chess.com ratings are deflated against USCF

How many sock-puppet accounts have you made?

35. Nearly everyone in this thread is me talking to myself.

The alleged fact to which I referred was this:

Comparing the outliers from the high end of the spectrum tells nothing about averages. Counting anything 'per capita' also does nothing to advance your argument; you need to compare the chess playing populations to each other.

In the comparison of GMs per capita (Germany has 1 GM per ~995,000 people), no country comes close to the following two well-recognized chess powerhouses :

• Andorra (1 GM per ~38,000 people)
• Monaco (1 GM per ~36,000 people)

Sources: http://ratings.fide.com/topfed.phtml and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population

To provide evidence for your alleged facts, you'd have to take average players (median would be better) from both countries, have them play each other and see which team wins. This is not likely to happen, so feel free to come up with some proxies.

Have you tried comparing with FIDE ratings?
justt asking. 

Here's one proxy: compare FIDE-rated active players in Germany and USA. Based on the numbers in these links, we have:

• Germany: one GM per ~134 active players; USA: one GM per ~30
• Germany: one IM per ~53 active players; USA: one IM per ~28
• Germany: one FM per ~20 active players; USA: one FM per ~12

BTW, this derivative of your idea of counting GMs per capita was done to further illustrate its shortcomings.

Hey, thanks for the serendipitously timely question!

I thought I was typing my response as a follow-up to myself, and here you posted 2 minutes ahead of my answer 

Germany: one GM per ~134 active players; USA: one GM per ~30

Clearly, not only does Germany have more GMs per capita than the USA, but it also has more active players.

Yeah, that's called "cause and consequence".

And besides, you carefully avoided the fact that 1-GM per capita or per rated players is not a measure of the average Joe's level and 2-'international pool' is not 'Germany'.

You carefully avoid the fact that you don't know what you are talking about.

Change this to first person, and you may be right. Either that or you are nitpicking data to suit your purpose. You used GMs per capita to show the average rating is higher world-wide than the US. How many GMs per capita are there in the world, and how many are there in the US?

There are about 1200 GMs in the world today, and the population is 7 billion. That's about 1 GM for every 5.83 million people. 

In the US, there are 83 Grandmasters and about 314 million people.  That's about one grandmaster for every 3.78 million people. 

Seems like the US is quite a bit above the worldwide average if you use GMs per capita. But using grandmasters per capita is still not the same as using average ratings. 

Please note, he is talking about the "international pool". If the international pool is the pool of all potential chess players (the entire world population), then Adam is just wrong on the facts, and the math.

Well, of course it depends on the meaning of "international pool is stronger than US average".

If "stronger" means that the players of the rating pool 1879-2017 beat titled players with Black in the first or third round of tournaments more often, it might be true. Just make up a definition that fits the claim.

You sure get around fast snowboard dude...

..especially for a guy who hasn't been here long and who found the cheating forum so fast...

That makes me seriously requestion if the motive to get people to blindly accept the premise of this threaed didn't somehow revolve around cheating...?

Nothing like a little ventriloquism from a sock puppet...

Nicely put nemo.

Here's an interesting data point.

IM pfren (Panayotis Frendzas) who has FIDE ratings in the 2300s for standard, rapid, and blitz, only manages chess.com ratings for blitz and standard of 1729 and 1831 respectively.

Smells like chess.com deflation to me.

When Rinkleff talks about international pool it probably needs to be qualified quite a bit. Europe and parts of asia likely have higher GM rates and more chess participation, but the US would likely have more than other parts of asia, africa, south america, perhaps australia not sure.

But of course you can compare ratings across pools and you can expect some correlations. What people may be getting confused on is you cant just make a direct comparison of the sort that says "oh, I am 1800 here, so I should be 1800 there". But if you have large populations you can certainly make comparisons (probably a regression of some sort) and make preditions that would likely work in the average case. If my buddy is 1600 blitz OTB and 1400 online, and I have the same OTB rating, I can expect my online would be about the same as his.

When I said, "international pool", it implied "people who actually play chess." Let me put it this way: Is the world champion from the US? Was the last world champion from the US? Was the world champion before that from the US? Nooo.

You can say this about Germany too.

And Sweden.

Also China.

A couple more countries too...Poland, Romania, North Korea, Vietnam, Iceland, Taiwan, Canada, Portugal, Spain, England Denmark AustriaAustraliaIsraelItalyFranceBelgiumTurkeyScotlandFinlandSwitzerland.

And this has completely nothing to do with the average strength of people who actually play chess in these countries.

Will you please stop arguing that outliers have anything to do with the argument about average strength of the playing population? You're damaging your own credibility after having started with a reasonably decent theory with (independently collaborated) evidence clearly supporting you.

Or are you going to agree that Andorra and Monaco with the higest GM per capita (by an order of magnitude) are the strongest chess-playing countries in the world?

I know at least two unquestionably honest players whose ratings here exceed their USCF ratings, but, recognizing that it is likely an outlier, I am not dredging this up as an argument.

You were talking about averages. World champions are not average. 

The US is above average in the world of chess. Every Olympiad, the US finishes in the top half (and usually competes for a medal).