What Elo is beginner

did you just say playing over 30 matches makes you good?

I think he's saying that 95% of humanity would lose a game of chess to a 300 player, including newborn children and people in comas.

Whatever it takes to sleep at night!

So, I started playing on chess.com at age 49 1/2 with pretty much no chess experience.  By "no chess experience," I mean that I had learned the rules of the game as a small child but only ever played a handful of actual games, and lost them.

I'm pretty analytical and generally good at solving puzzles, so after a bunch of games, my rating stabilized somewhere around 750.  With a lot of play and some focused study, I hit 1000 about four months later.  In the 8-ish months since then, my rating's fallen back down to 850-ish and recovered to above 1000, with a peak of about 1048.

I'm fully aware that a 10 year old who catches the chess bug and puts as much time into it as I have might well have been able to reach 1200-1400 by now, since kids that age are exceptionally good compared to adults at acquiring pattern recognition knowledge.  That ten-year-old might consider 1000-1200 to be "beginner" ratings because they blew right through that range and can barely remember being that weak.

Meanwhile, I'm just recently starting to have a minor upward rating trend after several months of being at a plateau.  So, for me, anything below that 850 point would seem like a "beginner" rating.

I will say that in the range of 1000-1100 rapid on chess.com, my errors are often more subtle than simply blundering a piece or mate-in-one.  Not always; I do lose games to unsubtle errors too.  But, more often than not, my losses are more about a handful of suspect moves that weaken my position incrementally, rather than a sudden "oh no my queen" moment.

So, it all depends on where you're coming from.  If you learned chess as a kid and are sitting at, say, 1900, then sure, 1400 may seem like the top end of the beginner range to you.  But, if you're an adult struggling to get out of the low 1000s (or, heaven forbid, the 300s, like ItsMaddening up there) then it's easy to characterize "beginner" as whatever level you've already moved past.

Never underestimate the ability of a typical adult to rationalize away their own failures.

The way I'd put it is that people in the 300 range on chess.com have enough interest in chess to log on and play, and learn something about it.  You're right that that automatically puts them head-and-shoulders above the average person who knows the rules and has played at least once in their lives.

What's typical of the 300 player is that they leave a lot of pieces hanging, tend not to develop pieces effectively, and don't see the oncoming threat of maybe the half a dozen most common checkmate-in-one patterns.  It's definitely possible to spend a lot of time studying chess and learn things that just don't help these problems.  (Studying openings is a typical example.  If you're a 300 player who studies openings, you'll usually find yourself out-of-book on move three or so, and at that point that opening preparation doesn't add anything.)

A 300 player who reads Silman's "How to Reassess your Chess" is going to learn lots of great information, but very little of it will help with not leaving their rook hanging, and when games are being lost over that point, being able to read positional imbalances on the board doesn't help much.  (Although, arguably a hanging rook is one heck of a positional imbalance.)

(From his comments in "The Amateur's Mind," it's clear that Silman would characterize sub-1400 as "beginner level."  He definitely was writing about "amateurs" who didn't leave a queen in a bishop's line of sight for three moves.)

hey maddening if 300s are so good beat me in a match lol

EDIT:just played a 300, he blundered 2 rooks and his queen, aswell as several pawns

unrated - 1400 

than beat me in a match lol

Remembering back, my first ELO rating with USCF (1977) was 1210. I then sank into the 1100s and was quite distressed.

I want to say that being a beginner is do great. When I started playing again around a year ago , I could look at openings , check mate patterns and all kinds of stuff , but it made no sense to me on relation to the game. My brain couldn't put it together . I could hear it and say , that sounds smart but I'd never see it in a game . Now after constant b practice , reflection and video watching , I'm slowly creeping up to 1000 elo. But I don't care how long it takes to get there , because every loss and win is so much fun for me. Watching my brain get it. It's like playing an instrument , seeing a move and going , aha . Playing safe, playing risky , sensing when an opponent thinks they have you owned so you can take advantage of their arrogance. All these things makes being a beginner a delight. I hope it takes as long as possible to loose that thrill.

Yeah, but you had probably played a bunch of chess before you were USCF-rated.

I suppose. I started on the high school team in 1975 when I was 15. So I had a couple years of dubious play behind me.

Chess.com’s previous rating for:

New to chess: 400

Beginner: 800

Intermediate: 1200

Advanced: 1600

Expert: 2000

But it was changed now though, 

Elo isn't actually that accurate. If you studied more than u play, more likely you'll end up in 300-800 rating. Or if u fell too low in the ratings. But I'll say 1000-1500, while I'll call 800-900 "pre-intermediate".

No wonder my first rating was 800. 

Yeah you joined before chess.com change the rating for the levels. So I guess you had set your level to beginner

imagine sakura