Average chess player ability increasing?

Just a question regarding someone that is 1000 ELO today, would their actual chess ability be the same as someone that is 1000 ELO say two years ago?  I'm talking about chess.com rating.

Thanks!

 So essentially more people in the pool means rating is harder to achieve?  Since generally majority of the people new to the pool are going to be lower ranked I wonder if it only effects lower ELO players? or ratings across the board are harder to reach than they were a couple of years ago.

I would have thought that the increase in players due to the lockdown would tend to inflate the ratings somewhat, so that a 2020 rating of 1000 wouldn't be worth as much as a 2018 rating of 1000.

My reasoning is that with a wide choice of initial ratings... you can select to start your account at 800, 1200, 1600 or 2000 as I recall... most players would enter at 1200 or so, but the average rating AFTER playing a hundred games or so is around 1000 to 1100. So excess rating points are being pumped into the system by the swarm of new players, and this would tend to inflate (and devalue) existing ratings.

But you also get lots of cheaters. They steal rating points out of the pool, then get their account banned, thus lowering everyone's ratings.

Overall I'd say that most ratings today are pretty similar to how they were 10 years ago.

Except bullet on this site. Bullet on Chess.com is significantly less inflated compared to how it was 10 years ago.

I do believe average chess strength is increasing. There r so many different ways to study and play now that weren't available decades ago. I know ur only comparing 2 years ago but I'm thinking over the long term.

I think the typical 1000 of today would score well above 50% against a 1000 of say 1990 or before.

 

That is not how ratings work or banning works.... o_O

When someone is banned, it is like those games never happened. Your score is rebalanced. 

...Could that explain why rating bumped up to 1500 from 1150 one month after I got back into chess, or is it a combination of getting better and the inflated rating. 

 

I don't think the quarantine has nothing to do with it. Unless the Coronavirus has now infected the rating system. I never thought a rating system could catch a virus. 

I would think that average players today are marginally better than those of a couple of years ago. Every year people have more and more access to tools that help them improve like videos, puzzles, and access to challenging play. I especially think that the middle ranked players have improved greatly over the last generation, but that’s just conjecture.

Not your question, but I think the rating deflation may happen in tournament chess more so than online (at least in regards to like 1000-2000 USCF) after this pandemic. In online, my guess is there are enough lower-rated players who are just trying it out to see how they like it that the distribution shouldn't change much (just my guess). Then again, like any activity, play in chess probably doesn't get worse over time (i.e. top players today>top players 20 years ago, average players today>average players 20 years ago, etc.)

Until you reach my age.

... what were we talking about, again?

I think the average chess player of today is better than the average player 20 yrs ago. Online playing has helped a lot. Pre internet it could be difficult to find a similar rated player for a game, now its easy 24/7

 

The only reason Carlsen is the best is because he has access to an engine. If Bobby had access to extremely powerful engines, he would be the best. Why? Because Bobby was self taught and he annihilated every of his competitors. His peak rating is also quite close to Carlsen's which is impressive because he did not have access to engines and computers and has more limited reading resources as there was no such thing are Amazon back then. 

Magnus can press go and analyze more precisely a game in a few minutes than all the top 10 players in the world working together could in a day. Bobby taught himself Russian just so he could read Russian chess books. Imagine. Bobby was horrible man, but I refuse to believe that given modern training methods he wouldn’t be the best player in the world.

Ratings systems, like IQ, are designed to measure relative skill, not absolute skill. For instance, the average IQ by definition is 100 for a given population even though 100 today is much”smarter” than 100 fifty years ago. It is the same for ELO.

It is possible to rate players based on overall player accuracy compared to a computer, but this also presents problems.

There is a Wikipedia entry called “Comparison of top chess players throughout history” if you are interested.

They'll only reapply rating points if it was your most recent game. Otherwise, you're out of luck.

For example, let's say I make a fresh account. My rating starts off as 1800. My first game, I play vs a cheater and lose 400 rating points. Now I'm down to 1400 rating.

Then I play 20 more games, winning most of them, and bringing my rating up to 2000. And then they detect that the player was cheating and they ban him...

Do you really think they're going to give me my 400 rating points back now, thus bringing me up to 2400?

I stand by my point that cheaters steal rating points out of the pool, thus deflating ratings.

However, I'll add that new users signing up to the site, losing a few games and then quitting, adds rating points to the pool, thus inflating ratings.

So it's a question of which effect is more powerful.

Don’t forget that there is a large percentage of good players who have multiple accounts for “training” purposes so as not to mess up their ratings. This makes it seem that that are far more 1500+ players than there actually are.

Interesting question. You would think a player of any given level today would be better than say 20 years ago because the chess universe generally increases in knowledge. Because that is what you are competing against, it takes more to achieve the same rating at a later date. Then again, maybe there is no inflation in the sense people think, just increasing chess knowledge that results in a truly better players at a later date, even if they lack originality or did any of the groundbreaking work to achieve that knowledge. In that case, this would mean that the Fischer of 1972 is roughly as good as Nakamura today, but not quite to the level of Kasparov in the ‘90’s or Carlsen today.