Ratings Deflation?

I feel like there's been some significant rating inflation on this site since forever

People on chess.com want to be told "OoooOOooo you are doing great!" and see their numbers rise.

Even if they are terrible.

If you want to leave the matrix, try lichess.

Levy has spoken about it in his videos with his wife on his channel - essentially, during the chess boom in the pandemic, the influx of players inflated the ratings. This was particularly the case at the lower end, where more of the newcomers naturally gravitate.

Now that chess has stabilised again, ratings have come down a little bit

Anyone know roughly the level of deflation? I'm trying to find data with average elo over the last couple of years but I'm not having much luck.

None of the responders in this thread know what they're talking about. There's been significant rating deflation since the Queen's Gambit boom owing to the introduction of the experience levels starting rating. The global average rating on chess.com vacillated around 1200 back when everyone started at the same rating, but has dropped since to around 600. Since the majority of rating points are clustered around that number, the entire pool experiences a deflationary pressure towards the global average. So yes, 1200s are stronger for their rating today than they used to be.

This is evident when you look at the peak ratings of long-time chess.com members. Many, if not most of them, are down 100-200 points from their peak.

Is that not… exactly what I said?

No. Reread your comment and you'll realize you stated ratings were inflated, not deflated.

"Levy has spoken about it in his videos with his wife on his channel - essentially, during the chess boom in the pandemic, the influx of players inflated the ratings."

… yes? Which is the same as your start? I go on to say that now those people are gone the ratings deflated again?

If there was rating deflation I would never get above 1400

Nowhere in my post did I state ratings were ever inflated during the chess boom. They were always deflating.

They are still deflating.

Yay I reached 900 elo

Btw can you tell which is a good elo level for a 10 year old? 

Pls 

No, they're not. They deflated after the chess boom subsided, but they inflated during the pandemic. This is well documented, with many top players and people like GothamChess noting it frequently.

The global average elo has been falling since 2018—before the pandemic. Gothamchess also doesn't know whatnhe's talking about and it's not his job to know what's happening with the rating pools.

If inflation were occurring, the global average elo would be increasing with the increasing availability of rating points. But it's not increasing, is it?

Are you talking about online or over the board? Because those are two completely different things.

Online. Though there's significant rating deflation in OTB FIDE as well ever since the young players playing online during the pandemic returned to tournament play. This is also well-documented and led to FIDE adjusting their rating system to counteract deflationary pressure.

You can see the deflation on chessgoals.com rating conversion chart. In early 2019, most chess.com ratings tracked well behind FIDE and USCF ratings until ~2300 where they converged, whereas they are now aligned closely up to 1900. You can use the wayback machine to see the archived charts over the years. In fact, a recent update to the charts in July has shown that chesscom blitz actually converts higher than FIDE above 1900. This wasn't the case before the pandemic.

You can also click on any of the global leaderboards in any time control on chess.com and see how skewed the Gaussian is toward 600-650. This wasn't the case in 2017 when the average was 1200. It's been deflating for years. The statistics and graphs don't lie.

Here are two screenshots of the chessgoals.com rating comparison charts to show just how much deflation has occured:

The first is from 2020 and the second is from today.