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.
One number, four different meanings
Almost every Lichess player has several ratings and quietly assumes they are on one scale — that 1600 bullet and 1600 rapid describe roughly the same player having a different sort of day. They do not, and the gap is much larger than the gap between two websites.
Lichess publishes the full rating distribution for each time control. Counting how many players sit below a given rating in each one turns the assumption into a table, and the table is the article.
Read across any row and the spread is startling. 1500 is the 43rd percentile in bullet, the 50th in blitz, the 58th in rapid and the 44th in classical. By 2200 the same number buys you the top 9.3% of bullet and the top 1.4% of classical.
| Rating | Bullet | Blitz | Rapid | Classical |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | 9.4% | 10.9% | 16.4% | 5.3% |
| 1,200 | 21.4% | 24.2% | 31.8% | 16.8% |
| 1,400 | 35.7% | 41% | 49.3% | 33.2% |
| 1,500 | 43.4% | 50.1% | 58.3% | 44.1% |
| 1,600 | 51.4% | 59.4% | 67.5% | 56.3% |
| 1,800 | 66.8% | 76.7% | 83.3% | 78.6% |
| 2,000 | 80.4% | 89.6% | 93.8% | 92.9% |
| 2,200 | 90.7% | 96.6% | 98.4% | 98.6% |
Counted from Lichess's published rating distributions: 336,344 rated bullet players, 657,474 blitz, 466,867 rapid and 38,941 classical, all with an established rating in that control. A percentile is the share of that pool rated below the figure.
How to read your own four
The practical rule is that the percentile is the comparable thing and the rating never was. If your bullet rating is a hundred points above your rapid one, that is not a fact about your bullet play — it is mostly a fact about which pool you are standing in.
In fact the ordering usually runs the other way from what people assume. The median rated bullet player on Lichess sits around 1575 and the median rapid player around 1400, so an identical rating is worth substantially MORE in rapid, where fewer people are above you.
This is also why the lookup on this site reports a percentile for each control separately rather than an overall figure. There is no honest way to average four positions in four different populations into one number, and any tool that offers you one has decided not to tell you that.
Why bullet ratings run high
Bullet has the highest median of the four pools despite being the format most associated with casual play. That is not a paradox once you look at who is in it: bullet is played almost exclusively by people already comfortable with the game, and the enormous population of genuine beginners simply is not there.
Rapid is where beginners land. It has 466,867 rated players against bullet's 336,344, and a median a good deal lower, because it is the control a new player is steered toward and the one they stay in while learning.
So the bullet pool is not stronger in any absolute sense. It is filtered. A rating measures your position among the people who turned up, and different controls attract very different people — which is the entire explanation for a table that otherwise looks like a paradox.
The strange shape of classical
Classical is the smallest pool by a wide margin — 38,941 rated players, less than a tenth of blitz — and it behaves differently at each end. At 1000 it is the most exclusive of the four, and at 2200 it is the most exclusive again, at 98.6%.
A small pool is a noisier one. With a twentieth of the population of blitz spread over the same range, the extremes of the classical distribution rest on a few hundred players each, and percentiles there move around far more between measurements than the same figures in blitz.
The site reports classical percentiles anyway, because they are real, and it says how many players they are counted from. A number from a thin population is worth having as long as nobody mistakes it for a precise one.
What this does not cover
Lichess only. The Chess.com distributions this site ships are derived from these through the conversion anchors rather than published separately, so putting them in the same table would compare a distribution with a transformation of itself and call the difference a finding.
Only players with an established rating in that control are counted, which is Lichess's own basis for the distribution. Provisional ratings are excluded, and the guide on how ratings work explains why placing an unsettled number inside a settled distribution produces a figure that looks precise and means nothing.
And the pools move. These are the distributions as they stood when this site last read them, and every page here that uses them states the date. The percentiles shift by a point or two over a year, which is small next to the differences the table is about.
Common questions
Why is my bullet rating higher than my rapid rating?
Mostly because the pools differ, not because you play bullet better. The median rated bullet player on Lichess is around 1575 against about 1400 in rapid, since bullet attracts players already comfortable with the game while rapid is where beginners start. The same rating is a higher percentile in rapid.
Which Lichess time control has the strongest players?
By median rating, bullet — but that reflects who plays it rather than absolute strength. At the top end the picture reverses: 2200 is the top 9.3% of bullet and the top 1.4% of classical, so the hardest pool to stand out in depends entirely on where you are standing.
Can I compare my blitz and classical ratings?
Not directly. 1500 is the 50th percentile in blitz and the 44th in classical, and by 2200 the gap widens to 96.6% against 98.6%. Compare the percentiles rather than the ratings — the percentile is the part that means the same thing in both.
Data updated 2026-08-02
Chess.com publishes no rating distribution. Those figures are derived from the Lichess distribution mapped through the conversion anchors, and are rounded accordingly.