Articles

15 pieces about what chess ratings actually mean. Every number in them is counted from the same data the tool uses, and every one says what it cannot tell you.

• What is a good chess rating? Short answer: almost certainly better than you think. "Good" only means anything next to the people you are being measured against, so here is the whole population, counted.
• Lichess vs Chess.com ratings, explained The same player is usually rated higher on Lichess than on Chess.com. Neither site is wrong — they are two separate populations with two separate starting points.
• How chess ratings actually work Elo, Glicko-2, and the number next to your rating that most sites never show you.
• What rating each chess title means Where GMs, IMs, FMs and CMs actually sit — counted from FIDE’s own list, not from the title regulations.
• Is chess rating inflation real? We counted fourteen years of FIDE rating lists instead of citing anyone. Ratings are not inflating. They are very slightly deflating.
• How long does it take to reach 1500? We read 570 real Lichess rating histories. About three weeks of actual playing, spread over six months of calendar — and half the players never had to make the climb at all.
• When do chess players actually peak? Almost every answer to this question is built on the wrong kind of data. This one follows 1,837 titled players across fourteen years of FIDE lists and reports where their own careers turned.
• Which countries actually produce chess masters? FIDE publishes every titled player it recognises. Counting all 24,486 of them by federation shows that producing a lot of masters and producing very strong ones are almost unrelated things.
• How different are your rapid, blitz and standard ratings? Measured on the same people rather than on two populations: 16,096 titled players who hold all three FIDE ratings. The gap is far smaller than the folklore says, and for a third of players it runs the other way.
• How much does a chess rating move in a year? 59,613 January-to-January steps from 5,551 titled players. The most common outcome, by a distance, is nothing at all — and when something does happen it is smaller than almost anyone expects.
• Why your four Lichess ratings are not comparable The same number means a completely different thing in each pool. A 2000 bullet rating is the top 20%; a 2000 rapid rating is the top 6%. Here is the whole table, counted from Lichess's own published distributions.
• Chess has two title ladders. What is the difference? FIDE awards GM, IM, FM and CM, and a second set — WGM, WIM, WFM, WCM — with lower requirements at every step. Counted across all 24,486 titled players, the two ladders sit a remarkably constant distance apart.
• Chess is growing. The top is shrinking. The FIDE rated population more than doubled between 2013 and 2026. Over the same fourteen years the number of players above 2000 fell by 15%, and above 2700 by nearly a third. Both of those are counted from FIDE's own lists.
• Does your chess rating decline with age? Yes, and the size of it is remarkably steady: about 11 points a year after fifty, 4 in your thirties, and a gain of 32 a year if you are under eighteen. Measured on the same players, across ten consecutive years, on the whole FIDE population.
• How much of your rating is just noise? About 95 points of it. Fit a line through fourteen years of a player's ratings and the typical one sits 24 points away from that line in any given year — which means a 40-point swing is not news about you.