Online ratings vs FIDE, explained
Why your Lichess or Chess.com number is not your FIDE number, and why this site will not guess one for you.
FIDE rates over-the-board tournament play. Lichess and Chess.com rate their own pools. All three use the same family of maths and none of them share a scale, because a rating only means anything relative to the people it was earned against — and those are three different sets of people.
This site shows a FIDE rating when a real one exists: when Chess.com carries one on the player’s own profile, or when the player appears as a titled player in FIDE’s published list. It does NOT convert an online rating into a FIDE one. The evidence for such a conversion covers roughly a 300-point window at the very top of the online pools and nothing below it, and a conversion fitted there and applied to a 1200 would be a confident guess wearing a decimal point.
Common questions
What is my FIDE rating if I only play online?
You do not have one. FIDE ratings come from rated over-the-board games; playing online, however well, does not produce one.
Why not just estimate it?
Because the sample that would anchor the estimate is titled players near the top of the online pools — 44 usable blitz pairs spanning 3184 to 3465 when we measured it. Anything below that range would be extrapolation, which this site does not do.
Where do your FIDE numbers come from?
FIDE publishes its full rating list monthly. We count the active players into the distribution shown here and keep the titled players’ ratings for matching. The raw list is never republished.
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.