Rating Comparisons

One of the most common questions in the chess world is how your rating compares to other measurements. For example: how does your rating on Chess.com compare with your rating on lichess.org? Others wonder how their online rating would compare to an over-the-board (OTB) rating. How does Chess.com blitz rating map to the USCF rating system? How does your lichess.org rapid rating compare to FIDE ratings?

We had these same questions. We have a combination of multiple sources to create these comparisons. If you’d like to help expand our rating database, we have a rating survey below. The results are updated regularly, so make sure to subscribe to get site updates.

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Details on math: Rating Comparisons Explained.

Chess.com Rating vs FIDE and USCF

Last Updated: 12/16/2021

The Chess.com ratings map pretty closely to USCF and FIDE ratings overall. You can use it generally as a quick mapping to your USCF rating. USCF ratings start at 100 and the Chess.com equivalent is a bit under 500. The gap shrinks up until the breakeven range of around 1400-1750. Chess.com ratings become slightly higher again as one’s rating increases above 1750. FIDE ratings follow a similar distribution to the USCF ratings. Fewer OTB events in 2020-2021, have not had much impact on the Chess.com to over-the-board comparisons.

Typical bullet ratings on Chess.com are slightly lower than blitz ratings. Rapid ratings start higher than blitz ratings with a breakeven point around 1900 when blitz ratings begin to be higher. This table also accounts for the change that Chess.com made to move 10+0 games to the rapid category. Chess.com to chess.com ratings have about 7000 data points, USCF 1500 data points, and FIDE 1900 data points. See the full data below.

Reading the Table

• Find Chess.com blitz rating in the first column
• All other ratings are mapped to Chess.com blitz
• The (+/-) values represent one standard deviation in the predicted rating. About 68% of players fall within this range.

Lichess Rating vs Chess.com

Last Updated: 12/16/2021

How does your chess.com rating compare to your lichess.org rating? The data we have is of active players on both sites. To keep these comparisons fresh, each section consists of relatively active players (RD < 150) on both sites. For this chart, we use your chess.com blitz rating as the base and map it to typical ratings on lichess.org. As you can see, lichess.org ratings are a couple of hundred points higher than Chess.com’s across the board and lichess ratings have seen inflation in 2021. Lichess blitz and rapid have around 750 data points, rapid has 512 data points, and classical has 219 data points.

Reading the Table

• Find Chess.com blitz rating in the first column
• All other ratings are mapped to Chess.com blitz
• The (+/-) values represent one standard deviation in the predicted rating. About 68% of players fall within this range.

Lichess Rating vs FIDE and USCF

Last update: 12/16/2021

We have also analyzed how lichess.org ratings map to OTB ratings. This table is created by combining the first two tables on this page. Lichess.org ratings are generally quite a bit higher than OTB ratings, and the separation has increased in 2021. If you have a lichess rapid rating of 1800, don’t expect to score an 1800 performance at your first FIDE event. Your rating will map to roughly 1420 FIDE or 1270 USCF. The full data set is below, which maps all lichess ratings to their OTB averages across our survey results.

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