Chess world is too low rated?

I'm in the top %4.5 with 1415 rating? What! how.. I mean okay there are less than 2000 GMs out there, Some IMs FMs lets say 20k people have titles.

And the rest of us.. mere mortals are living down there.. on the earth. But are we that bad? 1415 rating means better than the rest of %95.5? Seriously?

The concentration of players at the 1000+ range is much higher than those at the upper echelons.

Think of it this way. You enter knock-out tournament with 1024 players initially. If you lose at the third round, you are still better than 75% of the players. If you lose at the fourth round (out of 10), you are better than 87.5% of the players, even though 4/10 isn't exactly a score to be proud of.

The concentration of the "best" performers are too low. In my example. if we consider reaching the quarter-finals or better to be "respectable", then only 8 out of the 1024 players would achieve this feat.

Chess works in a similar way. The proportion of players hitting higher ratings decrease over time. If we draw a normal distribution curve, the peak is likely going to be around 800 and 900, with you being at the 95.5th percentile. You will be close to the "right tail" of this curve, even though we know that 1400 is "nothing to be proud of" in the views of the top players.

I liked the tournament example. Still it feels awkward. 

1400 is like intermediate level. if 95.4% of players are below the intermediate.. then the situation is bad.. too baad in my opinion. A normal percentage should be %50-60.. At least i always though that is what intermediate means..

Because there are still Expert & Master levels ahead. But too little room left for them.

Maybe it is just chess.com, many players opened and abandoned too many accounts? and those are affecting percentages now?

I will lose my faith in humanity otherwise

I would imagine those percentiles are specific to Chess.com. If the last month is any indication, people are joining Chess.com at a crazy rate. A lot of those accounts probably get orphaned, or they never progress passed beginner levels. The FIDE rating distribution is most likely MUCH different... although the Chess.com distribution does massage the ego, lol.

I Agree. I hope they readjust the rating of all players and make 1200 to be the 50% percentile. They can do that by doing the math using Elo calculations. But I don't know if this will be a lot of work because there are many accounts made. If they are going to do this they might need a lot of time or not based on how difficult this thing and the server needs to be close during those days. And to sum up more things, this readjustment will have null effect in attracting players and will be just their lost.

It’s different because FIDE rating starts at 1000

The only way they can achieve this is to make most players unrated. So it won’t happen.

Good point, I didn't realize that. Just checked USCF though, and I think the gist of my point still holds true. 1400 rated non-scholastic players in USCF are around the 60th percentile:

http://www.uschess.org/archive/ratings/ratedist.php

EDIT: This data is quite old, still looking for current numbers. I imagine they're not too far off from this though.

There are many people who decide to play a game or two, have no earthly idea what they are doing and end up with a low rating.

They get sick of losing and quit playing.  They are still in the official numbers for the site.  I would guess well over half the official number are people like that.

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/a-few-statistics-from-the-uscf-database

This post has data from 2014, and the numbers are pretty similar. It seems the only way to get access to the USCF database is through software like WinTD, because I couldn't find a way to export it from the site itself.

But back to the OPs point... what's wrong with there being a lot of low rated players? I'm glad to see the explosion of chess popularity, and that's bound to saturate the low end of the rating scale. But it will also result in more titled players as those dedicated few put in the work. It's the same distribution as every other sport/game. Having intermediate skill makes you better than most, but you're still along way from the top performers.

Yeah, I don’t think the current data would be much different. But to get the USCF rating you have to play in a tournament whereas a lot of chess.com’s users are casual players who will never enter the competition. Basically, chess.com rates everyone so its rating distribution is probably more accurate.

Chess.com should change their way of calculating percentages. All accounts are not active, therefore inactive and "just created but not used" accounts poison the statistics.

Calculations should be done in between accounts;

• that has logged in last 3 months..

• played at least 50 games.

etc.

The average player here is below average. That skews the percentages.

chess.com is probably not very representative for the chess world, as everyone who at some point in his/her life decided to play a few games, is included here

My guess is that it's different for FIDE as you have to be somewhat serious about chess if you join an OTB event.

If it makes anyone feel better (or if it makes anyone feel worse, perhaps ), at the tournament level (FIDE, over-the-board), the majority of players are rated around 1700 to 1800. 

Agreed, and it probably even includes users who got a provisional rating based on their selection of beginner, intermediate, etc. and never played a game. Chess.com's distribution is probably more representative of the whole world, whereas a FIDE or USCF distribution is more representative of the chess world.

I think that means you are better than 95.5% players