How does chess.com decide initial ratings?

Jeez, I noob screwed this question up twice now. Okay, a search tells me everyone should start with 1200. I thought I started with 800 but that was with a bot. My profile shows I started at 1089 and increased 177 in the past month to my current 1266. I have seen people at 400 though.

When you create an account you choose a skill level and that translates to a default rating:

• New to chess: 400
• Beginner: 800
• Intermediate: 1200
• Advanced: 1600
• Expert: 2000

https://support.chess.com/article/671-how-do-i-create-an-accoun

When I started I figured I was not the top level because I wasn't a FIDE titled player and I was sub-2000 so I wasn't advanced.  Thus I chose intermediate.  It took me a while that first day to get used to the online interface and thus move up from 1449 reaching 1697 by the end of the day and 1790 within a month.  A month and a half later I opted to play for another couple of weeks and reached 1857.

It might be useful to ask for existing ratings and base things on that (I would have started over 1800).

In 63 games I've faced one person with an account closed for fair play (I won, but that was the first day and I had not yet broken 1500 before that game - he dropped a piece on move 14 and turned it into a dropped rook on move 15).  I had not noticed that before today.

Aren't ratings decided on your first five games I played 3 blitz and 2 rapids but I'm unsure if my rating is permanent or not

You are correct, it takes 5 or more games to display your rating. 

@Martin_Stahl response was correct back in early 2021 when that was written; chess.com has since "upgraded" to this newer way of getting to an accurate rating more efficiently.

I think that once you complete about 50 games in a particular control, the ratings become reasonably accurate in the sense that rating fluctuations per game will be kept low.

When did that happen? Was it announced?

The default ratings are still applied at account creation, it just doesn't display the rating (not sure where it doesn't show though) until the 5 games are completed. The only other thing that has changed is there apparently isn't an Expert option anymore.

You also did not start with a rating of 1089.  You had a rating of 1089 after the completion of your first game.

Going into that game and looking at the "Info" tab, you can see that you had a rating adjustment of +289.  So you had a rating of 1089 after getting a rating adjustment of +289 from your first game.

So you started with a rating of 800.  This presumably means you choose "beginner" for your initial rating.

New accounts get big rating adjustments to help them quickly narrow in on an approximately accurate rating, so in the long run your initial rating doesn't really matter.

As you continue to play games you start to get smaller rating adjustments to fine-tune your rating and reflect changes in your strength of play (which generally happen fairly slowly).

I started at 800

For reference, it doesn't display during the Play (live chess), but the rating still shows under the stats page. Once 5 games are completed (including a mix of time controls), then the ratings are displayed as usual.

I reckon the ratings are bogus. Play someone with a low rating and they wipe you off the board. Then play someone with a high ranking and I wipe them off the board. The ratings are rigged and don't mean anything.

In some cases, players who start with a high initial rating and turn out to actually be beginners may think that they are expert players (having played with a circle of friends and winning them constantly) only to realise the playing strength of the general Chess.com population later on.

In my case, I selected my playing strength as intermediate a few years ago because I believed that my paying strength was somewhere in the middle. As it turned out on this site, my rating ended up moving upwards.

It's also normal to have upset wins and losses.  You will lose more than you win against higher rated players and win more than you lose against lower rated players, but it's not going to be 100%.

hellooo

what is dis group

When I posted that quoted reply, there was an Expert level.

And when I joined in 2020 it was labeled professional instead of expert (with no numbers given to clarify any of the levels). From an OTB standpoint I considered 2500+ professional, 2100+ advanced and 1700+ intermediate, so I started as intermediate with a 1900+ OTB rating (figuring that would start me in the 1800-2000 range) and it took a little time to increase from the chess.com start of 1200 to where it currently is.

I started at 900