Current average chess rating

Why is the current average rapid and blitz rating on chess.com so low? 1089,36 for rapid and 1026,42 for blitz. How is it compared to ELO rating?

Why do you think that is low?

It is just the average.

What ELO rating are you referring to? The international FIDE over the board one that only some people have?

Are the average ratings here lower than they used to be?  I guess so but I don't know what it means.

I have copies of old snapshots from 2014 to 2016 and they are all higher than the current average.

November 2014

July 2015

October 2015

January 2016

March 2016

There was a definite uptrend over time in blitz ratings. The last one shows an average of 1102 in March 2016.

The current average is obviously lower.   I don't know what to make of it. In the first place, I don't know if they were all calculated in the same manner.

It may be because chess.com started letting people begin playing with lower ratings-- 800 instead of 1200.

It may be because they stopped letting people grab ratings points by beating the computers.

It may be because a lot of high rated players quit or because a lot of low rated players joined.

It may be because they are getting better at rooting out artificially high rated players.

Who knows?

/ I didn't keep snapshots for the rapid ratings because I don't play much rapid. I think I stopped taking them when they disabled portions of V2.

One thread reported the November 2017 blitz average as Blitz: 1044.66.  That would indicate that most of the drop occurred between March 2016 and November 2017.

Interesting. Right now the blitz average is 969.21

And there are many more players. Maybe the way chess.com calculates it is much different than 2 years ago.

If you think about it the only thing that can affect average rating is new players joining, since for every rating point loss in a game, there is a rating point gained in a game

The ratings list in a game by one player are not always the same as those gained by the other. 

Consider this. A person with an ELO of 2000 is around 1% of all worldwide chess players. A person with an ELO of 3000? Let's just say players like Wesley So and Magnus Carlsen are few far and between, very rare. Now, a person with an ELO of 1000? Now you're getting right around the worldwide average. Considering again that person with a 2000 ELO. Think of the gap between their 2000 and the grandmasters level of 3000. and they KNOW how to play very well. How easy do you believe the game of chess to be, my friend? We cannot all think eight moves ahead. We cannot all calculate at ungodly levels, and we cannot all navigate to the road to victory every time. Now! Consider that person with an ELO of 3000. They still lose games. Nobody wins every game of chess. When we win, we win points, and when we lose, we lose points. That is the reason why the average is so low. 

I disagree completely. 

When new players join, it is likely that they are new to chess as well. And all the inactive players.

So whats your explanation MisterPonziani? I'd love to hear it. I don't think any of us lose on purpose here. 

I mean, its fine you disagree, but can I at least have your take on the subject?

I also agree it's pretty low but I think another factor might be that many "ok" players start several new accounts which start off with the low ratings then end up playing other ok players who also have the low starting rating.  In other words I think a lot of decent players who may actually be about 1400 are in the pools of 1000 and 1200.  It is a total crap shoot the actual skill level of players I play anywhere between 1000 and 1500 I got an equal chance of getting obliterated by a1000 as I do of obliterating a1500.  I know, a 1500 rating is not good, but it should be more difficult than a1000.

Well. What I can't figure out, is just a year ago, the average was around 1010-1020 mark. It's now around 970-980. I don't know. I have to look at the numbers, though. They don't lie. 

It's also wild that the"beginner" starting level is 1000.  I play "beginners"all the time in the real world.... They are not in the same class as1000 players here. I know 1000 isn't good, but these 1000 rated folks here ain't "beginner" ffs

Five years ago I was 980. I couldn't bench myself out of the 1,000 mark. I only play blitz, once in awhile maybe a correspondence game, but for the most part....I don't pay any attention to my ELO anymore. There's other numbers to look at. Percentile. Average ELO wins, Average ELO loses, Average ELO draws, a pie chart calculating your wins, loses, and draws. If it wasn't for all the arrogant and ignorant players, I'd say chess.com was a great site! 

The average rating for club players is around 1600

I had some fun trying to model a chess site's rating distribution with python... it also gave me incentive to learn python (I knew almost nothing before I started this).

Sample graph, 100,000 random users generated in a normal distribution.

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I tried lots of different settings, but generally kept the pool of players below 10,000... because when that many players play a few 100 games each it takes a while to get your results.

I learned something interesting.

The average rating of a pool heavily depends on how quickly you can get new users to their correct rating... and I mean 0 games (initial rating is correct) is much better than requiring 5 or 10 games (for example).

Why?

Because after the new player burns through their RD, and everyone's RD starts to stabilize, then as far as the average is concerned, the player's real strength doesn't matter anymore. They can be a GM or a noob, but after the RD stabilizes the number of points they gain or lose in every game is roughly equal to the number of points their opponents gain and lose...

... which means at that point the average rating stays the same (with surprisingly little movement).

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This means the average moves up when your high RD players are staying too high for too long.

And the average moves down when your high RD players are staying too low for too long.

I mean, it's obvious after you hear it, but I didn't realize it at first, and I didn't realize how important it is to quickly move a player to their correct rating... for example bad days, good days, widening or narrowing the rating range of opponents... it simply doesn't matter after players are gaining and losing roughly the same amount. The pool's average gets stuck in place.

I thought that was pretty interesting.

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Sample output

At the bottom you see one of the new players was 2100 strength.
But his first rating on the site was 1950.
His highest rating was 2100, so that's good, he got to the correct rating.
His current rating is lower, but that's ok, I have it so people under and over preform.
He played 40 games, winning 26.

(Since the rating math doesn't distinguish between 2 draws and 1 win + 1 loss, I don't deal with them at all).

2 randomly selected players. One from the initial group and one from the joining group, and then:

2 random players selected, and then:
First is first rating when joining the site
Base is the player's true strength. Their results are based on this +/- an amount
Curr is current rating
High is highest rating
Lowest is lowest rating
Games is total number of games played
W is total number of wins for that player
L is total number of losses for that player

Yeah, who they're counting has the biggest impact for sure.

The next biggest, IMO, is unsurprisingly the average strength of the players joining. When strong players join, the average goes up because their high RD essentially generates new rating points that didn't exist before.

But for sites as large as chess.com, probably your average is pretty close to the real average. So I assume new users stop moving it much.

And then the next biggest (smallest on this list) is what I discovered with my little experimentation... that the longer it takes your system to get new users to their correct rating, the more your average is influenced.

I suppose the extension of this is how quickly you can ban fraudulent users who play with high RDs (whether they're sandbaggers or cheaters).

I bet you play dumb online because you're a genius in real life

I'm starting to have the opinion though, that since this site is so large, its average is the best estimate we have for the "real world" average (so to speak). In other words month to month, new users cancel each other out.

So because of that (and because I assume Glicko was a good mathematician) it seems the only groups that can really move this site's average are cheaters and sandbaggers. Chess.com's great cheat detection is a quality of life measure for its users, and a very successful one, but I assume many times it doesn't act quickly enough to keep the average stable...

Which is why we see refunds... i.e. playing more games won't actually get your rating back. The loss is distributed to the whole group, but over time you would permanently lose rating points.

Speaking of laughing, the following is not fake news.

Trump goes into a chemist shop,

Trump 'can you tell me something that will kill Corona Virus?'

Pharmacist, 'Ammonia cleaner'

Trump, 'well get me someone who works here.'