[sbrother]

1. Uh, isn't 2000 like extremely fucking good?

2. I played a chess bot on Delta on easy and it was really bad, felt like random moves. I beat it trivially and I am actually bad at chess, ~1000 on chess.com. I wonder if this one is different?

[NewsaHackO]

Yeah, he just casually said he had an elo that high, as if that doesn't blow 90% of people out of the water.

[umanwizard]

Note that 2000 on lichess is probably weaker than 2000 on chess.com (or USCF or FIDE)

[dmuino]

That's true, I'm 2050-2100 lichess, around 1800 on chess.com. Never played a rated tournament but played some rated players who were 1400-1500 rated USCF, and they were roughly my strength, maybe a bit better. Still the Delta bot, easy mode, was much, much better than me.

[fragmede]

Casually just in the top 2-3 percent of chess players globally world wide humble brag. I'm not that good at it, just a little bit!

[seanyeh]

I think it depends on the pool to which you're comparing. Being top 2% of all programmers is not so impressive if you include everyone who's ever taken an Intro class. Top 2% of people who do it for a living is much more significant.

I'm in a similar boat as the other posters (2050-2100 lichess, 1400 USCF). The median active rating for USCF is around 1200 and likely much higher if you don't include scholastic players, so if we compare against the OTB pool, "2000 lichess" is probably closer to top 50% than 2%

[jmb99]

I mean, if you’re in the top 3 percent of anything, yes that’s pretty good, but not unbelievably so, especially in the field of chess. If for instance you randomly put together a classroom full of chess players, there’s decent odds one of them is better than top 3%. Two classrooms and it’s almost a certainty.

Put another way, looking at chess.com users, there are ~6 million people who would count as the top 3 percent. Difficult to achieve, yes, but if 6 million people can achieve it, it’s not really a “humble brag,” it’s just a statement.

[refulgentis]

It made me smile to hear “I’m only 97th percentile” isn’t a humblebrag. You may be employing an old saw of mine, you can make people* react however you want by leaning on either percentages or whole numbers when you shouldn’t.

* who don’t have strong numeracy and time to think

[citrus1330]

It's still significantly stronger than the average online chess player

[mcmoor]

I heard it's never intended to be the same since initial rating for Lichess and chess.com respectively is 1500 and 1200. So they should have 300 rating difference on average. Quite fitting with what the other commenter claims actually.

[reassess_blind]

I don’t think it would average out to a 300 elo difference simply based on the starting rating being 300 apart.

If everything else was the same, and people play enough games they will average out to the same elo.

The difference is caused by many factors. People don’t play enough games to sink to their real elo, the player pool is different, and you gain/lose fewer points per game with Lichess’s elo algorithm.

[mcmoor]

ELO is relative. There's no reason why a GM ELO should be 2800 or 280 or 28000. So it's all decided by ELO of every other person. So if the ELO gain/loss calculation and audience of Lichess and chess.com are exactly the same, because of different starting position, I don't think they'd converge to the same ELO but instead will differ by starting position difference.

Also I can't really prove it mathematically but I guess average ELO would also hover on the starting ELO. Because I can't see why it would hover anywhere else and any ELO gained would be lost by someone else.

[reassess_blind]

On further thought yes, I think you're correct.

When I started playing I believe chess.com let you select whether you’re beginner, intermediate or advanced and your start elo was based on that. Could be wrong, and it could’ve changed since.

[Jach]

This was my experience on a long Delta flight, I don't remember if I picked easy or not but it was laughably bad. I took its lunch money for a game and then turned the screen off. I was mostly irritated by the horrible touch interface, it felt so laggy among other issues. (I don't have a ranking, I barely play these days and usually just in person, but my memory says around 1400 back in the yahoo chess days as a teen but it's probably closer to 1000 now.)

[bluedino]

I wonder if it's different on different planes? I can easily beat my friend and he won a few games on a flight, I played on a different flight and got crushed for two hours straight. I'm probably 1400-ish