Chess.com

General discussions about ratings.
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Kevin Thurlow
Posts: 5802
Joined: Wed Apr 30, 2008 12:28 pm

Chess.com

Post by Kevin Thurlow » Sun Dec 17, 2017 8:50 am

I'm running an event in January and about half of the entrants so far do not have gradings or ratings. Some have quoted chess.com ratings, between 1000 and 2000. Now I realise any sort of conversion is a guess, but if people on here could give some sort of guide how that might convert, it would be helpful. I suspect if I do the usual ELO conversion, it will be at least in the right ball park as our American friends say.

The event is to find qualifiers for a team event, so we are looking for 4 or 5 winners, not 1.

Alexander Hardwick
Posts: 128
Joined: Tue May 18, 2010 4:45 pm

Re: Chess.com

Post by Alexander Hardwick » Sun Dec 17, 2017 11:54 am

Hello! Oddly enough, I had exactly the same situation about a month ago. I had 8 players and needed to sort them into two 4-board teams for a competition. A few of the players had chess.com ratings, which they gave.

From personal experience, I've always found that the standard on chess.com (relative to ratings) is relatively high compared to other online chess websites. With GameKnot, for example, a decent rule of thumb is: [GK rating] - 250 = [FIDE rating strength]. By contrast, with chess.com, it's surprisingly difficult to attain a high rating. In my experience, chess.com ratings tend to be roughly in line with FIDE rating strength, or perhaps 50-100 points higher than FIDE rating strength.

This doesn't always work for players who have only ever played online chess, however. Often they're unused to OTB and it takes them a while to adjust. One of the players in question had a chess.com rating in the 1900s. In general, his play during the team competition was impressively mature: he won most of his games, seemed to be playing at 1800-1900 level, and also won a warm-up blitz game against me (ECF 168) quite comfortably. But he hung and blundered several pieces in the first round, simply due to lack of familiarity with having a physical board and pieces.

I hope this helps!

PS. I wouldn't use chess24 ratings as a guide, they tend to be extremely volatile because of the very high k-factor used by chess24.

Matt Fletcher
Posts: 271
Joined: Wed Mar 09, 2011 9:42 pm

Re: Chess.com

Post by Matt Fletcher » Sun Dec 17, 2017 1:15 pm

Users at the various sites try to equate ratings every so often. This is the latest one I'm aware of from chess.com

There's not huge amounts of data behind it (clicking through, it's based on responses from around 100 users) but it looks like a rule of thumb of chess.com rating = FIDE rating isn't massively far out, and that you might want to knock a couple of hundred points off a lichess rating before converting.

Kevin Thurlow
Posts: 5802
Joined: Wed Apr 30, 2008 12:28 pm

Re: Chess.com

Post by Kevin Thurlow » Sun Dec 17, 2017 5:15 pm

Great, thanks!

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