Provisional ratings explained
Why your new rating jumps around, and when it stops.
A provisional rating is one the system does not trust yet. It is not a different kind of rating — it is the same number with a large uncertainty attached, and the uncertainty is why it moves so far after every game.
This site treats a rating as provisional when its rating deviation is above 110 or it has fewer than 20 games behind it. Provisional ratings get a "still settling" tag and their percentile is rounded rather than given to a decimal place, because a precise-looking figure on an imprecise number is a small lie.
Common questions
How many games until my rating is real?
Around 20 is where this site stops calling it provisional, but the honest answer is that certainty arrives gradually, not at a threshold. After a few hundred games it barely moves.
Why did my rating drop 80 points in one game?
Because the system is still unsure of you. High uncertainty means large corrections; as it shrinks, so do they.
Should I avoid playing while provisional?
No. The only way to settle a rating is to play, and the wild swings early on are how the system finds you quickly.
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.