does OTB rating vary geographically?

hicetnunc, I don't understand your graph.

You're showing a normal distribution with the mean around 1900 FIDE.

But how can this be possible? If you walk in any chess club 1900FIDE players will be only a handful. A 1900 can walk into the average club and wipe the floor with the vast majority of people there. I don't get why FIDE ratings have such a distribution.

It is not the same with national rating; for example my 130 Rapid ECF (around 1700 FIDE) puts me at a rank of c. 1300 out of c. 4300

That means I'm on the .30 percentile, or in other words, I'm stronger than the 70% of players with a grade.

Do you know the reason of this discrepancy?

active players with a fide rating

so how many 1900 are there at your club?

Your reasoning is correct. A while ago there was an inmate organizing tournaments in prison. He warned the USCF that the rating could go wrong, and it did. They reached something like 2700, without cheating, but just playing with the same pool of players.

Also notice that Russia has the greatest concentration of GMs of the entire world, and they even exported them in US, and Africa an entire continent has maybe 1. So the pool of players is definitely important for the rating. I'm also sure it is more difficult to become GM in Russia than US.

That's why there are terms like "club player" and "tournament player" with the implication, of course, that club players are weaker.

You have a point there, but it still doesn't explain it.

I just checked the results of a rapid tournament I usually go to.

I counted 57 players below 1900 FIDE and only 12 above it.

I looked at the ECF rating and then I converted it in ELO, but this tournament I go to is also FIDE rated. So, for this FIDE rated event if you went there with a 1900 rating then you'd be on the c. .18 percentile (i.e. stronger than the 82% of the players).

So how do we explain hicetnunc graph?

Historically, the FIDE rating started at 2000. That's why the distribution is very different from national ratings.

With the new FIDE rating floor now set at 1000, we can expect the rating curve to slowly slide to the left in the coming years...

The question I have never seen even asked is how do points leave the system( died,retired,stopped playing) ,and how is this matched with points entering? ( we all get an arbitrary number of "free" points when we start).