At what elo are you no longer a bad player?

Aha, then I see. I would tend to agree, more or less, but I would probably put the upper end of the rating span quite a bit higher than E2200 (probably E2400). Up to E2200-E2300, improvement is still a lot about plugging your knowledge gaps and improving your worst level rather than improving your highest level.

spartakbarnsley: Exactly. I'm sure you've come across the same problem yourself playing someone far below your own strength. Most likely you're going to win 19 times out of 20, but on the odd occasion such an opponent will make few mistakes and you won't be at your best.

You are crazy. 2600+ is correct

No. 2500+ is correct. 

On here and in real life (ELO) I am rated a little under 1500.  But a lot of games I've lost have been because of blunders mostly I feel I really should have avoided.

But whether you are "good" or not is entirely subjective, it all depends on the perspective of whomever you are playing against or judging your playing strength.

Beginners may think everyone who beats them is a strong player.

A guy might be the best chess player amongst his group of friends and think he is really good, but then joins a chess club and finds out by club standards he is modest at best.

And to an engine like Houdini or Stockfish, 99.99% of human players are crap.

 

At 2600, we can assume the defects have been erased. Above 2700, the player is very good and in the current world's top 50.

What do you mean by defects have been removed?  It is all relative, even Magnus has defects when compared to stockfish. 

Everyone who is 200 points above you is a good player and someone who is 400 points above you is a very good player. It is all relative. 

 

Definitely. A couple of months ago I had a nightmare in a tournament, including a game against a player rated 400 below me. He made some solid but unspectacular moves, and every tactical hit I was planning seemed to not quite work. I got frustrated, over-extended myself, and suddenly realised that I was in quite a precarious position. Then in trying to correct it, I walked into a knight fork and lost my rook. In the second game against the same player, I crushed him in 21 moves. I still have no idea how I managed to make such a meal of the first game. 

Your argument that Magnus also has flaws compared to Stockfish is rooted in the refusal to admit that you are terrible at chess. I’m terrible, too, but I don’t deny it.

Its called being human.

Nah!  I might be terrible compared to you and you might be terrible compared to pushwood. But this just proves my point that it's all relative. 

Easier to say: You are a very skilled player and know your basic theory Above Elo 1900 !! Your ELO reflects your skills especially your WORST play or lack of consistency ;-)

 

You are missing the point. I'm simply terrible, not terrible in comparison to someone else. I have weak openings, routinely drop pieces, and blunder in simple endgames. My opponents give me a free queen, and I let them keep it because I am blind to what is happening on the board. I pursue simplistic, transparent plans of attack that are easily refuted.

Now, if I am terrible, and I can beat the majority of members of this site, it stands to reason that they, too, are terrible. Or they are delusional.

Measurement of skill is always relative to the competition, and thus someone being in the 97th percentile calling himself and everyone below him terrible is nothing but disrespectful ivory tower bollocks. The fact that you can beat majority of the players means that relative to the competition you are a good player, despite whatever flaws you think you might have in your game. The question was at what Elo you are no longer a bad player, not at what Elo you are a great, flawless mastermind of chess genius.

It's weird to even have to talk about this to a native English speaker, but there is a wide spectrum of adjectives used to categorize different levels of skill. Only a child would have a two-scale ranking with everything being either good or bad. That's like saying every kid who doesn't get all A's or 10s (whatever the scale is) on their school tests is terrible at the given subject.

Now you think a persistent emphasis on excellence combined with a realistic self-assessment is somehow a problem with my native language?

Yes I know the basics. Yes, I have reasonable success at the levels I compete. Yes, my students feel a sense of accomplishment that results partly from my teaching.

But honesty and recognition of excellence requires that I acknowledge certain adjectives as descriptors of my play: flawed, horrid, blind, incompetent, amateurish, horrid, ...

If you really want to argue about my English, you are in way over your head.

This is the right answer. Looking at games 400 lower is almost as mystical as games 400 higher.

Except that in your previous post you said that you are simply terrible, which to me indicates absolutely no or hardly any redeeming qualities. That doesn't seem honest or realistic to me at all. Yes, you may consider some parts of your game amateurish, have blind spots, make flawed positional assessments or horrid blunders... But so does everyone else! That's a part of the game. And a part that makes player a bad or good is the sheer amount or implications of said mistakes. The better you are, the less mistakes you make.

Just because you still make mistakes doesn't mean that you are a bad player. Because obviously you still make less mistakes than vast majority of people you play against, implied by your rating. I don't want to argue about your use of English (as a non native speaker that would be way over my head, and not the point of my argument), but your emphasis on the word terrible in this context really hit a nerve on me. 

You are downgrading your level of skill in a way that is just disrespectful towards everyone less skilled (or lower rated in chess terms) than you. I strongly believe there is a vastly bigger spectrum of grading beyond good and terrible, and it's not on a scale where 97% is terrible and less than 3% is good. You can still emphasize excellence without trashing everything that is not excellent.

There is a range within terrible. There is a level at which players are no longer bad. Very few reach that level. I haven’t.

My answer to the OP’s question was posted weeks ago. He asked for a rating. I gave it.

2600.

The rest of us need significant work on our game. Some more than others.

Put your emotions aside and objectively evaluate your game. Terrible is probably an objective description.

Last week I posted in this thread a game I played against a master. He gave me his queen. I didn’t take it. I opted for an illusion, and failed to see that the queen was free. He then could have forced a draw, but tried to win from a worse position. Eventually, he offered his queen again, but his position was hopelessly lost by then. I took the queen and he resigned. It was a terrible game. Our play was horrid.

I also think you are misreading the qualifier “simply”. The point of the word was to denounce efforts to render objectivity as relative. It’s not a measure of how terrible I am, but a reference to the objectivity of the word.

When I started reading chess books 45 years ago, I grew better than my friends. I thought I was good at chess. If I had acquired a rating then, it would have been well below 1200. That’s the problem with judging one’s skill subjectively in terms of others. Look at the game objectively.

So some of the best chess authors and even most of the grandmasters are bad at chess. Why do I even bother...