Inflated Rating

Yeah I'm also at a loss to understand what you are trying to say.  No one is arguing that ratings are perfect.  Sometimes a 2100 will lose to a 1900..to an 1800..etc, and there does not have to be an 'explanation' for it, its called variance.  Thats why worst team or not, you can probably count on the Detroit Lions doing better than 0-16 this year (I said probably).

Grobe's sprinter example is very good.  If you run a 9.9 100m, thats your current strength.  You keep working hard and you look to improve your current strength.  If you start running 9.7 two months later, it doesn't mean you were that good all along, it means you improved in those two months.

Such a player must continuously endeavor to 'prove' that his/her current rating is,in fact,too low to accurately reflect his/her current playing strength.

Isn't that sort of the point of competition, to continually demonstrate improvement?

Yeah, how smart!

As time passes by I become more convinced that this site gathers all the drop-outs from ICC and ICCF. The target audience of this site seems to be the players banned from ICC for cheating and trashed on ICCF by strong legitimate centaurs. They gather here, on chess.com, where you are allowed to cheat a little bit, just enough to make you feel smart and important.

The denial of cheating and the support people have for cheaters is simply unbelievable for me. Almost everybody here believes that it is possible to come out of nowhere, to think that chess ratings "expire", but to be better than a top GM.

So would it be suspicious if I claimed a GM level FIDE rating but somehow couldn't manage to sound like I'd ever actually spent time at the chessboard among experienced players? Maybe I'd just spout out eco codes and database percentages.

TheGrobe is a very intelligent person but his 'sprinter example' is not so good.

A second is an objective interval of time,and accurate clocks all over the world are in agreement as to the length of that time.

A meter is an objective distance and meter sticks around the world are of the same length.

As TheGrobe previously stated,there is no formula through which a rating in one system may be accurately 'translated' into a rating in another system.

I am saying that a given rating 'x' is not of an objective value when it is compared to another identical rating 'x' even when the two ratings were awarded in the same pool and by the same organization.

The reasons for this are many and their number increases as the number of players in the pool increases.

All of the things you say in that last post are true (really, all of them...), however the sprinter example was intended to refute the notion that acknowledging your current measure of performance as accurate means that you have no will to improve -- not to imply any objectivity in the nature of chess ratings.

I fully acknowledge that the time is objective and that chess ratings are subjective and that the comparison breaks down there, but that's OK because the very point of the sprinter example was that the fidelity of the measurement device has no bearing on one's willingness to improve their performance against it so the relative subjectivity of the two measurement devices in the analogy is really not relevant to the analogy working for its intended purpose.

@ TheGrobe:

If you are saying that we all want our ratings to go up,you will get no argument from me.

Let me ask you this.... 

Why would a player accept his/her rating as 'accurate' once he/she has understood that the rating itself has no objective value at all?

As has been said many time, in this thread and elsewhere, this is not true. The ratings are relative measures of performance, not absolute measures of skill. As such, any advantage given to all the players makes no difference in the ratings (assuming they all make use of that advantage).

I'm not sure what you mean here. The word "objective" would seem to say that you think that the ratings have no existence in consensus reality. I don't have a problem with that, given that they are estimates of performance across a range of games most of which will never happen.

But given that, I fail to see what the number of players in the pool has to do with it. It's either objective or it's not, the number of players is irrelevant.

If you by "objective" you mean accuracy (which I only bring up because it seemed to be what you were saying earlier in the thread), then I would have to say you are wrong. It would only be true if there was an interaction effect between the players, such that you could have two players with even scores against each other and signficantly different scores against a third person.

I think perhaps there is an interaction effect, but I think it has a very small effect on the outcome of the game, and therefore is not really relevant to the ratings. If there is no interaction effect, the number of players in the pool has no effect on the accuracy of the ratings. I can provide you with simulation results that show this.

Well, I think accurate may not be the best word, but when used in this context I'd take it to be mean representative.  Perhaps the person making the statement doesn't understand this and perhaps they do and are simply speaking colloquially but in either case I don't think it has any bearing on their desire to improve.

Often when you say your performance/level has been 'accurately' measured, it means you're happy with the result and the way you think other people will interpret it

Chess ratings are never completely accurate.  Sometimes we play opponets whom have ratings higher then what they should be, due to their opponets having a bad day.  Chess ratings are just a guideline to a player's chess history.  There have been times where I have lost to players with ratings over 300 under me.  This is just how the system is, though far from perfect, it still works.

Compared to the Internet Ratings here on Chess.com, it's a whole new league compared to USCF and FIDE.  The internet tends to have a larger amount of less serious players due to its convience.  Most players who go to get ranked in FIDE tend to have a serious outlook on Chess.  With the players here for fun, compared to the players in FIDE, those less serious players tend to be an easeir win and allow for faster ranking boosting. 

Don't expect your online rating to ever be equvilant to your FIDE rating for this reason.

 i agree