At what elo are you no longer a bad player?

I believe once you know opening theory, understand middle game concepts like pawn structure, outpost, king safety, creating & attacking weakness, positional play, and end game principles you are a "good player."

Once you have an understanding of this you should have an OTB rating above 1450. Online ratings are too subjective. Time constraints, cheaters, and lets be honest.. no one plays online games as serious as they play OTB Rated games. So online rating could be 1300+ and still understand all of these crucial concepts.

You are misrepresenting my argument. Look at the game I posted. I'm talking about routinely hanging pieces where the average second grader in my school club can take it.

I don't pummel 1600s. I beat them through hard work and slow grinding, stubbornness, and often a little luck. Yes, luck favors the higher rated. To wit, 

My argument is not that you are bad because I beat you easily. I never said anything close to that.

My argument is that I am bad, and you are calling players good who I beat regularly, but not easily. People who regularly beat me are still often bad.

Magnus is not bad, nor are any of the world's top 200 GMs. The rest of us need a reality check if we think otherwise.

Your views are credible. Your representation of my argument is not. It is, rather, FLAT WRONG. 

Doesn't matter to me. I've got a bad elo, always will. 

I disagree.

Maybe you don't. But I wouldn't assume that no one else does.

My correspondence games on this site, for example, are far more serious and time consuming than anything I've done OTB, except maybe the first time I played in a match for my city's championship.

In a nutshell, your argument is that people are no longer bad when they reach the 60th percentile.

Mine is that no one is as good as they think.

It is an argument between the defense of mediocrity, on the one hand, and the pursuit of excellence, on the other.

I haven't lost a single chess game over the board in the past year against people who are not active chess players but play occasionally for fun. Because of this many of my friends call me "the master" when it comes to chess.

However, I'm nowhere close in playing strength to a real chess master, and I would get destroyed by most active club players.

I would still consider myself a pretty good chess player, even though I understand how much better the really good players are. I still think that I would give a better challenge for a master, than your average "playing chess occasionally for fun" would present to me.

Above average is mediocre. The 80th percentile is minimally competent, but not good.

The OP was not asking about good, however, but "not bad". Perhaps, someone at the 80th percentile has enough minimal comprehension of the subject--whatever it is--to no longer be bad, even if they are not yet good.

Chess masters beat me, but they do not always beat me. In May 2019 so far, I have scored about 40% against them. Lost one last night with truly horrid play. The game I posted above was equally horrid by both players, and the NM was worse. I know I'm not very good at chess, even though at blitz I seem to be better than 97.9% of people here.

Elo doesn't show an accurate representation of the player's talent and skill. It is just a broad estimation of a player, like to differentiate a 2200 player and a 1200 player. 

Objectively, most players below 1800 lack a grasp of elementary pawn endings. The past week, I've been looking through a database I created of slightly more than 200 drawn games that reached an ending where both players had four pawns or more. Nearly every one should have been decisive. This game fragment is from this morning's study.

White has a decisive advantage from the diagram--something I noticed at a glance.

It's amazing to me that these semantic arguments go round and round on these forums.  Is chess a sport? What level is no longer bad?  People define the question their own way and then argue with people who have defined it  differently.  Semantics!

I'm acknowledging your perspective.

Sigh. I think you need a reading lesson. I thought we were beginning to get somewhere.

No. I never said anything of the sort.

And, you denied saying this. Which, as I pointed out, is not exactly what the OP asked.

Being dead to such nuances is how you have misread nearly everything I've posted here.

You have no argument, Just assertions. 

Exactly, everything is relative! And just to make us a feel a bit better: In Amsterdam 1956 Candidates tournament, Petrosian hung his queen in one move against Bronstein, while Nigel Short, Victor Korchnoi, Alexander Belyavsky and various other world class grandmasters have walked into a mate in one in the middle of the board. Don't take a 'Best Games' view of even a player like Magnus Carlsen, because we chessplayers all have our off days. The difference lies in the frequency with which we make such terrible blunders, quite apart from the fact that grandmasters are much better than us duffers in all aspects of the game. There are more than 1,000 grandmasters in the world, and there are millions of registered chess players in the world. If I remember correctly, the top of the bell curve is somewhere around E1650 to E1700.

I didn't say that you deployed that argument, which was in half the posts before I joined the thread, but not in mine, despite your assertions (grounded in misreading).

The game I posted against the NM, which I think you are referring, highlights my point that players above 2100 can drop a queen, get away with it, and still lose to another player rated slightly above 2000. I did not say that players are bad because I beat them. I said that players are bad, even players above 2000. The relevance of my experience is that I play at that level and play opponents at that level.

My argument, simply, NO ONE BELOW STRONG GM IS ANY GOOD.

My game (and argument) does serve to reinforce what you said about the unreliability of ratings, although that point was understated in your assertion and another poster helped hone that point for you.

Every internet poster is a semiotician, although only an infinitesimal percentage have ever had a course, read a book, or watched a video concerning semiotics.

This has sort of devolved into people arguing their subjective belief about player strength which will obviously never lead anywhere. If you're going to question what a 'good' player is, you have to have some kind of concrete basis to start with. Otherwise you just keep spinning around subjective interpretations. I don't think Chess.com rating is a very good basis since there are so many inactive, duplicate, beginners that play a few games then stop, cheaters, etc. 

I would say your basis for 'good' should be whatever the average OTB rating is in your city/area and then evaluating each player as being above or below that median. Regardless, find a basis and then you'll find your answer.