I'm assuming the 600 million chess players are OTB players yea?
The average ECF rating is 1724
I think it's fair to say half the 600 million are over 1500
Is 1500 a good rapid rating on chess.com?
Sort:
OTB players are much stronger than chess.com players on average
ECF ranks competitive players who attend multiple competitions in a year, which is not a majority of chess players. If you take a rating of those who played soccer competitively in college versus all soccer players, the rankings of collegiate soccer players will be higher. How many of the 600 million do you think play in chess clubs and play over 30 rated competitions per year? You'd probably say half.
Hmm ok you might have a point, 1700 did sound a bit high to me from my experience. I still think it must be quite a bit higher than chess.com though
Also I don't think many people play football competitively in college. That's more of an American thing
Sunday league football is really popular. It's where you join a club that isn't connected to school or anything
I'm in a football team. It has its own league and even a shirt sponsor. It's really normal. It's nowhere near semi pro though lol
I’ve seen enough good chess to know I’m just a patzer and I suspect my rapid will top out around 1600 on this site. I may be in a top percentile on a site whose stats include anyone who has ever picked up a pawn, but put me in a roomful of serious tournament players and that percentile plummets like a rock tossed into the deep end of a pool. Keeping real.
1500 is okay, but there is still room to improve, so good luck!
Feb 9, 2026
0
#69
luppia wrote:
1500 is okay, but there is still room to improve, so good luck!
700 elo saying this btw
Feb 10, 2026
0
#70
#15 so you mean your rating sucks? I mean that is pretty low self-esteem ngl
It’s good
Online it's good. Because 50% are using engine. And over the board they Suck.
thats disrespectful to semi pro footballers. i would say NM is semi pro
There are less than 20,000 NM and above in the World, according to a post on Chess.com
There are roughly 130,000 professional soccer players according to Chat GPT. There are 600 million chess players, so even if half of the World plays soccer, that still makes NM a pro in chess, whether you think it's disrespectful to soccer players or not, that's reality.
https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/how-many-masters-are-there
I mean probably half the world does play football, yeah. A lot of the pro footballers you mentioned are actually semi pro because they don't make a living off it
No offence but probably half the 600 million chess players are above 1500
Chess.com ratings do not reflect OTB players
There are over million active chess players on chess.com so it's a valid sample. The average rating for bullet is 580. For those of us who are fluent in basic statistics, this completely invalidates your argument. And those of us who aren't, shouldn't be making claims that 300 million chess players are above 1500, with no factual evidence to back it up.
*over 17 million