How accurate is the Chessmaster rating system?

Let's say one can consistently beat the predefined personalities around the 1200 range, can that person say that he's at least at the 1200 level as well?

if u go by the ratings and u consistently beat personalities in the 1200 range then u probably would be well past 1200 range....

It really depends! CM (as has been discussed on these forums) is NOT good at playing low-rated human style chess.

If I program rybka to play full strength for 50% of it's games, and to play hideously hanging a piece every move etc. the other 50% ... and I send that program to a big tournament... it'll come home with a rating, around, I dunno, maybe 1800 (after going 50.50 against GMs and rated 700s alike.) That rating will be perfectly accurate in one sense, but it will have nothing whatsover with what it feels like to play this awful program, nor anything like human chess.

CM is sadly similar. The CM engine plays at full or near full strength and then makes loony blunders (typically a bizarre minor piece for pawn sac) then back to very strong. That is its version of weak chess for a lot of personalities.

However, that isn't for all personalities. Some of the personalities are weakened by lowering the look-ahead move horizon etc. My completely subjective opinion is that most of the personalities below 1800 most of the time feel too strong. CM does a much better job of playing reasonable humanish chess between 1800 and 2400 -- the higher the rating the more CM is actually playing _weaker_ than it claims, IMO.  CM gives an automatic ratings adjustment to fast processors, this adjusment is too generous, at higher ratings CM will tell you GM personality X is playing 2700+ chess. It's just bs.  

The bottom line is I don't think playing CM is going to give you anything better than a  very very rough guess as to how you'll fare against rated human opponents.

Good explanation of this program in this thread.  I have played CM 10th edition for a year now and noticed similar things.  I play at the 1100 to 1300 range and notice it is playing a very strong game that is hard to beat, then suddenly, makes an odd blunder totally unexpected.  After the blunder it goes back to a strong game again.  The game does not flow like against a human player. 

I still like the game and have learned much from it.  It serves well when I cannot play online or against a human opponents. 

I agree with Vespasian69; LastInpression described the game well. I have CM 9000 and it does the same. I also play between 1100 1300.

i agree with the comment that chessmaster 1200rating personality is much stronger than the real people at 1200 most of the time.
(sometimes it makes blunders which are way too obvious which even sub-900 doesnt make, while other times it plays like it's 2500+)

wow... i seldom beat anyone higher than Josh(age6) and you play between 1100-1300?
i am pretty sure you're trolling your blitz game on this site then... or else there's no way you are sub-1000 here...
the 1200s here are a lot weaker than chessmaster's 1200s. 

This Thread is older but I would add something . A while back for CM 8000 I was one of many participants to play against the version before it hit the shelves. I played against it with a cd I still have ..but they rated those engines based on human rated players and they adjusted accordingly from that point on as the cpu increases it adds and program strength. Not sure how much this helps but ..I love the fact that they did attempt to get an accurate rating on the personalities .