COVID, Queen's Gambit, and Average Blitz Rating

Periodically over the last year I've gone to chess.com's stats page and taken screenshots like these:
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That picture is for today, April 2, 2021. It shows the number of active blitz players as 12.7 million and the average blitz rating as 849.

How this has changed over the last year is interesting because of COVID causing a "first wave" of interest in chess and Netflix's Queen's Gambit causing a "second wave."

@Erik blogged about these here:
First wave
Second wave

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Using the data from 7 screenshots I made the graph below.
Each rating decrease is about 20 points
The average player increase between data points is 800,000

At the beginning of 2020 the average blitz rating was 992.

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For further info you can go here:
https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/current-average-chess-rating

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Note that as the average changes, established players should see no change in their rating. In other words if you were rated 1400 at the beginning of 2020, and you didn't get any better or worse, then you should still be rated 1400 today. This is because Glicko creates and destroys rating points for new users until their rating is considered accurate. New players who are quickly moved to their "correct" rating (let's say within 20 games) don't have an impact on established players.

the population got dumbed down

I still lose more than half of my games therefore I am below average 

Yes, I think that's right.

 

Thanks

Added a link in my 2nd post.

What's interesting is the average was slowly (very slowly) increasing from 2014 to 2016 and seems to have peaked around 1100.

At the beginning of 2020 the average was nearly 1000.

Now what's interesting is... if many of these players keep playing chess, then their skill will increase right...

When an established player has skill higher than their rating, then their rating increases of course... but where do those new points come from? They have to "steal" them from other players!

So in the future, if there are a disproportionate number of players getting better, then players whose skill is the same will actually lose rating points...

So over the next year or two the average might climb while long time members experience a slight drop in rating!

There are a lot of other factors, so this isn't really a prediction, it's just something that's plausible.

It doesn't matter if they're still worse than you, the deflationary effect hits everyone equally.

Let's say a 1000 player suddenly becomes 1200 strength... the rating system doesn't know that yet! So when he beats a 1100 player, that 1100 player is "punished" by losing rating points as if he'd lost to a 1000 player.

So now that 1100 is slightly underrated. If someone beats him, then they wont gain as many points as they "should." If they lose to him, then they'll lose more than they "should." It's a ripple effect that eventually reaches everyone.

Now... usually this doesn't matter. If 1 person gains 1000 points of skill, then the 1000  point cost is evenly distributed among the entire playing population... with 1 million players you as an individual only end up "paying" 0.001 points. Not a big deal.

But when there are millions of new players who quite literally can't get any worse (hehe) then they'll only improve... and when that happens there's very real potential for a noticeable deflationary effect.

Uh oh. Time to get good

Let's say all of the new players, 4 million people, each improve 200 points.

This is impossible because many new players will quit, which can even have an inflationary effect.

But anyway, let's say 4 million improve 200 points. That means 12 million players have to "pay" 800 million points.

So everyone's rating goes down about 60 points... yes even the players among the 4 million who improved Their skill goes up 200 points, but the system only "pays" them 140 for it.

Every game I lose is now new people’s and chess waves’ fault 

So no, there's no excuse for losing 200 points in a day

But let's say... 20 points over the next year for no other reason than all the new players... I think that's definitely possible.

that is because many new people started playing i think

 

please tell me that isnt real

Chess.com needs to print some rating points!

Haha

Good point

 

Google traduction :

there are a lot of 100 because it is the minimum. A player who loses all his games remains stuck at 100. Among all ranked 100 a game should have less. level 100 possibly corresponds to a much larger slice than the others. Chess.com stopped at 100 to avoid rating some players as 0. The other well-known site I believe they start at 400 or 500. The FIDE I read that the minimum is 1000, so like 1000 FIDE does not mean anything it can be worth much less.

Very good work !

Only Blitz is concerned ?

High quality post as usual Llama.

It is interesting to see the effects of COVID and Netflix on the Chess.com player pool.

It’s interesting to see that the average is far below my skill level, despite many people in the 1500-1600 rating range straight up not being good.

For instance, I just played a 10 minute game were my opponent hung mate in one despite not going through time pressure in the slightest.

And despite it being a mating pattern that I’ve done hundreds if not thousands of times in puzzles, it still took me 30 seconds to see it in game!

A comical display by the both of us!

Even worse, a 1700 gave up a pawn and a rook for no reason the game prior, and I still lost by hanging a simple mate in three!

Given your significantly greater level of skill and experience, is there a certain rating range where players stop playing games resembling tragicomedies on a daily basis, even in longer time controls?

Obviously everyone screws up from time to time, but I mean frequent, obvious, game ending blunders.