Semi-Pro?

Some of my friends who are into chess say that having a rating from 1600 to 1800 means your a semi-pro at chess is that even true?

No.

Nope...well thats hard to say. You could call yourself a professional chess player at any rating. You would simply be a very poor professional chess player.

not at all

Well you can win money at any level in chess, as long as you play in the appropriate class. So if the definition of a professional is somebody who does something for money, I guess any tournament chess player can be considered a professional...technically.

I'd consider semi-pro something closer to 2000+ rating, or even NM level.

2000 but not nm

Your friends must be joking.

GMs are 2500+. Many GMs can't make enough money from playing chess to be pro, but let's say they can, and 2500+ is pro.

Then surely a semi-pro is someone who makes enough money from playing chess to get some real part of his income from playing chess. I think that below 2300, that just isn't realistic. 2300 players can trawl all the small local tournaments and get a few hundred dollars a month. That's barrel-scraping semi-pro.

lol

Maybe we're all missing a trick here... To be pro, you need to make money. What to do? I rekon I'm going to travel to schools and charge the kids their lunch money for teaching them the rules. All I have to do is teach two million kids and i'll never have to work again.

No. 1600-1799 just means you're an above-average tournament player. See:

http://www.jaderiver.com/chess/ratings.html#TITLES

• National Class B (USCF 1600-1799)

           Above average tournament player.

Yeah, but above average as a  tournament player puts you into the elite level of all people who play chess.  Throw in casual players (that don't have the kind of assistance chess.com seems to permit casual players), and I'd guess that the average tournament player is in the top ten percent of all people who play chess.  

In my opinion, 1800 or 1900 is probably legitimately the beginning of the semi-pro range.  At that point, you are well within the top ten percent of all tournament players in the USCF.

I guess I don't have a good reference for what a semi pro is... basically someone who competes (and makes a little money) part time right? So this is a player who can win local tournaments and maybe some bigger open tournaments as well.

So I'd say more like 2100-2600. Yeah 2600 is really good, of course, but I don't imagine these players are winning five figure tournament prizes.

Somewhat agree with Milliern though. I've seen 1800-1900 win local tournaments ahead of some higher rated players.

I don't think money is a great way of determining that a level of competition in chess Is pro or semi-pro, as well as many sports. If that were the case, most GMs would not be pros. Therefore, I think it only reasonable to put labels on pro and semi-pro on the basis of population statistics and arbitrarily choosing a reasonably high level to append the reference terms to.

Well professional simply means it is a profession for you; i.e. you make money from it. But in the sense of what the word "pro" generally exudes, I'd say 2000-2200, i.e. expert (right? Pretty sure it's 2000 minimum and think at 2200 you are now a master, if only CM), would constitute semi-pro. 1600-1800 is a pretty good club/tournament player I guess. 

'Professional' is anything above 2700, 'semi-pro' is at 2500-2700.