What Is A Good Chess Rating? 5 Tips to Quickly Improve Your Rating

Most people say evaluations and ratings generally don’t matter if you enjoy the game. However, this is not the case for the majority of chess players who work very hard and are keen on improving their rating to reach a good one.

Chess ratings are used to indicate your strength and sort of categorize you among other players from all around the world.

So, what is a good chess rating?

You can calculate what’s considered “good” among different rating systems according to the average that the players reach. For example, a good ELO rating is 1500, while a good USCF rating is higher than 1200. It can also vary across different online chess sites, ranging from 1400 to 1500.

In this post, we’ll break down what is considered a good chess rating across different systems and provide some tips on how to improve it past that.

What Is a Good Chess Rating? 

A good chess rating is not something universally defined. It’s all about perspective. Here’s what’s considered good across different OTB and online systems. 

ELO Ratings 

Since Arpad Elo invented this system, it has been used to evaluate a player’s relative strength against other players in chess. Even though it’s used as an evaluation method in other games, it’s the most popular one in the chess world.

A good ELO rating ranges between 1200 to 1600. Below 1200 is considered a beginner in chess, so if your rating jumps to 1200-1600, you’re considered a good chess player. This, of course, is very subjective, but I and most of the chess players I know will consider someone a “good” chess player if they have a rating of 1500 and above.

I consider someone to be a worthy opponent if they have a FIDE rating of 1700 and more. A 2,000+ FIDE rating usually means it’s going to be a very difficult game.

The more you advance and increase your rating, the more experienced you are compared to other players.

If you find yourself stuck at a certain rating, I have a quick guide on what you can do to improve here.

USCF rating

On-the-board USCF Standard Ratings of 1200 or higher typically denote a good chess player with a fundamental knowledge of tactics and strategy and some insight. A strong player is often represented with 1600. 

You may need more time or less time to achieve a high USCF chess rating depending on your age, training commitment, skill level, etc. It frequently takes a few years to develop from a complete beginner to what is regarded as a good player.

Chess.com Rating

On chess.com, a rating of 1500 or more is regarded as good. When you reach a player rating of 1500, you have advanced past the point where you used to make unnecessary blunders. Furthermore, you are capable of defeating players with ratings between 1800 and 1900.

Each online chess site has its own player evaluation system that it employs. Chess.com uses the Glicko rating system, which includes a measurement of their confidence in the players’ rating known as the “rating deviation” or RD.

Chess.com asks you whether you are a beginning, intermediate, or advanced player when you sign up for an account and assigns you a starting rating based on your response. If you choose beginner, you get an initial rating of 800. If you choose intermediate, you get 1200 instead. You get 1800 if you choose advanced.

The system has a 95% confidence level that your rating is between 800 and 2500. It is utterly unpredictable. As a result, a player’s rating will alter substantially when they first start off, possibly by several hundred points at once. 

The confidence interval will, however, start to close, and the average number of points won or lost each game will start to drop after a few games against more skilled opponents. Another thing to keep in mind is that the confidence interval will expand over time. By doing this, you can quickly gain or lose points to adjust for any variations in your skill level.

Lichess

Lichess uses the Glicko 2 rating system. This makes it close to chess.com ratings. Therefore, 1500 points and above is a very good rating on Lichess. It means that you surpassed beginners and started to advance more in the game. When you reach 1800, you’re considered better than 75% of the players on the site. 

Chess24 

Elo is the foundation of the chess24 rating system, with a few modifications for online play that result in marginally higher ratings. So, it’s safe to say that if you get a 1500-1600 rating on chess24, you’re considered a very good player.

Why Your Initial Chess Rating Does Not Matter 

Initial ratings actually don’t matter. In the long term, it doesn’t matter what your initial rating is because new accounts undergo significant rating modifications to enable them to soon settle on a roughly appropriate rating.

You begin to receive minor rating modifications as you play more games to fine-tune your rating and account for changes in your level of play. This happens quite slowly, so you have to be patient. 

As for offline ratings such as FIDE and USCF ratings, similar to what happens with online chess, you will eventually play enough rated games to reach a rating that more accurately represents your strength. The key is to keep playing and improving.

By the way, you can learn how long are chess ratings valid for in this article.

How to Improve Your Chess Rating Quickly?

Improving your chess rating is all about studying and practicing. More detailed tips might be helpful, so here are some tips to quickly improve your ratings:

Get Back to Basics

When required, moving forward necessitates returning to the basics. So get a couple of fresh opening books, learn the principles of theory, and study middle-game tactics.

Good recommendations would be Chess 101: Everything a New Chess Player Needs to Know! by David Schloss and Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess by Bobby Fischer.  

Simply familiarize yourself with a handful of the opening strategies and straightforward methods; nothing complicated is required.

By the way, if you don’t know who Bobby Fischer is, you really should take the time to do so. You can learn the truth about Bobby Fischer’s life and why he quit chess here.

Study Your Games

You need to study and analyze your own games. You’d be surprised at how much this can help you! 

Review your best wins over tough opponents. You usually had to put on a really strong play to do it, proving that you have it in you. Knowing how you might have turned the tables in a game and somewhat improved will be very helpful to you.

More importantly, you must deeply examine your losses and understand what happened: were you defeated by positional play, was there a strategic error that immediately put you in a losing position, or was it time issues?

Reviewing and analyzing your games whether alone or with someone can help you also learn about your weaknesses and patterns so you can work on them and improve them.

Learn from the Masters

Studying and analyzing the chess games of strong players is essential for chess improvement as it offers the opportunity to absorb and incorporate the strategic choices, tactical moves, and positional understanding of masters, serving as a valuable source of knowledge, inspiration, and exposure to diverse playing styles that can be utilized to enhance one’s own chess skills.

Play Against Stronger Players

You get better if you challenge your skills against those who have higher ones. I suggest teaming up with more experienced players. It may put your strategies to the test and compel you to improve. 

This will undoubtedly boost your points if you succeed. Your score will drop if you lose, but you’ll learn how the masters succeed. This can serve as a useful reference for your upcoming game.

Join Reputable Tournaments 

Take part in three-round rapid events where there is a good probability that you may win a trophy. This should motivate you to raise your game. In reputable tournaments, people tend to outperform themselves. That’s something you shouldn’t miss.

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