chess.com ratings are deflated against USCF

Seriously? You haven't played in a USCF tournament in -over- a year. Its been 18 months. Why don't you get an -active- USCF rating before you start talking? My comparisons used people who play regularly in both USCF and chess.com events. You wouldn't qualify since you don't play enough to have a reliable rating. Seriously, people, work on your thinking before you post.

With a blitz rating of 1575, its not going to be hard for you to get a USCF standard rating of at least 1775. Just go try, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Actually, you can't even tell THAT from the ratings.  Chess.com could inflate or deflate all ratings by 500 tomorrow, but that wouldn't indicate any particular strength or weakness of players from particular countries.  It would just mean the scale is different.

David, you are a little nerd, aren't you? Look, I didn't say that chess.com players are -better- than USCF. I said the pool is harder, and it is. Players from USCF experience a ratings drop here. That's a fact. That means that, for whatever reason, it is harder to get a high rating here. However, from FIDE, we do know for a fact that the international community is stronger than the American average, and we should therefore expect chess.com players to have stronger average abilities.

Look, people, I don't want to argue with you. I'm right. I know what I'm talking about. You can think about it, and verify the numbers for yourself. I don't need to prove it to you, when you can just get a clue and crunch some numbers for yourself.

Chess.com's ratings are perfect.  USCF is inflated!

He's about right in my case, though.  I don't play much blitz here, but it's about 150 points lower than my USCF standard rating.

Perhaps they are inflated for a part of the group. I know my rating for 15/10 wont stand in USCF/FIDE, neither my online chess rating. And I think many more experience this.

I wonder, what if both groups get mixed. How many people from each group will rise or lower in rating? If the people from first group mostly rise, and the others go down, then that first group was deflated.

Lol, but yes. 150 points is on the low end, but it could just be because you haven't played USCF tournaments lately. I haven't seen one person with a verifiable 'active' USCF standard rating, who somehow had a higher blitz rating. It doesn't take a lot of imagine to conclude that most uscf players will have lower ratings here, regardless of any exceptions.

What is there to disagree with? It's just a number, that statement means nothing.

You're correct about my USCF rating being out of date.  I really don't think I could possisbly have improved 300-400 points, but I guess I won't know unless I try.  I really should go play in one, anyway.  There's one coming up after Thanksgiving and another in early December that I have fliers for.

On the other hand, these events have very long time controls (3-4 hours per side if the game has enough moves.)  Anything over an hour is to my disadvantage, since I'll never really think for longer than that over the course of a game.  During high school we had G/45 so that's what I got used to.

ElKitch wrote:

"Perhaps they are inflated for a part of the group. I know my rating for 15/10 wont stand in USCF/FIDE, neither my online chess rating. And I think many more experience this."

Right, I'm only talking about the conversion from USCF standard to Chess.com blitz. Not the other way, and not for any other rating categories. As numerous GMs have noted, you've got to play slow chess if you want to get really good, and that's true. There are concentration and time-management skills which come into play in standard, but which don't exist in blitz. You just can't practice that in fast chess.

Chess.com 15'10 standard is definitely not the same as USCF standard 90'30.

The pools are non-comparable, why should a USCF rating correspond to a blitz rating when:

 - Different time controls (vastly) requiring different skills.

 - Different rating calculations (this matters a lot more than you seem to think, especially when the number of games played is small)

 - Different player pools (I laughed when you said chess.com has a lot of the same people as USCF, a national federation. A very small percentage.)

So I end up agreeing with everyone else on here, that you're just another of the many idiots that couldn't think of anything interesting to post, so instead posted some inane attention seeking crap. You don't know anything about statistics, that is clear.

Also, by your blitz rating -> USCF rating logic, I should be about NM level in the USCF. So watch out US, I'm coming over to get my title 

Well, yes. Your blitz rating shows you have the tactical ability. Its going to take some effort to get the discipline concentration thing down. You've got to think during longer games, or you'll lose. But its mostly a matter of self-discipline. This is why I explicitly stated that I was talking about USCF standard ratings converted into chess.com blitz rating. I wasn't speaking about converting from chess.com into USCF.

I read something from Dan Heisman the other day, where he stated that once you learn to play standard chess, you can learn to play blitz very easily; however, its hard to go from blitz to standard. I think my numbers confirm this. The USCF players are showing a consistent performance at blitz, which suggests that they retain their basic ability although the overall pool is deflated for various reasons which have already been mentioned.

Yah, actually, with 1900 in blitz I'm pretty sure you'd clock in at about 2200 at USCF, providing you are able to concentrate consistently for a couple hours. I know another 2200, guess what his blitz rating is here? 1900. Gee, go figure. I know a 2100... guess what his blitz rating is? 1800. I know a 2000... wanna guess the blitz rating? 1700! I know a 1900... wanna guess the blitz rating? 1650! I know an 1850... wanna guess the blitz rating? 1600! The numbers are pretty consistent. You can talk trash if you want, but if you'd calculate the numbers, you'd see I'm right.

My uscf rating is wholly based on games played in the last year and a half.  That must mean I'm due for a good result in the next one, right?!

I'm just underrated...just like every chessplayer I've ever talked to.

Look at the ratings on this site for online play and blitz. The same player routinely has different ratings for the two - some of the differences strikingly wide.

Probably. My numbers suggest your USCF rating is about a 100 points under. That's believable and could take a couple tournaments to even out. Your problem might be that you fail to concentrate during games, which is critical at longer time controls, and less so during blitz.

Yes, but online chess really isn't the same game. Have you noticed that there isn't any clock? One player might think for 2 seconds, and the other routinely thinks all day long. That's why I'm -not- talking about online chess. See? Online chess is more about how much each player cares about winning, rather than about how good each player is.

I know they are not comparable, but I never played a 90/30 game in my life. So I am unrated there :)

So what would happen if the two groups both start playing eachother timecontrols. After a time the ratings are somewhat stabilised, and then they merge. It will be interesting to see how they do compared to equal rated people from the other group.

My guess is that the USCF players are mostly serious chessplayers. We have alot of beginners or very casual players here on chess.com. So on average their pool must have stronger players. But they both have the clock shape - I think. 

this is a random image of 2 bell curves, but i think it resembles the overlap in true strength (so not rating!) between the two groups. One bell curve should be higher with more extreme values, since the two groups have different sizes.

So if you mix them and a 800 USCF player will start in the 800 region of the new formed group. In a short time he will probably be rated much higher in the new group. So after a while I think old USCF members will migrate to the higher percentiles. Perhaps the lower the USCFrating, the more percentiles you will gain when the two groups merge.

 * btw I assumed that chess.com has a larger population, but do they? Also in this story I dont take the engines in account, which boosts the chess.com community's average.

They don't have 90'30 ratings here. I don't know a single person who does USCF standard tournaments who would ever do a standard game here. I certainly won't do it, because I know I'll wind up watching YouTube videos while I'm waiting for my opponent to move.

We come here to train our reflexes with blitz, and the ~250 point rating drop is a pretty clear statistical fact. What it means, and why, is more a matter of debate. I think it reflects the stronger ability of the international pool of players, and the fact that chess.com has some pretty decent blitz players.

ElKitch wrote: My guess is that the USCF players are mostly serious chessplayers. We have alot of beginners or very casual players here on chess.com. So on average their pool must have stronger players. But they both have the clock shape - I think. 

Well, that's debatable. Why do USCF standard players experience a ratings drop here? I really think there are three reasons:

1) the international pool has a stronger average playerbase
2) there are lots of people who play only blitz, and they are quite good at it
3) there are some differences in the ratings calculations


Taken together, these three factors result in a ~250 point ratings drop when USCF standard players do blitz on chess.com. I don't even know why this claim is controversial, since its so patential obvious to anyone who compares the ratings of active players.