1200 is still weak when it's clearly better than most players?

2) What is a "good" rating?

Re point 1) This is because there is no expectation that the 'average' player is "good".  If you take the 'average' human, and ask him or her to run 100 meters, they might run it in 25 seconds. Let's say 25 seconds now represents the 50%. So you might say a 20 second run time is good, because its better than average and might be better than 70% of people.
However someone who runs either competitively or even for a hobby will have a different perspective and might not consider anything over 13 seconds as "good" and anything over 16 seconds being so uncompetitive, that a run time of say 16 or 23 seconds is of no consequential difference.

This is similar to how competitive or hobbiest chess players might think. A typical tournament player of 1600 might represent the 50% percentile of serious chess players, but would likely be better than 90% of all players. A 1600 would likely not even consider themselves good due to them being roughly at the mid-way point against competitive players, so it might be harder for them to recognise a 900 rated player as 'better than average' - even though it is.

There is no universally agreed upon definition of "Good". However this is a commonly accepted way to break down the rating brackets:

0-800 = New player.
800-1200 = Beginner/Improving Player
1200-1400 = Advanced Beginner/Weak Intermediate
1400-1800 = Intermediate Player
1800-2000 = Strong Intermediate / Advanced Player
2000-2200 = Expert
2200+ = Master strength

These are relative to competitive chess players though, again, even a 1200 "advanced beginner" by competitive standards might lose 90% of their games against tournament level chess players, they will likely win 90% of their games against the general public. So TL;DR - Good is a matter of perspective. Most people say good is 200 rating points higher than their own!

If you focus on learning chess, training tactics and following principles - the rating will take care of itself. Rating also doesn't rise overnight - sometimes it takes weeks or even months for rating to catch up with your newly gained knowledge from study sessions and lessons. It's all about consistency.

I think you are depreciating chess skill too much. For me I just think Total beginner up to 900, Beginner is up to 1400, Intermediate up to 1700, Advanced up to 2000, Expert yo 2300 and master for 2300+

One does not need to be a master or anywhere close to that to have a clue about how to play chess.

Once you know how the pieces move and all the rules and play, you have a clue. You will not be good at that point, but you can play. It is just a game.

Now good is something that is hard to define, but it must be well below master level for sure. I mean you don’t need to play in the NHL to be good at ice hockey or the NBA to be good at basketball. If you make the local team roster you are already good.

You either totally ignored or misunderstood my point about making the local team roster. By that I meant, you are good if you make your way into the local ice hockey team in your town. The team that is not in the NHL or even the AHL. It is just a team, say, the local University team or whatever, something like that.

I understand I did not make my point clear enough, so it is understandable you might have misunderstood.

Who cares about what some GM thinks? Yeah, maybe Wayne Gretzky didn’t think some players in the finnish league were good. So what?

This topic is not about what is master level. This is about what is a good level. Those are two very, very different things.

I think that the ranking and percentiles are for active players.  If you look at my stats, I have a rating and percentile for Rapid and Daily, but I have only a rating for Blitz (no percentile).  I have played both Rapid and Daily in the last 90 days (definition of active), but I have not played Blitz for years.  Also, I once went for over 90 days without playing Daily, my percentile disappeared.  It returned when I played another Daily game.

Agreed to some extent, perhaps a 2200 should be re-classified as a strong expert. The brackets I quoted above were not my own though, they are the typical categories you see when you google chess rating brackets. There is definitely a difference between a 2200 and a 2600. But hey, if you're a NM or CM or FM - Fair play to ya - it's a nice achievement.

On the subject of the lower band masters... this made me laugh at the time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRHnLK2eCtQ&t=565s

Go to 19:19

Because "good" is subjective and people love to tell you why their subjective opinions are objective. 

No. These other comments are just wrong. Active or not, people who just start out playing chess in the 1-5 month range attain a rating of 800 avg as indicated by the . Hanging a piece doesnt mean you're bad. Since 800 is the average, technically yes, everyone above 800 is better than average.

Depends on what the average is. If you take a look at the population, 400 would be above average

Reading this thread is almost like asking people to define what a woman is

Don't take my word for it, but I'm pretty certain that the percentile ranks include all accounts that were active in the past 90 days. 

It's because there are a lot of beginners on chess.com.

Back in the olden days, to play chess you had to go to a chess club, there was no such thing as the internet.  So it took a bit more dedication than it does to play on chess.com, where you can play at home whenever you feel like it.  As a result, clubs had a smaller percentage of beginners than is the case on chess.com -- the average rating back in the 1980s was about 1400.

That's a really interesting point. My first reaction was, "Oh yeah....those are two different things.".... then I thought, "But as the player pool gets bigger, the two converge", which makes sense. 
Then I thought, "What is objective skill at chess? Is it measured by your knowledge of tactics, theory, etc, or is it measured by your ability to beat other players in your pool?"  So I came full circle, now wondering if the two really are different.  
Please don't view this as argumentative. Your comment just stimulated my thinking and I really don't have conclusions. So whether I actually agree with your point or not, it's a really good one and, IMO, more complex than it might seem. 

I wonder how the 1400 player at that club would compare to the 800 player on chess.com. An 800 player here may have played 500 games. The average 1400 player at the club probably had nowhere near that many. It's not a question we can answer, but my point is that it's hard to compare from one era to the next. I'm very "average", I'd say. But I've played 350 games here, and I don't believe I would have ever gotten even this good relying on OTB play. I wouldn't have had as many games or as many opponents.