What does an online rating say about your FIDE rating?

We measured it on ten thousand titled players. The honest answer is: less than you would like.

Everyone wants the conversion. You have a Chess.com blitz rating and you want to know what it is worth over the board, in the rating that counts for tournaments. So we measured it properly: 10,379 titled players who appear both in our name index and in FIDE’s own monthly list, matched by name, with their online ratings read from the platforms and their FIDE ratings read from FIDE. That is not a survey or a forum estimate. It is the largest sample we could assemble, and it is roughly two hundred times the one this site refused to publish a conversion from a year’s worth of arguing ago.

Classical — 1,894 players measured

Online rating band	Titled players in it	Their median FIDE	FIDE spread in the band
800–999	38	2,123	1,171
1,000–1,199	93	2,143	949
1,200–1,399	151	2,185	944
1,400–1,599	292	2,200	1,094
1,600–1,799	378	2,223	1,105
1,800–1,999	416	2,268	920
2,000–2,199	317	2,255	868
2,200–2,399	124	2,317	909
2,400–2,599	37	2,306	711

Rapid — 4,254 players measured

Online rating band	Titled players in it	Their median FIDE	FIDE spread in the band
1,200–1,399	34	2,119	1,093
1,400–1,599	69	1,970	1,150
1,600–1,799	152	1,948	1,021
1,800–1,999	362	2,002	975
2,000–2,199	1,067	2,120	1,159
2,200–2,399	1,433	2,216	1,036
2,400–2,599	869	2,351	910
2,600–2,799	205	2,501	876

Blitz — 8,256 players measured

Online rating band	Titled players in it	Their median FIDE	FIDE spread in the band
1,200–1,399	24	1,714	854
1,400–1,599	57	1,794	946
1,600–1,799	121	1,830	1,080
1,800–1,999	255	1,914	878
2,000–2,199	663	2,010	1,162
2,200–2,399	1,457	2,093	1,115
2,400–2,599	2,366	2,190	939
2,600–2,799	1,949	2,269	953
2,800–2,999	1,007	2,370	791
3,000–3,199	295	2,489	875
3,200–3,399	34	2,647	438

Measured across 10,379 titled players holding both a published FIDE rating and an online account. Each row describes a group of players — it is not a lookup for your own rating.

It still does not support a conversion, and the table above shows why better than any argument. Look at Daily: the online rating climbs by two thousand points while the median FIDE rating behind it moves by less than a hundred. That is not a weak relationship, it is no relationship — and it happens because every player here is titled. A grandmaster with a 900 Daily rating is not a 900-strength player; he is a grandmaster who does not play correspondence chess. Blitz looks much better behaved, and it is the same effect wearing a nicer suit: a titled player rated 1500 in blitz online is strong at the board and casual at the keyboard. Read across from your own rating and you are borrowing a number that belongs to someone else’s over-the-board career. Which is why this site shows a FIDE rating when it can find your real one, and shows nothing at all when it cannot.

Common questions

So what is my FIDE rating?

If you have never played rated over-the-board chess, you do not have one, and no online rating can produce it. That is not a limitation of this measurement; it is what a FIDE rating is. If you do have one, this site will show it on your report when it can match you to FIDE’s published list.

Why can you not just use the blitz numbers, which look fine?

Because the sample that produced them is titled players, and you are asking about someone who may not be. The blitz curve describes how strong players’ online blitz ratings relate to their board strength. Applying it to a player who only plays online assumes those two groups behave the same way, and the Daily column in the same table shows how badly that assumption can fail.

Why is the spread column so large?

Because individual variation swamps the trend. Within a single 200-point online band the FIDE ratings behind it can differ by more than a thousand points. Even where a relationship exists in the population, it says very little about any one person — which is the same reason the Lichess-to-Chess.com conversion on this site is marked approximate.

Data updated 2026-08-01

Chess.com publishes no rating distribution. Those figures are derived from the Lichess distribution mapped through the conversion anchors, and are rounded accordingly.