Is ELO related more to skill or the amount of games you’ve played?

Just to be clear, you think this guy is highly un/skilled at bullet?

https://www.chess.com/member/peacemyfriend

I've played 84 games on this site.

Daily rating: 2351.

It's a strange question. You may misunderstand Elo. A rating takes past performance and uses it to predict future performance... and it's very good at this.

So, at least in terms of performance, a 1500 is just as good as any other 1500 regardless of how many games they've played.

When you say "skill" if you're thinking of some component apart from performance then we could talk, but Elo (or Glicko, etc) is purely performance (wins, losses, and draws).

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If your question is "at what level does getting better involve only playing games" then the answer is probably "at beginner level." It's well known that the better a player is the less time they should spend playing and the more time they should spend studying (if they want to improve).

If your question is "which shows more innate talent, the person who got to X with fewer or more games" then the answer is probably "the player who got there with fewer."

Yeah, the question doesn't actually make a lot of sense. 

If you're talking about equivalent opposition in each case, then your question doesn't contain enough information for an answer.

A player who has a score of 6/10 has a higher uncertainty (or "fuzzyness") in his rating than a player who wins 60/100, and a player who wins 600/1000 has a more precise rating still.

But all three might have the SAME rating. Only the RD (rating deviation) would be different.

Think of it this way.

If you win 6/10 on Monday
and then 6/10 on Tuesday
and then 6/10 on Wednesday

and so on

Have you improved? Or are you scoring the same every time?

And after you answer that question, if you did this 1000 days in a row to make it 6000/10000 will your answer to that question change? Why or why not?

True, the rating of a player with only a few games (or who has not played in a long time) is not reliable.

You can gain technical skill by grinding so...

Merely playing games doesn't give you rating points. See the person I linked at the top of this topic.

If you want to say the person who got there faster had more talent, then sure.

Games played primarily. 

Magnus spent his entire life in chess. Of course his elo is great.

General trend is the same with most people. More chess games means more improvement over time.

Chess is not a game of skill, but rather sacrifice. How much of your life can you sacrifice to play chess.

Carlsen was over 2800 by age 18.

You think by age 18 Carlsen had played more games than e.g. Anand and Kramnik?

You misunderstand how improvement works, and you're clearly unfamiliar with chess history e.g. young champions like Tal and Kasparov.

Magnus went from 900 to 1800 in less than 2 years after being trained by 2 well-known GMs almost exclusively when he was a kid.

Again, sacrifice is the primary key, although having trainers like that would also be drastically significant.

The sad fact is that chess professionals didn't train all day as kids, and didn't "sacrifice" their lives. They spent a few hours a day for 8-10 years. That's it.

Practically everyone who loves chess does that much, and doesn't get close to GM much less 2800.

The difference is the age you start, and how systematic / structured / intentional your work is.

To be honest, you can't exactly assume the second 1,800's actually rated 1,800 either way. 

The 1,800 can actually be a 1,700 and his/her 1,800 opponent might just be having a bad day but was constantly playing that 1,700.

But, you can't use the amount of games to determine that player's ELO either. That 1,800 can be a 1,700 who played 150 games like a 1,700. The next day, the 1,700 could have had a "voila moment", played 25 games like a 2,000. The next day, the player played 25 games like a 1,700 again so was said to be 1,800. You can't exactly tell if that player will go to a voila moment again and will next average at 1,900 for a long time.

I disagree, I think pro chess players treat chess like a sacrificial life to chess, much like a neurosurgeon has to do the same with his career.

Many times natural talent is mistaken for simple sacrificial ambition.

You can't disagree with facts, but in any case, you disagree because gaining something through sacrifice is a romantic idea. It's also very comforting to believe the world is a fair place where work is proportionally rewarded.

By the way I never said anyone became a GM through natural talent. That's silly. Everyone had to work... but some worked less than others.

You don't get any points for grinding. So it doesn't matter how many of those zeros you add to someone's rating... the result is unchanged.

There seems to be some basic misunderstanding about how the rating system works.

Typical rating systems (whether Elo, or Glicko, or Glicko-2, or whatever) are calibrated so that a difference of +200 rating points... a 1400 player facing a 1200 player, for example... equates to a 3-to-1 difference in win/draw/loss points. If a 1400 player plays an eight game match against a 1200 player and wins the match 6-to-2, then no rating points are won or lost by either player. A 6-to-2 match result is the expected outcome, given that 200 point difference in rating.

Only if one player performs above or below expectation do any points change hands. And rightly so. If a 1400 player fails to score 6-out-of-8, then either the 1400 is playing below his rated strength (and fully deserves to lose points) or his opponent is playing above his rated strength (and fully deserves to gain points).

Nowhere in this are any points given just for playing, or for grinding.

Suppose that you wanted to gain some cheap rating points, and started playing against players rated 800 points below you. They would only have 0.25^4 = one chance in 256 of beating you... but each win they gained would give them 256 times as many rating points as it would have given you... and you would LOSE those points.

The system is set up so that "grinding" gains you exactly nothing, while risking a catastrophe if you should suffer a lapse in concentration.

I'm well aware not everyone can become a GM in the same way not everyone becomes a doctor. However, a fairly competent person should complete either task through sacrificial ambition.

Yep, it's impossible to imagine someone working hard and not improving.

Or at least... it's not possible for kids to imagine this

Yeah, I've known people who studied chess for decades and remained patzers.