At What Rating Do People Stop Consistently Making Blunders?

Over the board ~ 1950 FIDE blundered horrible checkmate in one vs 200 points lower rated opponent with his king on middle of the board with just few pieces left with a lot time left on his clock. He even asked not to write down last move...  I would not say 1600 is the average rating where opponents stop blundering on simple tactics or checkmate threats. Tactics matters and players lose games because they did not saw or calculated bad a basic tactical combination and thats pretty common in sub 2000. Some players rated 1700 are great at tactics and would not drop/miss tactics, but many do. Some play very solid openings and never blunder vs equal rated opponents.

Maybe there is something unique about prodigies like that. There is only so much wisdom you can have then, so maybe early on they have to replace that with unbelievable tactical ability. And then as they become IMs and GMs they start to get that wisdom. Me getting to 2000 was absolutely nothing like that, but then I'm not a prodigy and never was.

I'd say around 1800 uscf. I'm 1600 uscf and still make blunders.

I play at the 2000+ level and both myself, and my opponents, blunder often (both positionally, and tactically).

So I'd say around 2200 is when blunders get start to get more a lot more subtle. 2200+ players still blunder, of course, though their mistakes get smaller and require a keener eye to notice.

It seems to continue on up the rating scale: the higher the ratings go, the smaller the blunders get, the harder they become to notice, and the more they require precise play to exploit.

'Rating' is very debatable and one 1600 player can be entirely different to another 1600. It is best to just ignore ratings altogether, as you can also fall into mind tricks.

Yeah, of course "blunder" is quite a relative term so it's tricky to talk about it. But class players can just suddenly lose a pawn or the exchange during a tense game where otherwise the play has been logical. They just lose focus or forget something. I think that specific kind of mistake starts to get pretty uncommon 2000+.

Styles vary of course, but there are a lot of commonalities too, particularly when it comes to class players. Just mathematically speaking, no matter how profound your play is, if you still blunder even just occasionally, it's hard to imagine how you can get to, say, 2000. What class players share is that they just make too many simple mistakes to the point where it spoils otherwise well played games.

It's amusing how many people think the answer is "200 points higher than I am right now."

Of course the actual answer is 1558 at blitz on chess.com (and 1780 at standard).

Eh, I'm sure after you're 2200 you'll still notice your blunders and be saying the same thing about 2400.

I think the OP is asking about "oops, I didn't even notice that capture was possible" type of blunders. I think as low as 1600 players are already consistently calculating captures and checks. Maybe not every game, but OP said about 1 in 5. Even GMs blunder... but not a 2 ply tactic because they didn't bother to calculate... at least not more than 1 in 1000 games

"oops, I didn't even notice that capture was possible"

Yeah, that actually sums it up pretty well. But that kind of thing can happen if you calculate for a long time and you see lots of cool lines but earlier in the line you miss a simple refutation. I've had class A players do that to me not so rarely.

Even 1 in 5 games... keep in mind, if every game is about 40 moves, then that's basically 200 moves until a mistake like that. Even if you do just a few moves out of that 200, that loses you tons of rating points.

Well, even GMs lose to tactical sequences... I guess with "oops, I didn't notice that capture was possible" I'd have to add that it's not a sharp position... or just basically that if you had given them the hint "be careful here" they wouldn't have missed it.

Going by that definition, I don't think a B player would likely go 4 in 5 games without making a mistake like that. And even with an A player, they are fairly consistent, but 1 in 5 games might be cutting it close.

I know when I was a B player, this issue would happen all the time. I'd play good games most of the way through but then miss strangely simple things. I just couldn't rely on myself to avoid that for an entire game. Sometimes I would, sometimes I wouldn't, but I'm saying, I could never be too sure that I would. It wouldn't generally be something advanced, it would be some trick or move I know quite well but would miss it anyway.

And, if you analyze afterward with an engine, it will show you all the things you didn't even know you missed.  You might even have thought "wow, that was a good game with hardly any errors by me or my opponent!"  And then it shows you the fork you both missed for three straight moves.  Depressing.

Ok, 1800-2000 may be a better estimate than 1600-1800.

I actually didn't play much around this time and basically skipped class B (just a few tournaments), so I'm a little biased due to playing while underrated I guess.

Yes! I hate to say it, but back in those days, I didn't want to go over my wins with an engine, to see if I blundered or something. I think I knew deep down that that would happen (and the few times I did go over "great" games I played, this is exactly what happened). Sometimes the entire concept I was proud of was simply a blunder, due to some concrete variations (or even simple motifs, as you said) that my opponent and I were never close to seeing.

This happens a lot less for me now, as a USCF expert. But guess what, now I am always curious about the "truth." I'm always open to an engine challenging my ideas. If my idea is wrong then it's wrong. And it's made me be more disciplined. I know that I need to back up my ideas with accurate analysis.

Still, I do "blunder" more than I want to. It's not common, but it's not rare, either. I would say at master level it's rare, given that it basically never happens when I play a master. Any time I have gotten chances against a master, I have had to gradually outplay them over many moves, and even still, I tend to crack first.

I went from 1400 to 1800 mostly by eliminating blunders.  My opponents had to work much harder to defeat me, and in the process I scrapped out many draws and even swindles.

Getting above 1800, though, was a huge and prolonged struggle.  I couldn't just wait for my opponent's mistakes, like I could with the under 1700 crowd, because they didn't happen.  I had an interesting split where my record against people 1700 and below was about 85% wins, which kept my rating up, but my record against 1800 and up was 25% wins, which kept me from getting any higher.  I needed to do more than just not blunder to win, in other words.

So, from my experience, outright blunders mostly disappear in that 1700-1800 range.

@SmithyQ  How did you eliminate blunders? Was there a defining moment or procedure you implemented? 

ashvapathi, I'm a 900 blitz player and I usually do computer analysis on games I won to see if I deserved the win or my opponent just sucked and I average around a blunder per game, with a couple of "mistakes". However, at the higher level what the computer says are mistakes or inaccuracies usually cost the game. 

2900.