What rating signals a good player?

Hi everyone.

I'd like to post something like a poll here. I'm anxious to see your opinion about good chess players (or the title 'above average') and the ratings here on chess.com. What do you think the threshold is? Should 1500+ players be considered good players? Or does it all begin around 1800 or 2000? Where do you feel the border line is? Or is it more proper to define an interval of, say, 1600-1800 as average, and players above this are good, below this are amateurs? What's your opinion/idea about the relationship of ratings and player classifications?

Thanks in advance.

It depends on who you ask. Anyone below your own rank is usually considered a patzer.

Do you consider yourself a good player ? 

I've always thought 2000+ were pretty good players, and always tried to reach that rating myself. Now the new Dutch rating list is out and I have 1999...

Of course now that I get closer to them I see that most 20xx and 21xx are pretty clueless too and just better than I at hiding it. Those 2200+ guys seem to understand something at least.

Yes 

I don't think chess.com ratings can be a good indication of whether a player is actually good or not. I don't consider myself a very good player, but it's been relatively easy to reach a rating of over 2200 here (granted, I've had some luck along the way). And once you go over 2300, a large percentage of the players are actually cheating, so it's hard to say whether their rating is doing them justice. It's possible that there's a small window where finding good players according to their rating is feasible - that would probably be somewhere between 2200 and 2300.

OTB ratings are much more reliable indicators of a person's chess knowledge/strength than online ratings. 

"Good" is a term that has always moved around a bit for me.

Most 1600s or so have stopped dropping pieces, they rarely miss basic tactics, they know basic end game motiffs, they know "book" on a couple of openings. They're "good" in some sense. And that's just around the median of active adult tournament players. So a 1600 OTB rating is kind of the minimum of "good" for me. And at 1600, they'll wipe the floor in OTB play against someone who has never played a tournament before but knows how to play chess.

But compared to an IM, a 1600 sucks pretty badly.

So, I think the question is what is the population you are talking about? Do you mean all people who know how to play chess and have played a game? Or do you mean the active OTB community?

"Good" is a relative term that means different things to different people.  Since it has no absolute meaning, every person on chess.com could give a different answer and be right.   And I don't trust online ratings because too many players can't resist the opportunity to cheat.  For me, the true test of a chessplayer is how he/she plays face to face.

To me personally, a good chessplayer is someone who has moved beyond the beginner stage and has gained an intuitive understanding of the important elements of the game, knows the rules, knows basic tactics and strategy, has some basic opening knowledge, and some knowledge of how to play endgames.   Often this knowledge is gained through experience rather than training or books.  A good chessplayer knows how to be both a polite loser and a graceful winner.

if someone beats me  from opening,middlegame and endgame , each of every department and can sustain until the very end,i think he is the better  player. player with high ratings usually dont like to play with inferior  player as their is also a probability that  they might lose a game and lose  some points even with a draw.titled players are more the serious kind, they are more hungry to improve their status level by playing with  rating above them. the prize of every game is to know what level are you into,something like rise and fall for me.gadging by rating is also difficult, a  true rating for me is playing with different players of a thousand games in bullet ,blitz, and standard. you can  have a good statistics by the average opposition percentagof as thousand games not one hundred games only.,but a thousand games that may reflect a true rating be it,average oppositiontrue stasttistics is a question of how many games consistency andinconsistency , bullet, blitz andstandard.

50 points below my current rating in any given format at any time.

"Good" is totally relative.  Usually you would consider anyone better than you a good player.

Anyone over 1150 is a potential threat

Well you will notice that how he plays in the opening! But I don´t know if the rating here is the same compared the the rating they have in nearchess!?

Spacos!!

A 800 rated player would be considered good in my school

In Canada?

Everyone below me is bad, and my rating is what makes a good player

Considering that people don´t cheat here at chess.com, i would define the following table:

Master level - Above 2400

Expert level - 2200/2400

Very Good level - 2000/2200

Good level - 1800/2000

Average level - 1600/1800

Weak level - Below 1600

I don't think you can really tell a player's strength by rating alone.

I have played (OTB) against quite a lot of players with ratings above 1900 who had gained such a high rating by playing against lots of lower rated players. Obviously they were not really good players and played moves, which I simply considered to be bad.

On the other hand I know players that had ratings around 1800 and did often beat players with over 2100.

In my opinion rating can be a good indication of a player's strength, but should not be taken too seriously. After all the rating does not influence the game in any way.

Also, I'd like to add, that the reason why I don't particularly like to play against way lower rated opponents (150+ difference) is because they quite often tend to play "drawish openings" (as white) when they go up against higher rated players. I (and some other players I know) think that this is the exactly wrong way to play. If you give up your chance to gain an advantage in the opening you will most likely be easily outplayed by a more experienced player. Especially if you play something that doesn't suit your own style (i.e: you're an attacking-player and play the ruy lopez exchange). Whenever I face a higher-rated player I always stick to my usual openings and try to achieve positions I feel comfortable with. Even if I lose the game I still at least manage to learn something from it (especially if I get to analyze it with my opponent afterwards).

My point of view is that after 2000, you can't expect the player to make easy blunders, as in dropping a piece in one move. After 2200 most players (though not all) have a decent feel for positional concepts. After that the players make less and less mistakes, have a greater opening knowledge and handle the clock much better. 2500-2600 still make fairly major mistakes and indeed I remember turning something like a -5 into a +3 position against GM Bindrich before eventually blundering the game into a draw. The strength difference generally increases with rating, so the difference between 2600 and 2800 is much greater than for example 1500 and 1700, which seem almost equal sometimes.

I guess thats a lot of hot air just to say that in my eyes it gets interesting after 2000 (FIDE), but that most everyones a beginner at heart even up to a GM level ;)