thank you for your comments
online chess rating vs usfc rating

does it really matter?
really?
It depends what you are into the game for. Art or some aesthetic? Competition? The girls?
Which is the wrong one?

A player can be mislead by ratings . What it comes down to is what you do in the game , wither it's Kasparov or your kid sister.

I'm curious and excited to see what my USCF would be. I'll be playing in my first rated tournament in a few weeks. I played in an unrated one a year ago but the competition wasn't very good. Just from what I know and people who I can beat that are rated, I think I'd be about 1300-1400.

I'm curious and excited to see what my USCF would be. I'll be playing in my first rated tournament in a few weeks. I played in an unrated one a year ago but the competition wasn't very good. Just from what I know and people who I can beat that are rated, I think I'd be about 1300-1400.
No matter who or what you play always play good chess.

I have looked at a couple of dozen cc games here. Not all that many, to be sure, but in each case I see some quite bad play that does not correspond with what I know of USCF otb-ers with similar ratings. The cc games are much worse quality than what I see otb, with similar ratings. I can only conclude that the ratings are very inflated as they express chess skill/knowledge.
Live chess. Haven't looked at one game so I have no opinion.
This is a common misconception about Chess ratings. They don't measure chess skill or knowledge. They measure the likelihood that one player will beat another within a given population.

Well, I wouldn't say that the Online chess ratings are "inflated". They just represent a different type of chess than live and OTB. People playing online chess should have higher online chess ratings than OTB or Live since they have the oppurtunity to use books and certain other things and also have longer time periods to make theiur decisions, as opposed to having to play a whole game in a relatively short period of time.
Rating are based on the populations they occur in. There are a lot more people playing on Chess.com, and the population is world-wide. The numbers don't necessarily reflect that people are "better" on Chess.com, and it doesn't necessarily reflect that the population here is making their moves more slowly or have access to reference material while playing.
It's very typical to obsess about rating, but rating is only a relative indicator of strength, and it means nothing outside of the population it occurred in. For more information, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

A rating of 1600 on chess.com puts you in the top 20% of members.
Does this mean that only the top 20% of this site would have a chance to be rated 1200 or higher USCF?

I used to play both OTB and correspondence USCF tourmaments. I haven't played USCF for over ten years, but my correspondence rating is about 150 points higher than my OTB rating @1825 versus @1675. My chess.com rating is similar to my correspondence chess rating. I think it takes a little different aptitude to play correspondence , turn based chess and ratings will be different.
That said, my USCF Quick chess rating is also 1800+ so go figure.
I care not for the ratings. So long as an enjoyable game is played. I never played uscf, fide, nor icc. Probably wont.. there's enough interesting players here that could humble me with ease. So let's play a fun game.. forget the ratings. They're only good when playing timed, face to face, encounters. No aides, books, kibitzing, etc. Just one brain against another!

Hi guys,
I sure wish Chess.com would do a little research and give us an answer to this question. It comes up at least once a month. Surely, Chess.com has enough data to give us some hard number crunching answers.

Hi guys,
I sure wish Chess.com would do a little research and give us an answer to this question. It comes up at least once a month. Surely, Chess.com has enough data to give us some hard number crunching answers.
I'm a statistician, I could run a regression on the data. Of course, there's probably some privacy thing such that they can't give me the data, even with any identifying information stripped from it.

Here are the datapoints for 7 people I know both on here and off here:
chess.com 'Online Chess' vs USCF 'Standard'
2250 1300
2050 1750
2050 1400
1900 1400
1800 1500
1750 1700
1400 1500

If you're under 1400 in 'Online Chess', you're probably under 1100 OTB because you still hang pieces. Beyond that I'm not sure there's much correspondence. That's also why I mostly play timed games rather than correspondence chess to prepare for OTB events.
Live 'Long' ratings probably correspond best to OTB ratings.
I think the proof is in the pudding. There was one player on Chess.com that reached 4000 live rating for quick games...That would not be possible over the board - I do not have a lot of over the board experience - but I can say there is definitely an adjustment I have to make when playing over the board - the visual perspective is different for me - cannot speak for others...
Well quick is something which is very different on the computer with the use of premoves and the differences between internet connections.
If you look at Live chess long games the only people who are 2200+ are master players or play at master level.