What is the maximum acheivable ELO for a newbie

2851 if you learn :)

1300, and that's pushing it

I think anyone of reasonable intelligence could get to 2000 in a year of dedicated study though

Not to be rude, but how would you know :)  Competition gets tougher as rating goes up (and we're talking OTB chess I believe, not chess.com stuff).

I wish I had a photographic memory because I'm too lazy to look this up but I believe it was Kasparov relating how he'd been playing 2-3 years before reaching a 2000 FIDE equivalent in strength.  Of course he was something ridiculous like 10 years old, but you get the idea.

 Not to be arrogant, but I believe that if I had a well designed study plan and the time to follow it (I'm talking full-time 6+ hours a day study) I would have reached 2000 in a year easily (and I don't think it's unreasonable to think any intelligent adult would do the same). I think it takes young kids so long to improve to that standard because they're not developed enough to see how different aspects of the game integrate and how to apply new information. Of course, kids are instinctually better at the game ie. tactically competent with a good feel for initiative and an appetite to just play and enjoy themselves. All idle speculation of course...just my own feeling

It's not just general intelligence & study time, though. The best chess players all have natural inborn talents regarding spatial visualisation. That is a special trait that's not correlating with general IQ very much, but in chess it really makes a difference.

I tend to think those who progress very quickly have a certain kind of personality that is (for some reason or another) uninterested with making direct threats on the board.  Watch any beginner game and see meaningless threats and checks one after another. 

It's almost like from day one a prodigy is looking for something more, and this attitude makes every game, and every hour of study much more effective for them.

Again pure speculation, but it's fun :)

 Source?

1000 max.

See e.g. here for a newer study:

http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/668

The classical study was:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1611410

  I see nothing to support the assertion that "the best chess players all have natural inborn talents regarding spatial visualisation". More rather it seems that playing chess increases visuo-spatial ability

Definitely not a point over 4,745. Unless he had pancakes each day. Maybe 4,760 if pancakes were involved.

Granted, I have grossly simplified (I wasn't prepared to defend a thesis when typing my post, actually ;)). Still you should find something to that effect in those articles. Like at the end of the first one:

"The statistical results of our study show a significant difference in visuo-spatial abilities between chess players and non-players, after adjusting for age, whereas we could not demonstrate any difference with respect to perceptual or abstraction skills. Visuo-spatial abilities seem not to be influenced by age. Reflecting on the results, one wonders whether visuo-spatial ability is developed only in a specific form in chess players rather than in more general forms."

The classic study by Frydman&Lynn (which I was mainly thinking of) was more explicit about this. From the abstract you should get their gist:

"The results suggest that a high level of general intelligence and of spatial ability are necessary to achieve a high standard of play in chess."

Anyway I'm not saying that you can't train visualisation skills. That's actually what I'm doing most of the time. But there's simply no denying that there's also talent involved in this and that training can get you only so far.

Edit: To be fair, after looking through the literature it seems that a lot of the newer studies are extremely sceptical whether visualisation skills are important for chess at all!

http://www.mendeley.com/research/visuospatial-abilities-in-chess-players/

Over 2000 comments are ridiculous...3 days??? 1200/1300 max.

Too many joking comments. I dont know for sure but the range should be 1000 - 1200. Even the most talented Kasparov, Fischer,.. if u guys take time to check, all of them needed years to break 2000. The difference was that they didnt stuck at any level but kept improving.

You can't just jump over the novice stage. Everyone was a novice once, top GMs included. 1100 max.

i am 14 and have recently started playing chess seriously about six months ago, my iq is around 150-155, and i have been using all the rescourses chess.com has to offer and been playing a ton, my elo is around 900-1100 when i play live(which involvesme on youtube and games while i wait so its not full concentration) and on the chess mentor it is around 1500 (which i am usually fully concentrated on) so even with an extremly high iq i doubt with only 3 days of training somone could really be above 1000 unless they happen to be a prodigy.

You´re 14 ? 

While I don't necessarily believe that getting to 2000 in a year is doable, I do think that getting to 2000 over an undetermined time frame based on how frequently one plays in rated games is doable. I am an avid scuba diver and instructor. It is a very simple activity. I can train any able bodied person to scuba dive to 150 meters. But few do it, because few are interested in the extra work and time it takes to achieve that, most are quite happy getting certified to tool around at 20 meters on a reef and don't want to do more. 

Just because something is easy doesn't mean it's not also a commitment. 

Even adults who say they want to reach those levels of play rarely commit to doing the things that are necessary to achieve those goals. As an example, most every chess instructor will say that playing slow time controls OTB and analyzing the game afterward in depth with one's opponent is nearly essential. But go to any tournament (filled with "serious" chess players, pop into the skittles room between rounds, and you'll find that the people sitting at boards analyzing their games are few, but the people playing video games on their computer, blitzing, bughousing, or chatting about the weather are far more numerous -- and these are folks who are spending big money traveling to tournaments. 

But this is sort of the point -- Chess is not so hard that a normally intelligent person can not become a pretty darn good player. What is hard is the discipline keeping the commitment necessary to do that!

And I do think that is more than a semantic quibble. The reason it is an important distinction is that if possit a view that chess is itself so hard that the average person can't be more than a 1600 player, then at least some people will discourage themselves from cultivating the discipline to do more.  

It is one thing to accept a lack of time to devot to a game, and accept a lower level of performance and quite another to beleive one's self to be incapable of more.  

But it is also equally important, as you point out, to recognize the dedication and commitment of the people who do commit to improving and to not denigrate their achievement by suggesting that it's not impressive. One can hold a view that "anyone" can do it while still recognizing that few do because the discipline and commitment are more than most are willing to give. 

Bobby Fischer once gave an interview wherein he mentioned that great many lesser grand master's really aren't that talented, that they just "just work like dogs." I sensed that he had great respect for those folks' dedication, even though he could crush them as chess players. It can be a hard balance to maintain.  

As for your point of disagreement on OTB tourney analysis, I don't mean necessarily hard analysis - just spending time capturing your (and your opponent's ideas) about the game is; however, necessary to do a quality hard analysis later. But most players don't do this one simple step!! Or course, since most people don't analyze their games anyway . . .

I think 1200 is honestly pretty steep for your experiment. I would be unsurprised if in a sample size of 20 players there wouldn't be 4 or 5 who would win no games at all, given a random tournament.