Chess rating at chess.com

I understand that the rating system here has very little to do with FIDEs rating system. I also understand that in online games we tend to get higher rating than we would have if we played FIDE-rated games. I also dont see this as a problem. The main purpose of the rating is to make it possible to be matched up against others at equal strength, get an incentive to get better etc.

But on the other hand, I dont think chess.com want our ratings here to be too far off what our FIDE-rating would have been. Perhaps that`s one of the reasons why they want to stop too much rating-inflation.

I guess the main reason for inflation here is the fact that dropouts is common and that lifts all others (not only those who get easy wins because of time outs, but also all they play against, i.e. all players).

Chess.com can do much to fix this, perhaps with changing the maths. Another "solution" is to give players not 1200 as rating to start with, but for instance 1000.

But again, this is really not a problem.

Just some thoughts.

A question: If I have, say 1200, 1600 or 2000 as standard rating here, what is the estimated FIDE-rating for me? And in Blitz, is the rating more accurate there, because of little problems with timeouts because of dropouts? Or is the average 1200 player here weaker than a normal 1200-rated player with FIDE-rating?

Not an easy question to answer. FIDE Elo is your rating in "long" games. I think it must be at least 60 min. for both players, but don't quote me on that. There is no live chess rating on chess.com that corresponds to games played only under conditions that would count for Elo. The standard rating would be closest, I think. I don't know how much it suffers from inflation, not having played enough standard matches, but I think it is pretty accurate. Provided enough games are played. (I have a standard rating which, by chance, is within 3 points of my local chess federation's Elo equivalent, DWZ; but based only on a couple games against weaker opponents.)

Hi.

If this is correct, I will be very surprised about my own skill. Here I have a rating of 1600 +/- in standard chess, but I suspect that my FIDE-rating wouldnt have been that good. In blitz and tactical training I have 1350 and 1300 as rating. I suspect that that is closer to my real skill in normal games with 60+ minutes than 1600+.

Any thoughts?

I don't actually have access to any of your standard time control games, so I wouldn't be able to tell.

A good reason to account for rating inflation is to make ratings more respectable and by that make Chess.com in general more respectable too. Personally, the only rating that I treat as real regarding to other players is the "Live Chess - Long" rating, which corresponds to the "Standard" type of "Live Chess". In "Live Chess - Long" you play under a time pressure in contrast to "Online Chess" and you have the most time available to think for a live game.

You can't really set up a good method to get your online rating to match your OTB rating. The closest you can get is in Live and only if you try to match the conditions as closely as possible to OTB games; e.g. similar time controls. Even then, since the pools of players are different, you're not going to get a 1-to-1 correspondence.

I don't play a lot of live games here. However, the games I have played fall into the what the USCF would consider Quick rated games. My Standard rating in Live here is 600 points higher than my real OTB Quick rating. My blitz here is much closer to real life Quick, but still about 200 higher.

If you are also suggesting correspondence, then that isn't likely. There are too many factors that can impact ratings that don't get reflected in OTB ratings. Some people play faster, like they would in OTB. Some people use a lot of time analyzing positions. Some use opening books, some databases. All those things can impact ratings. While anecdotal, I know a few people in real life that have much higher online ratings than their OTB ratings, including me. The above reasons play into it a lot.

Thanks for a very good answer!

Martin_Stahl, I checked your last "Standard" Live Chess game and I saw that the 1500+ rated "Computer - Hard" was playing like only 1100 players play on Chess.com. I think that your rating would be much different if you played mainly with human opponents and not solely, as far as "Standard" Live Chess is concerned, with computers. In my opinion, up to 1400 rating, Chess.com "Standard" Live Chess ratings at least as hard to attain as in OTB games. After the 1400 threshold things start to go the other way, mainly because there are not many 1400+ rated players around. This means that 1400+ rated players, willingly or not, usually play with lower rated opponents, which causes their rating to inflate a little bit. The situation is much worse for 1500+, 1600+, 1700+ but not tragic. In my opinion, most 1700+ "Standard" Live Chess players are certainly at least 1600 OTB.

I think that this is also very personal. Some people just are no good in correspondance chess. I never look at a move for more then a minute while in a real game I sometimes take ten.

Well, in real games time controls give you the option of getting a bit lazy. But frankly, for under 2000 rated people, 10 minutes thought is as productive as 1 minute thought, or just slightly more productive.

I am also a 1400+ player & always get 1200 to play with. I agree with you

I mentioned that I don't play many Live games. I don't doubt my rating will drop if I play more, especially in the Standard time controls. I've played mostly blitz as when I have more time to spend, usually 5 mintues at at time is all I can guarantee. However, my blitz rating is still higher here than my OTB Quick rating. My example was more anecdotal than anything.

It is still pretty true that OTB and online ratings don't correspond really well, mainly due to the different pools of players.

This is a good place to start, because many here misunderstand this point and it's only for that reason that there's any rationale for trying to align ratings between the two pools.  If everyone understood that chess.com's ratings were only applicable on chess.com then the any argument for playing jiggery-pokery with the ratings calculations fades away.

I personally think it's a bad idea to try to manipulate the ratings here in any way to better align to a completely different pool, because while many users may end up better aligned, many will also end up more poorly aligned and it will really only add to the confusion.  Worse though, is that it will likely only serve to re-enforce the incorrect assumption that there should in fact be some kind of alignment between the two rating pools, and the fact that they didn't align meant that chess.com's ratings system was broken and needed to be fixed.  This is simply not the case, they're just two different pools.

 what about the BCF rating?  I also cant understand how a player can lose 71% of games yet keep a 1900+ rating? I know that to be the case with at least 1 player on here.

As to losing a lot of games and being higher rated, I would look at their average opponent rating.

If they are playing mostly higher rated players (maybe 200+ higher rated), winning and drawing a few of those while also playing some lower or equally rated players and winning most of those, then I can see them keeping a high rating, even with a high loss ratio.

You could also look at their highest rating and if they don't have a ton of games and timed out more recently in a bunch of games, that could explain it. I think there was a mechanism put into place to stop the huge rating fluctations that occur when people time out a lot of games in a row and/or get their accounts closed causing a lot of lost games.

i honestly dont know hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha