Chess.com ratings are so inaccurate

           Many people on chess.com have been saying for a while that chess.coms ratings are inaccurate.  Some time ago one user had claimed that your true strength is 600 points higher than your online rating.  Do I agree with this?  Yes and no.

           I don't think that everybody is underrated.  I have looked into this and found that some are underrated and some overrated.  There are some people who are somewhere around 600 hundred points underrated and others that are 600 hundred points overrated.  Also the numbers aren't just 600 the difference in points varies.  For instance I took a look at my rapid rating (1051) I took a look at another player that has a rapid rating close to that.  This players uscf rating is in the 1700 range and that tells me that it is possible that my level is in the 1700 range also.  That tells me that some players on chess.com could be 600, 700, 800, 900, or even a thousand points underrated.  Magnus Carlsen for instance I took a look at his profile one of his ratings is 800.  What does this say about chess.com ratings?  They are really messed up.

             Here are my reasonings for why this may be.  Online chess you can you use computers to cheat.  So the ratings are already far off just from the stockfishers.  One person cheats a master 5 times with stockfish and their rating goes down 100 points most likely.  Then the master plays a someone else and the points recieved/lost are inaccurate to the level.  You would be surprised how many people try to cheat the system.  I am not saying that every underrated player was cheated out of 600 points I am saying that your opponents could have been cheated or have cheated themselves.  Or their opponents, or even their opponents opponents. 

         I have another reason to support that they are innacurate.  My blitz rating is in the 700 area and I have beaten CM Natalia a few months ago on the uscf online blitz.  A 700 beat a Cm i don't think so.  A 1051 beat a CM I don't think so.  There is something seriously wrong here.  And don't even try the you cheated nonsense.  Because I don't think that I could stockfish in a blitz game.  Rapid maybe but not blitz.

           I have looked at a lot of profiles and have come up with the theory that the ratings are all wrong and it is hard to tell who is underrated and who is overrated and by how many points.  But I think it is safe to say that knowones rating is accurate.  

I totally here you.  It just bugs me when others users say that I am a beginner because my rating is 1000 on chess.com.  I had posted a forum a while back asking for advice on my calculation and was told that I am 1000 and that I need to work on the basics of opening rules.  I did not appreciate that at all because I knew that I was atleast a class c player.  When I say inaccuracy I mean that it doesn't describe your playing level correctly.   Say that a user is an expert with a uscf of 2100 was on chess.com.   He has a rating of 1000 on chess.com.  If he would get on the forums and ask about how he can get to 2200.  Everybody would tell him to work on the basics.  chess.com should add to the server a way to get the ratings more aligned with uscf and fide ratings.  This would avoid a lot of confusion.

Chess.com ratings are very accurate. But it's impossible to have a 100% accurate rating compared to FIDE or USCF. The ratings here are mainly for blitz purposes and some people are significantly better at blitz than standard and that reflects here. Some people are significantly better at classical than blitz so they have a lower rating here. Some people are just uncomfortable playing online so they may have a lower rating here. But apart from these people, the ratings are pretty accurate (100 point difference)

Truth be told, cheaters and sandbaggers don't affect the ratings much, if any. There are a very small, insignificant percentage of the population, and to your example of losing 100 points to a cheater, that isn't much. Using myself as an example, I can be a 2050 one day and drop to 1950 after having a series of bad games. It happens often. If you lose 100 points to cheaters, you can recover them, and if you can't then that means you were overrated to begin with. 

And Ashton, I'm sorry, but you don't play like class c player, at least in blitz. I've seen your games in the USCF blitz tournaments here, and you play more like someone rated 1000. Maybe you're better in classical than blitz, but you have only gone to 1 tournament according to your USCF page, and your rating is a provisional 745. You lost to people rated 1080 and 646. class c players rarely lose to anyone under 1000.

I'm 63 and a B player and will likely never be much more because I don't study much. Something you can learn from an old player like me is not to get hung up on the stupid ratings here on chess.com, OTB is all that matters. However, you have played enough games here for your ratings to be somewhat accurate for internet chess. Personally my OTB and chess.com ratings jive, but there could be many reasons why yours don't match. Are you more careful when you play OTB??? Do you see and visualize better on a 3D board??? Do you have an old mouse or comp; do you lag????  I think you are on your way up; studying is the right approach. I wish you all the best of luck!!!

I'm not trying to drag you down here, but I have the feeling after reading your profile and posts here that you're kinda looking for some self-indulgence. Hoping that people will say that you are indeed better than what your raiting reflects. 

I have to say I don't see it...

I don't know what the USCF rating pool is like, but I can assure you that with FIDE or KBSB (Belgian rating), you would be at the bottom of the pool, judging from your last rapid games.

Now, I saw you said you started at around 300 rating and worked your way up from there by studying, which is a huge achievment!

If people gave you the advice to study openings, that's simply bad advice. At your rating it's important to study opening PRINCIPLES and tactics! At the -1400 level most games are simply lost by hanging pieces, missing simple tactics that hang pieces etc... 

I read you study a lot, keep it up, you'll get there.

One thing I've noticed after playing internet chess for a while is the time you play online limits you to a subset of the online population, i.e. you get no "norm" for ELO scores if your subset happens to be disjoint to the main group.

Whatever your online rating is, does it really matter if it finds you good playing partners at whatever time you play?  and I think chess.com and other online chess sites do give decent enough rating to find well matched partners.

Regarding women's title, I have my doubts as well.

See this profile:
https://www.chess.com/member/camilita-becerra

In the rapid ratings she has too few games to judge, but what about blitz.

Check her ratings... way too low... but they are real, I mean, she has like +1000 blitz games... and a rating of 968 (top 1281). 

Check her games as well.

Becoming a WCM isn't that difficult. I know several young girls under 1500 FIDE that have a WCM title. I don't know the girl you mentioned, but look at her FIDE profile, She's currently a 1300 FIDE.

That's not too far off from here real rating....

https://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=4433289

Some countries have such a bad player pool that they just give titles to whomever...

All it says is that Magnus Carlsen never played a rated rapid game. From this remark alone it seems your research is quite unreliable. Can you post any of the profiles you found that are 600 above or below their actual rating? You realize I can put any rating I want on my profile right?

According to _______.org, sandbagging means artificially decreasing your rating.

To identify a sandbagger, they play better than their rating.

So, if you get cheated and play another person, they will report you cheating.

Eventually, almost every user on chess.com will be incorrectly labeled as a cheater.

First of all, no one ever has claimed that your real rating is 600 points higher than your online rating. Actually it is all the opposite, your online rating is higher than what your OTB rating would be. 

So I am sorry but if you have such a low rating is because you are very weak player, that's it. 

No one is cheating against you and it is a huge minority the ones who are sandbagging or whatever. You want to get a higher rating? Go and study! As simple as that. 

The rating is just a number you are looking at nothing more than an inaccurate number.  Before you judge a person look at their games and check it with a computer.  Look at the percentage of wins I have out of how many games I have played.  It isn't about a rating it is about the moves and the plans behind the moves.  You are right and wrong.  I am a weak player but 1051 is definitely underrated.

OfGeniusKind has told me that even though my blitz rating is around 800 I play at 1500 level.  My rapid rating is very similar to his rapid rating yet he is 1700.  I don't think I am 1700 though maybe 1500-1600.  But I will know for sure whether or not I am a -1000 player after my 25 supplemental games.  I am playing a tournament this weekend uscf.   So maybe you are right and I am the worst player on the planet.  I doubt it though.

Sandbagging here is almost inexistent. People have no reason to artificially decrease their rating. Most people that do it, do it for money tournaments to play in a weaker division (i.e. u2000, u2200 etc) and have a better chance at top prize. Here, the only money tournament is Titled Tuesday, and the tournament isn't divided into multiple sections, so an 1800 WCM will play in the same section as Hikaru for instance. 

Thil003, you didn't donate 200+ points to the pool. If you started as a 1200, and you played your first game vs another 1200 that has been playing on this site for a long time, and you lose. You will lose about 180 rating points, while he only gains 8. When you have a provisional rating, your rating increases/decreases by a larger margin than someone that has been playing for a while.