Are ratings on here really inflated?

its obvious thats the case with bullet/blitz, but what about rapid and classical?

theres an FM and a CM playing right now and their ratings aren't anywhere near their actual fide score.

same goes for IM anna rudolf, 2300 otb, but 1900 on here

what are your thoughts on that?

I think context is important. If you are looking at people's ratings then you should also look at their average opponent rating.

I'd say the rapid pool isn't big enough to be accurate at the 1500+ level. There just aren't enough players, and the few people who do play have often played less than 50 games and have effectively just provisional ratings.

The blitz and bullet pools are very accurate though. And there is significant inflation in both of these pools compared to the FIDE rated pools (I'd say blitz is about 400 rating points inflated).

For my level I’ve found they’re deflated, for higher levels they tend to be inflated is how I’ve always understood it after reading about rating inflation/deflation on chess.com on this forum and other chess forums. Ratings are only really relevant as a comparison to other ratings in their rating pool. Fide and uscf and lichess and other online chess ratings systems are not in line either as you probably know. Lichess is pretty heavily inflated compared to here.

To answer your question, I don’t really know but it could be any number of reasons and what deranged said makes sense to me. There is probably a much smaller pool of people playing rapid. Also I don’t know how many games anna rudolf and this FM and CM you’re talking about have played and how casually. Idk that’s the best answer I can give but like I said above the rule of thumb I usually go by is that the ratings are deflated for my level and inflated as you get to higher levels like 2000+

I mostly only play blitz and have played a little bit of bullet and correspondence though and have not really looked into or don’t remember what the deal is with other time controls

Nah they're inflated at every level. Trust me. I've played people with FIDE ratings of 1000 who played like 1500 rated players on chess.com.

The lowest FIDE rating you can even have is 1000. It's impossible to have a FIDE rating of 999 or less. They just classify you as unrated if your rating goes that low. And anyone with a FIDE rating is at least an intermediate player.

For reference: my FIDE rating is 1245 and my online ratings are above 1700 for every category (bullet, blitz, rapid and daily). Now, I personally think I'm slightly underrated in OTB tournaments. I think I'm about 1400-1500 FIDE strength and I just had a few bad tournaments. But that still goes to show how big the difference is between chess.com and FIDE ratings.

I think you should check out this

 

https://chessgoals.com/rating-comparison/#Rating_Survey

 

a survey of ratings from here, USCF, FIDE and another online chess site of at least 350 players. This is where I'm largely basing my opinion off of in addition to people's reports on reddit and some posts in the forums here.

if you're really skilled player, but you play fast as well, then you can have a really inflated rating. But some people just haven't had the chance to play otb to raise their rating to their real strength, so people like me are still stuck.

In general though, blitz/bullet is usually close to your real rating, and sometimes, if you aren't a fast player, it will be lower than your real rating. 

another important thing to note:

this survey is from 5/7/2020

at some point in late august or in september I think Chess.com changed what they characterize as blitz games and what they characterize as rapid. 10 | 0 games used to be considered blitz on chess.com and now they are considered rapid so keep that in mind when looking at these charts from before that change was enacted.

im 1495 USCF and 1400 FIDE according to that chart

I'd say the uscf is pretty accurate. In feburary i was 1700 blitz, and raised my USCF from 1300 to 1600 in one tournament. 

Thirty years ago, I was around 2000 OTB (Canadian Chess Federation rating). I haven't played OTB since then, so it's hard to say how my online rating compared to my actual strength.

in which case you would be a perfect example of how inflated ratings are here.

You're assuming that I'm still 2000 strength. That rating is 30 years old, remember.

I responded to Snuddo's post, not your's.

Daily chess doesn't really count.

No, he's right. They are deflated at some levels, especially around 1500.

Seems to me they're slightly inflated. I don't see that as much of a problem, they're not really meant to map exactly to each other anyway. Like I said above ratings are only really supposed to be relevant when comparing one rating to another rating that's in the same pool of players / on the same platform. They're not designed to be compared accross platforms. This is just a rough estimate of what your FIDE or USCF might be. The survey I shared also only has a sample size of 350 players which is pretty small considering there's almost 2.5 million people playing blitz on chess.com and I don't think all of the people in the survey had a FIDE or USCF rating to share although take that with a grain of salt I'm not sure, in fact take all of this with a grain of salt but regardless it is the best effort I've seen yet to compare ratings across player pools.

Sorry, inflated in comparison to FIDE and deflated in comparison to USCF so I guess that's a decent medium they've tried to find

Ratings are bound to be a sort of unhomogeneous continuum or whatever, because of the different entry levels which people can more or less choose. You can enter at 1800 so ratings will tend to be inflated there and you can enter at 1200 so 1300 to 1600 is bound to be a region of deflation.

My rating took a hit recently when I had to change from 10 mins to 5 mins and all of a sudden I find myself playing in the 1500s. The standard often seems better there than in the 1600s and 1700s. When I was in the 1800s, the standard there was not very high, in general. I found it improves a lot in the 1900s. So there definitely isn't uniform rating inflation in blitz.

edited