Online versus Live ratings

Having access to the opening explorer in online chess means that players who have no opening knowledge can develop into a good position.  They might not be able to get out of the gate in live chess before they get themselves in trouble.  Having the ability to begin from a well developed position vs starting from an imballanced one is huge.  That has to skew the ratings to some degree.

At some point this is true. But in the opening explorer you dont have so many moves. They develop into good positions but fall through afther some moves. 

In blitz they fall through straigt away.

Anyway it does not matter. I use the rating system to check if their online rating is 400 above their blitz and for me it is an alert!

Mazkor wrote:

Actually, blitz is a completely different game than online chess, and it's possible to suck at blitz (like I do , 1030 after a horrible losing streak) but play good moves in standard time controls (1591) or turn based (I'm 1750-ish now but have been 1850), because you have time to think and don't blunder pieces all the time, so just because someone has a huge rating difference between blitz and online doesn't mean he is a cheat...

I agree

I have a feeling that when I start playing a lot of correspondence chess.. I am going to get owned. I don't look up openings ever and I am not going to start. The reason being is I will forget every single thing I learned pretty much right away. If I stumble onto an opening that came from my mind.. its easier to remember. For instance, I was playing an opening the other day and stumbled on an opening called "Marshall defense" while playing a 30 minute game. However, if I was going for the Marshall defense in that live game, there is no way I would of remembered the move order or theory behind it. I just played like that because it seemed logical and it just so happened to be called the marshal defense.

Which could be a difference between how a person would play correspondence chess vs live chess. Maybe the people in live chess either memorize more opening theory or they are already adapted to play in a style that makes sense and is purposeful