I thought I was good at chess before chess.com

Analyse your lost games and learn from your mistakes.

You're not bad. Chess is hard. I truly believe if you're trying to get better at chess then you're good at chess. 🙂

We're ALL bad at chess. Some of us are just worse than others.

What is flagging? I've heard it before but I was unsure. Is it smurfing? Or like intentionally playing bad moves for fun?

It's how you look at things. I am apparently at about 73% on Rapid, which means I am better than all but 27% or so of chess.com players, at least in Rapid. But even breaking a rating of 1000 seems far off. It is all a bit hierarchical - I played an unrated game against someone in the 300s and it seemed as though there was no error the opponent didn't make. But if I played someone of 1500 or over, I would be equally easy to defeat. I usually handily defeat casual players in over-the-board, but that is people who probably do not know chess notation and would not join a chess club (I have encountered very good opponents in chess clubs). To paraphrase Harry Callahan, chess.com really teaches you your limitations.

Flagging is when one player loses because his time ran out.

You can say "I was winning, but I flagged" or "LOL, I flagged a 2200!"

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