> I guess you could argue that it's possible for someone to start at 1500, then really suck at chess and drop to 900, and then merely become average again (1500), and claim a 600 point improvement.
This is showing some pretty serious misunderstandings about ELO ratings. 1,500 is absolutely not the starting point. When you first learn Chess, your rating will be low hundreds (like under 500). It takes a decent bit of practice to work your way up to 1,500, at which point you are already decent. 1,500 is roughly average among people who play Chess competitively. You certainly don't start there. 1,800 means you're good enough to beat most players at an average low level local tournament.
It turns out that watching GothamChess doesn't make me a chess player.
Thank you for that. It's mildly interesting analyzing the source of why I was so wrong:
As someone who aspired to be pro at Dota (but was never too skilled at it), my "competitive instincts" have been calibrated for games where you do indeed start at some baseline, even among competitive players, because you will quickly be balanced out to the proper ELO. For example, in HoN (precursor to Dota 2), 1700 was widely considered pro, whereas everyone started at a baseline of 1500. The noobs were quickly punted down to lower than that. (It could've even been 1300 and I'm misremembering, but the point is, the competitive scene was still balanced around 1500 as a baseline.)
Ditto for Dota 2, back when they had explicit MMRs. (MMR = ELO.) Nowadays they don't have MMR, they have ... tiers? ... since they realized that it kind of sucks having a community obsessing over what your actual number is, rather than what division/tier you're in. So they were like "Ok, congratulations, you've reached Immortal tier, you're now a pro."
Anyway, when there was MMR, it still started at some baseline. Because again, the noobs would quickly be punted down to where they belong. 5k was widely considered pro back in those days, back when 5k meant something. But MMR inflation meant that the benchmark then became 6k = pro, and eventually 7k was top tier (I think?), so this was already a de facto tier system.
Point is, saying "1,500 isn't the starting point" for chess, but yes of course it's roughly average among people who play Chess competitively. The competitive scene is all that matters. Me blatantly not reading the article was based around the assumption of "Of course this is referring to the competitive scene."
As I said, it's interesting just how wildly wrong those assumptions were. :)
It's also worth pointing out that now that the bar to entry for playing online Chess is so low, a lot more players are playing in some form of ranked competition. So the lower end is filling in with unskilled people who hardly ever would've "played ranked" in the pre-Web days.
This is additionally confusing because different prominent platforms use different systems - eg, 1500ish is the 50th percentile on lichess (used in the blog post), but chess.com (which many streamers / online commentators use) has more like an 1100 midpoint for its ELO-approximating system, and 1500 is reasonably high there (it also varies with time control I believe). And USCF+FIDE use other systems altogether.
It's basically impossible to discuss chess ratings or changes in them without "type" information :)
At least on lichess which is where The articles mmr is coming from, 1500 is roughly average among everyone playing not people who play competitively.
I sit around 1450-1500. Myself and others I play against regularly throw pieces away for free. Not fall in to traps or anything like that, or even when rushing on low time, I mean just straight up plonk a Queen down in the path of a bishop during the early/mid game for no reason at all. And then sometimes our opponent doesn’t even realise we did it! It’s certainly not competitive tier play.
This is showing some pretty serious misunderstandings about ELO ratings. 1,500 is absolutely not the starting point. When you first learn Chess, your rating will be low hundreds (like under 500). It takes a decent bit of practice to work your way up to 1,500, at which point you are already decent. 1,500 is roughly average among people who play Chess competitively. You certainly don't start there. 1,800 means you're good enough to beat most players at an average low level local tournament.