Do you actually deserve your rating

what most 1200 players think: rating=skill

The truth that beginners and grandmasters know: rating=outcome. it literally doesn’t matter how horrendously you play, the outcome is what matters and partially why game rating exists. you can literally have komodo in a 200 rated account that plays perfectly at the beginning and middle but slips up at the end. that’s also why i hate chess.com bots because they are all playing perfectly it’s just how many mistakes and blunders they make. martin literally plays the best move half of the time but with occasional blunders, which lower his outcome chances.

you can literally play the most dog water moves ever and still stay a gm because the outcome was that you checkmated your opponent.

hot take rating is not an accurate representation of skill, but it is outcome and general knowledge.

you can literally be a decent player and still get scholars mated because oops. and then that outcome influences your rating.

with my friend @snowbeardedmonkey we literally had the most blunder loaded game ever, where i even made more blunders, but the outcome was he resigned because i forked the queen.

so i guess the more refined version is can i see if your skill actually linearly correlates to your rating. if rating was actually an accurate representation of skill, then some random 400 would suddenly get 1200 and some random 900 would get 300 rating.

and yes i am bad under time pressure so i hang pieces. and yes 99% of the time why you are stuck at 400 is that you need to take care of your king.

honestly having a freaked up ego makes your rating worse, from my experience, because it’s better to lose from timeout than make a million blunders but oh well making a million blunders to not get timeout is engrained in my bad habits but i’m just giving advice.

lmao

I don't really feel like I deserve my rating because I don't even know how I improved after reaching 2300, and often I play games like an 1800. I play the occasional smart game though.

Some people get lucky at get to high elo and other people are unluckier and get to lower elo.

for example on duolingo chess most of the time people deserve much lower elo. i am 700 rapid on duolingo, but the people on duolingo play like 320.

i dont know what causes me to blunder more on chess.com than duolingo but people on duolingo blunder a lot. so i take their free pieces.

if you feel like you don’t deserve your elo just play more daily games.

At the end of the day your rating only really matters if you want to make a career out of chess.

Though I would argue that chess gets the more fun the better you are at it.

it gets less fun the better you are at it.

Preposterous

"Career" is a big word. We all have a career in chess. It just doesn't pay very well.

I think it's a good idea for anyone who loves the game and/or is serious about it to establish an actual rating, as opposed to online.

Yes and I would to thank all of those who so graciously donated rating points to me by playing poor chess.