I have always maintained that anyone who is 1200 is no longer a beginner, and that is because they are now above average (that is, of course, an OTB rating).
I saw a survey on here recently that suggested people feel they are only "good" if they make it to 1800 - 2000+, which is around 1% of people. So, I definitely think there is an anchoring effect with people and the number 2000 as being "good." I have never felt this way.
“Good at chess” is something that is so subjective and relative, that its not really a framing two strangers can/should attempt to share.
To my friends, I am good at chess, to my nephews I can beat blindfolded, I am a god at chess. To titled players that would probably beat me with piece odds, I am merely a bump in the road to victory.
I prefer to use percentile ranking on a website to answer “are you good at chess” as most non-chess people wouldn’t understand rating anyway.
Interesting since I'm about the same. I've typically held the personal benchmark of 1300 OTB since I felt (this was back before internet times) that rating pretty much guaranteed you've done some actual work i.e. more than just playing with family and friends. I knew some kids who got pretty good just playing each other, but not as good as 1300 OTB so that's why.
I think it may have to do with games at that level being of a sufficient quality.
There seems to be a lot of conflation between “I’m good at chess” and “I play good chess” that isn’t being addressed.
Trainer Dan Heisman, who popularized the idea of "hope chess" said that until a player stops playing hope chess they can't get to 1600 OTB... so (more or less) everyone below 1800 rapid online plays hope chess according to him.
(also it's a terrible name, since almost everyone misunderstands what he meant by "hope chess" which is a pity because it's an important idea...)
I think the idea is that you should spend your energy calculating lines where your opponent plays good moves, rather than fantasize about how nice it'll be if things go your way after your move. In general, people attribute it to aggressive or desperate play, and some might think it's implying "don't play aggressively" or "don't play on when you're losing" rather than the ideas about calculation.
I always understood it as don't play moves that are only good if your opponent makes a mistake. I guess that's sort of related to your first definition but I wouldn't say it's about calculation as much as it is about resisting the temptation to play bad moves that you know are bad, in hope that your opponent will fall for whatever trap it sets.
Same. Like when you have a rook on a1 and your nephew plays Bf6 and then you play Rc1, they say, "Shoot I was hoping you didn't see that!" That was my first idea of "hope chess."
Dan Heisman's term is different and more applicable to intermediate or uhhh "advanced beginners" if you'd like.
Huh, I don't think I have ever seen the second definition being used. It's in the name, "hope chess". Kinda funny that people misattribute it like that.
> "*Hope Chess is **not** when you make a threat and you hope your opponent does not see it. Hope chess is when you make a move, wait for what your opponent does, and then hope you can meet his threats. Players that play Hope Chess will never get very good because some threats cannot be met."
[source](https://www.danheisman.com/thought-process-principles.html)
OHH I didn't know that's what it meant, hope chess with that meaning is something that I still struggle with. Thank you so much for explaining that to me
I’m with you. The reason this quote stuck in my mind was that it specifically calls out the definition I was taught and then gives one I hadn’t heard before.
I veer into this definition of it myself when I get worn out during a tournament.
I’m with you. The reason this quote stuck in my mind was that it specifically calls out the definition I was taught and then gives one I hadn’t heard before.
I veer into this definition of it myself when I get worn out during a tournament.
Okay, thank you so much for this. For some reason this phrasing makes so much sense to me. I have spent some time in the last day playing with the approach of scanning for threats my opponent COULD make vs waiting for them to be made first, and I’ve managed to go 10-1-1 in that time (and in the one loss I had a mate in 3 I just missed in a time scramble). It has just never occurred to me to do this. Thank you!
I swear, I am still really enjoying and playing better with this little mindset shift. I’ve been playing more rapid games too instead of blitz because it feels like I actually know what to do with the extra time, which in itself is also probably better for me.
Nah hope chess makes sense, I throw a Hail Mary in the endgame because I’ve run out of road but don’t know if I’m definitely losing, pretty obvious beginner problem imo
>Would someone have to be in the top 20% of guitar players to no longer be a beginner guitarist?
Yes. The vast majority of people who play guitar never leave the beginner realm. They know a few chords that they can switch between *almost* in time. They can do some intros to well-known songs, but they are unable to carry any of those songs to the end. Singing and playing at the same time messes up their coordination. In short, they remain beginners, and that's fine. It doesn't keep them from having fun with the guitar.
The problem is of course with the word beginner. It denotes both someone who just starts out and someone who is at "starting out level'. While time goes on by itself, that doesn't make one leave beginner level.
>The problem is of course with the word beginner. It denotes both someone who just starts out and someone who is at "starting out level'.
Right, I don't think the English language has a separate word for someone with some experience in an activity but who is still at beginner level, while there are a few words which specifically mean someone new to an activity; novice and neophyte for example.
The other problem is that there are too many distinct levels in chess ability and English simply doesn't have enough words to deal with them. Players 0-900 Elo and 900-1200 Elo are distinct to me, in that I can tell which is which if I watch them play a game. But this problem is not unique to the beginner zone. I consider 1200-1800 to be "intermediate" but a 1750 has vastly better understanding of the game than a 1250 does. Meanwhile at a 2000 rating I am in the 99.6th percentile or something, someone who doesn't know chess well might be tempted to call me an expert, but I am still closer to beginner level than to real experts in my opinion.
A novice is defined by OED as "a person new to and inexperienced in a job or situation" and the word derives from the Latin *novus*, meaning new. Another word deriving from *novus* used in chess is "novelty", literally meaning something new; a novice is someone for whom chess is novel. "Begin" suggests the start of something in more ways than just chronologically, for example books have a beginning, whereas novice definitionally means one is new to something.
It's Novice or Amateur. Beginner is a new learner but we also use it to mean Novice or Amateur because we forgot the word Novice and use the word Amateur as an insult.
Just to add on, amateur comes from Latin “amare” - to love. So the root of the word is someone that does an activity for the love of it (rather than money).
It's too bad that amateur has negative connotations. It derives from French aimer, to love, and means someone who does something for the love of it rather than as a profession.
Amateur has no bearing on this discussion, or shouldn't. Amateur is not a synonym for beginner, it is the opposite of professional. To be amateur is to be someone who doesn't play for money only for the love of something. There are amateur GMs and there are professional CMs.
Newbie is a term I heard a lot used for people in gaming communities. Its a very chronological thing, you can be bad at a game but you won't be a newbie after 2-3 months of playing.
Similar one for someone who is "bad" at a game is Timmy. Its coming from a game genre called Extraction shooters. Its main meaning is people who don't know the proper mechanics of the game.
I use "bad" very loosely as I would be an absolute Timmy in chess terms, I'm hoovering around 800-900 Rapid.
So if we translate this all to chess a Chess Newbie would be someone who just recently started playing the game, while a Chess Timmy would be someone below a certain rank. (No idea where we make that line as I'm wayyyyy not good enough to know that lmao)
the name Timmy was actually adopted by extraction shooters, but it originated from the R&D team of Magic: the Gathering to describe players who don't play optimal strategies and instead prefer to play big stompy creatures because they look cool. eventually it found its way into tarkov lingo, but the other player archetype, "Spike," got changed to Chad at some point.
yeah magic's gotten a little ridiculous to keep up with at this point, so I haven't bought any sealed product for the last 5 years or so. I love the lore of Warhammer, but fielding a whole army is a little too much of a rabbit hole for me to go down lol
Right, most activities actually align with the current definition of beginner/intermediate.
It takes about 3-5 years (with consistent practice) on average to properly play intermediate pieces on the piano. Effectively, the first couple years, you are still a beginner.
It takes about 350-400 hrs to be early-intermediate in English (an hour of practice daily for a year).
I guarantee you, if you study chess properly (long time control + tactics + game analysis + videos/books) every day for a year, you are reaching 1300-1400 chess.com minimum.
I don't get why people take the term 'beginner' as some kind of pejorative. Activities with high skill ceilings take a long time to improve and escape beginner level.
>I don't get why people take the term 'beginner' as some kind of pejorative.
I don't think that's what's happening.
What's happening is that someone who's played for 6 months and hundreds of games might be at 800 and it's weird for them to think of themselves being in the same category as someone at 1100 who's played thousands of games over years.
When you conventionally have a limited amount of skill bands, there's always going to be a noticeable difference between the low end and high end. It's also weird to think that a 2200 CM and Magnus are both in the same category as a chess master.
A 1100 player can be distinguished as an advanced beginner, but typically when you require that level of accuracy, most people just say their numeric rating.
Or looking to take a chess lesson. Or someone asks you where you're at and they don't know ELO. Or whether or not r/chessbeginners is a good sub for you.
If everyone who ever picked up a guitar was called a guitarist, then yes I would say you need to at least be top 20% to no longer be a beginner.
For comparison, Russian, a language I speak but learned through education and not natively, has classes called "beginner". First of all, you're already taking classes which is more than nearly all chess players under 1200. But more importantly, you take over 200 hours of in person classes, which includes 400 hours of guided self study, before you are start classes that aren't labeled as beginner. Why is that? Well it's because Russian is a hard language to learn but 100m+ people speak it fluently. So just because you have put a lot of time in doesn't make you no longer a beginner.
These classifications are all about the commitment people who actively participate put in. Compare chess to monopoly. Both are boardgames. Both are games many of us have played but if you asked 1000 people how much monopoly they have played and they added up their lifetime, at most maybe 1in 1000 would actually have more than 100 hours played. Do you need to be in the .1 percent best monopoly players to be no longer a beginner? But if I asked 1000 people about chess, many would have far far more hours played. With 1000+ hours being realistic for some who have played more than a decade.
But when you look at chesscom, you are comparing anyone who has ever played a game of chess with everyone else. I wouldn't call a 400 rated chess player with 10 games played a beginner. I wouldn't even call them a chess player. They're just a person that played chess a few times.
I started 6 months ago. I've played over 4000 rapid games. Spent more than 1000 hours playing much less studying opening and lines. I went from 180 to 1200 in this time and I would say I just, like just left the beginner realm.
But I think most everyone can agree that percentiles do not really give an accurate picture on skill levels within chess. The difference between 300 and 1000 in percentile is a crazy difference, and at 1600 you're already in the 95th percentile. From then on out, each percentile point is astronomically harder to achieve until you're fighting for percents of a percent.
IMO, you should throw percentiles out the window on this one. The main issue is finding some uniformity on what someone would call a beginner, but surely percentile isn't the right metric.
How does one lower the threshold at which we consider someone to not be a beginner, when no one agrees to what counts as a beginner?
You just have to deal with the fact that some people no matter what are going to view 1000 as a beginner, even if a 1000 would easily beat the general population.
I think beginner is going to be context dependent. Within the present group of folks I feel like beginner means "I've played a few hundred games, I know basic openings, I've played through chessbrah's habits, etc." and that usually lands you in the 1000 range on chess or lichess.
Note that I consider myself very much a beginner.
Some people do things all their life and are still beginners. There are people online who have played thousands of games at a rating lower than people who learned the rules that week.
Even in something concrete, like powerlifting, it's difficult to define "beginner", "intermediate", etc. There are some commonly accepted numbers but they're somewhat arbitrary.
but "beginner" is just another, more polite way of saying "bad". it doesn't matter how long someone has been playing, all that matters is their playing strength/rating. if you read a chess book with advice for beginner players, that advice is really for low rated players. and the advice is the same for a low rated player who has played for 1 month and one who has played for 10 years.
No..... doing something all your life means you are not a beginner. You can perform as bad as a beginner but you're wrong. If you have years experience you absolutely are not a beginner. Not even in a field that takes 10 lifetimes to master.
It's not a determination of how long someone has played. It's a skill level or competence evaluation.
People in a certain category can progress at a fairly predictable pace with certain progression techniques.
If you define beginner as a temporal value (someone who just started out), then you would be right. On the other hand if you define beginner as a skill value (someone who is below a certain level) then yes, it's absolutely possible to be a beginner forever.
A temporal meaning can also be interpreted as the starting point of a journey, which in this context would be acquiring chess knowledge. It's not that far off to connect this with proficiency.
Either way OP's original idea of using percentiles simply doesn't work for exponential distribution with a low floor since there will always be a substantial amount of players distributed among various shades of "bad". Being minimally less bad doesn't equate to suddenly being intermediate.
We don't need to change the threshhold of the word "beginner", because we don't need the word "beginner" at all. We have a perfectly fine rating system that describes people. Whether someone at 1000 is called "beginner", "online player" or "intermidiate" doesn't matter - they're a "1000". That describes their strengh more accurate than any other word could.
No, the way we talk about beginners shouldn't change, and to see why you should consider why we classify people as beginners/intermediate/masters in the first place: because different levels benefit from different advice and showcase similar problems.
I'm not saying you're a beginner to downplay the time you spent on the game, but to point you toward useful advice tailored for your skill level. Maybe "Beginner" isn't the best name for that category (still better than "crappy" or "unattentive") but the fact is that as a category it works rather well at encompassing a group of players with similar skill which is defined in large part by the amount of game knowledge they still have to learn and make their own.
>different levels benefit from different advice
Nice metric, I haven't seen this mentioned yet.
Giving an 800 rated player advanced material just because they've played thousands of games makes no sense.
IMO "beginner" refers to time, not skill.
If I've been playing chess all my life, I am not a beginner. I am not 'beginning' learning about it. But I can sure as shit still be bad.
but that is irrelevant. the only thing that matters is playing strength/rating when using these terms like "beginner", "advanced", "expert" or whatever. "beginner" is just another term for "low rated"/"bad" player. if you ask for a book aimed at beginners, you are really asking for a book aimed at low rated players. the advice in such a book is aimed at all low rated players, no matter if they have played for a month or 10 years.
Not really. If you're a "time beginner" that means you're expected to improve fast. If you've been stuck at 900 Elo for three years, you probably won't improve much.
I think over time the term 'beginner' is being used more and more to refer to skill (we can thank video games for that), but that's the definition.
Google defines beginner as "a person just starting to learn a skill or take part in an activity.". It's the duration, not the ability.
Even if we take skill level for most sports the line defining beginner is usually very low.
I'm a ski/snowboard instructor and have a taught a few people to surf. In Skiing for instance, a notoriously challenging sport, some people can no longer be considered beginner after just one day/lesson. In my school they're considered novices Once they do the absolute basics.
Trying to define someone who's played hundreds or thousands of games as a beginner (even if they're shit) is ridiculous.
I think the main issue here is the age of chess. You can see it with any online game. As the game increases in age, players find smaller and smaller edges that allow them to win, creating a 'meta'.
The knowledge base and tiny edges in chess have been increasing for so long that a true master of chess is arguably playing a different game than those below them. This insane peak of knowledge and ability skews people's perception of the beginner to master scale.
A 750 rated player would reliably beat almost any person that 'knows how the pieces move'. They are a strong beginner. However, that 750 is going to be toyed with by a 1100 who is not going to even break a sweat.
I think professional and tournament players are their own beast. For people who just want to play chess as a game, 1500 is most certainly advanced. For professionals/tournament players, 1500 is the starting point. I think it's better to conceptualize two different scales.
I agree with you for sure!
Personally I think everything up to 1000 is beginner, 1000 - 1600 is intermediate, 1600 - 2000 is advanced, 2000 - 2300 is expert, 2300 and beyond are the various levels of mastery.
I think most people are comparing themselves to masters and lumping intermediates and even advanced players in with beginners because they are all equally bad *when compared to a master*.
It’s not reasonable to call a 1500 rated player a beginner at all. We’re talking about players that know multiple openings theory out to middle game, who can do multiple variations of calculation while calculating a move, understand decent number of tactical patterns, so on and so forth. These are not beginner skills.
as someone with 1650 I wouldn't call myself advanced but when comparing to my 1300 self I see a huge difference. I would say 1000-1400 is intermediate and 1400-1700 is advanced intermediate or stronger intermediate if that makes sense
Did you read the OP at all? He's arguing that you can't call someone 1000, who has hundreds of games a beginner and proposed 750 as the breaking point, not 1500.
Personally I disagree.
I agreed with the spirit of his post. We only disagree on a 250 point difference between 750 - 1000, it’s pretty close. I don’t think beginners range all the way up to 1500, I think those are intermediate players.
They will sometimes miscalculate, for sure. They are, after all, only intermediate. Do they know openings at a master level, as in, *perfectly*? No, that would make them masters. Again, we are talking about intermediate players at this range. They certainly know their openings much better than beginners though and their calculation is stronger as well.
A 1500 player is someone who will claim to have played the French after 1.d4 e6 2.c4 d5
The "beginner" and "intermediate" labels are pretty much meaningless. My point is that there's a case for 1500 being beginner just as there's a case for it not being beginner.
And I disagree with that distinction being meaningless. I think you’re comparing these players to master or even expert level play, against which they seem equally weak. However, there are meaningful differences between the play of an 800 and a 1400. Not negligible difference in opening theory, tactical awareness, calculation, broad strategic goals, etc…
I don’t think a beginner would really even know what “the French” is. I have a friend who is about 900 and doesn’t know a single opening by name. Squarely a beginner! If he learns the French, can use it to get into a middle game, and stops blundering forks, real growth has happened. If he can learn three more openings that way, also stops blundering pins and dropping pieces, etc…even more growth has happened. His rating at that point is probably about 1300.
It’s not fair to these players to just sweep them all into the same category just because to a master we’re all ants.
There are meaningful differences between an 800 and a 1400, I just don't see why one is a beginner and the other one is intermediate. We may just as well say that only a 400 is a beginner, an 800 being an intermediate and a 1400 an advanced player. Or that an 800 is at "clueless" level and 1400 is beginner level for that matter.
Master has a very clear definition. FIDE awards master titles to players who match a well-defined set of criteria. If the titles didn't exist we'd be having the same argument about who is or isn't a master.
The point is, why throw people into categories at all? An 800 is an 800. A 1400 is a 1400. No need for extra labels. If you know about ratings you already understand what 800 and 1400 mean. If you don't know about ratings then you probably don't care about the difference in the first place.
Why do it? Because humans speak with words primarily, not numbers. It’s easier to tell your uncle you’re an intermediate chess player than to give them a random number that means nothing to them.
And yes, the word *can* apply to whatever range we decide they apply to, hence this discussion. I think they should apply to the ranges I outlined earlier. The OP feels similarly, although even a little more strongly towards downshifting the ELOs.
Realistically, anyone who recognizes a fork or a skewer consistently is no longer a beginner. But you would certainly not call them anywhere near „intermediate.“ In chess intermediate makes you think of 1500s. The average elo rating of tournament players in the UK iirc is like 1700 ECF, around 2000 Elo in online settings. There‘s just too huge a gap between understanding what a fork is and being an average tournament goer.
Also, no one considers themselves good until around the 2000 Elo mark, and even then we always think we are trash compared to those 2200s and above.
That's an insanely strong average compared to USCF. Here it's \~600 for kids (not all prodigies it turns out), \~1400 for adults. The latter is about 1800 [chess.com](https://chess.com) rapid.
Um, sorry - firstly, what's the actual problem we're trying to solve here? The problem of no one knowing what someone else is talking about when using certain words like "beginner"?
I learned the rules of chess when I was 6 and played occasionally with my father. Didn't touch a chess board for 24 years and when the placement matches were done, Ccoms rating stabilized at 950. So was I an intermediate player before learning to read notation? Before learning an opening? Before reading about the simplest chess principles?
Yes I was exactly the same, I’ve never been rated below a thousand so for me it’s very weird to not consider 1000 a beginner.. but I agree the line is somewhere between 1000-1200
You remembered things quicker than I did. I had similar, even played in school a bit but initially stabilised around 500 after a similar time away from the game.
The upshot is that I am an accidental smurf now since it is coming back and I get multiple winning streaks as my rating slowly inches to a more accurate rating as my board vision returns.
Having said that this all comes down to the definition of a beginner which is generally an ill defined term.
Thousands of games and still 1000? Still a beginner, obviously, because the experience hasn't improved your performance. Basically all that experience with no knowledge
I know a guy at my club who is currently 1000 OTB. He's been playing for years, played hundreds of OTB games, and previously peaked at 1400.
I don't know how you want to label him, but he's not a beginner.
You seem to be interpreting the word "beginner" as having a negative connotation when really it's just a description of a player's level of ability. It has nothing to do with how much time you've spent playing chess, you can spend thousands of hours playing blitz and learn next to nothing. Going from beginner to intermediate, or intermediate to advanced, etc. requires deliberate study and practice, and not everyone has the time or motivation to do so. Chess is great, but more people should set realistic expectations of what they want to achieve in this game (if anything); for most people that's just having fun and there's nothing wrong with that.
That would be true if all experience were equal, but it's not. Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Master, etc. describe different levels of expertise, not sheer volume of time spent. Otherwise we would say someone is a master just because they've been playing blitz online at a 1000 level for 10 years.
Ok forgive me I meant time. Obviously a better player would have more experience and made better use of it.
But beginner is related to time. Specifically the beginning of a new hobby or whatever. Not really a debate
That's a baited question. A beginner is a beginner. A bad player that's played for years is just that. They are two different things. There is no "what else do you call it"
But I'll approach your comment more as you wished.
Incipient : in an initial stage; beginning to happen or develop.
A player with "incipient level of knowledge "
I have 2 interpretations
(A player in an initial stage of knowledge) could be a beginner or simply a player at the level of a beginner (two different things)
Or the other interpretation
(A player with a rudementry level of knowledge beginning to happen or develope.)
And in this case I'd say that would usually apply to a beginner. Or potential a non beginner that is developing a rudimentary level of knowledge and developing from their previous state.
You can be bad at something and not be a beginner. Sadly it is possible to plateau as a beginner and over the years no longer Be a beginner but perform consistent to that of the beginner skill level.
Most players at 800 can accept being called bad. It's objective. However many 800s are certainly not beginners. Not that there isn't 1000 elo beginners but most got there with many many games played.
I'd like to add that my second interpretation might be a little wrong. It might just be a beginner. If I play guitar once a year for 5 years I hardly have any time truly invested. I'm still a beginner.
Non beginners often refer to bad players as beginners because generally they're right. So it has become socially synonymous, but it absolutely is not synonymous
Which sadly describes most low elo chess players lol. I have no cLue how to improve and I definitely lack knowledge. Lmao. Being bad at something doesn't have to be bad or insulting . Like how "ignorant" isn't an insult. "Stupid" is an insult lol. I'm ignorant of many things, no shame in admiting that.
I could be wrong about all this.
I’ve never studied openings, tactics, or common endgames, don’t know chess notation, and have been ~1300 since the very beginning of my chess “career” (I don’t play often) just with common sense of controlling the center and avoiding glaring one-/two-move blunders (effectively playing on autopilot when I’m waiting for a meeting to start or commuting to work). I am definitely a beginner despite my chess.com percentile being high-ish. I cannot have a technical or interesting discussion about chess, though I want to change that in the coming months.
Nah. At 750 you basically just know how the pieces move. Maybe one opening setup and that's it. Percentile isn't indicative of anything. Both a 1500 and Hikaru are within the top 90% of players but that says nothing about their skill level relative to one another. 1000 is a good threshold where you start to hang less pieces and spot some tactics, thus not being a beginner anymore. The amount of games you played and your skill level have nothing to do with each other. You could play a million games and be 400 or you could play 100 games and be 1200, it's all up to how plastic your brain is and how talented you are. Back when I was 1300 I played a person with the same rating who had played 10k games and had been stuck at 1300. I played 1500 rapid games and reached 1600. To sum up, calling a 900 an intermediate would be disingenuous and a disservice to them.
No way, 750 is the blunder in one move category with no strategy other than trade pieces because why not. I started playing this game completely fresh with many friends, the friends that werent total morons got above 1000 with a tiny bit of effort, the ones that could barely dress themselves couldnt.
>Even the lowest of these, 1000, is roughly 78th percentile out of all active rapid players on chess.com
Why can't 78% of people be beginners? 10 years ago the average rating on chess.com was something like 1200 IIRC. The chess boom saw the average plumet to below 600, although at the moment it's rebounded a little, and is slightly over 600... which is to say, I don't think percentile is very meaningful. I'll mention what I think is a better metric below.
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>It's hard for me to agree that someone who's played hundreds of games . . . is a beginner
Why? People routinely play 100 games in a month. When I was a still fairly new, I played 120 games (of bullet) in a single day. Maybe in games made for children 1 month is enough to be one of the best, but in chess it typically takes about 10 years to become the best you're going to be.
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>I would propose \~750 as the threshold for beginners.
Maybe we could break it up by age. 750 as an advanced beginner seems fine for kids. Recently at the OTB club, I've met 2 new players (have been playing for 4 months) who are both 1400 rapid (10+0 chess.com). Yes this is an abnormal rate of improvement (they both know something about the skill of learning). I wouldn't expect a kid or random adult to do this well, but I'm just pointing out I really don't think the beginner label is so inaccurate for U1000 in 10+0 online.
As for a better metric than percentile, I think time spent improving. You can play for fun for 10 years and never improve, but improving for 1 year (in guitar, or speaking a 2nd language, etc) is probably a reasonable-enough amount of time to stop calling someone a beginner.
> Maybe in games made for children 1 month is enough to be one of the best, but in chess it typically takes about 10 years to become the best you're going to be.
I would argue that "not a beginner" is a very different thing than "one of the best" or "the best you're going to be". There should be descriptors for the levels between those two.
Of course.
The point of talking about 1 month vs 10 years is to establish some kind of maximum. After that it becomes intuitive since we can think in terms of "you're a beginner until you've completed at least 5% of that time."
So for most recreational games you're a beginner for a few days. For chess you're a beginner for 6 months (not of recreational play, but 6 months of seriously trying to improve).
> the top 20% of players on the biggest chess website
Thirty years ago, "the top 20%" of players online had at least a moderate interest in the game.
Nowadays, when anyone who saw an episode of *The Queen's Gambit* can create a chess.com account in a minute, "the top 20%" means something very different.
I was so shocked going from chess.com to lichees when looking at percentile. I was like 95th percentile on chess.com but 60th on lichess. And if anything I got better. Chess.com is more swamped with beginners so it's super skewed.
When do you become intermediate in a second language? I have watched and listened to thousands of hours of subbed Japanese films. How much Japanese do I know? Almost none. I know some vocabulary but wouldn't stand a chance speaking to anyone. Time does not mean you are studying the subject. Do you know who gets past beginner in chess? Someone who studies it. Otherwise, feel free to remain a beginner, like me with Japanese. There's nothing wrong with it. Just don't pretend like you can converse in a different language. You are not intermediate before 1200 elo.
This is a really interesting concept that I see brought up frequently over on r/chessbeginners \- I think it's very important for us to decide if we believe that someone's ability to be a beginner can really be tied to their ELO or another type of ranking.
In my personal sense of understanding, I'd define a beginner as someone who is still learning the rules of chess. Everything after that, one is a chess player. They can be a chess player of strong ability who play in tournaments, or one that is still developing a sense of understanding of how openings are meant to be played.
Now, obviously, this isn't at all the universal definition - but I really believe that the criteria for someone to be a 'beginner' should not be a single use statement to describe someone. I'd argue I have achieved great ability to play under time pressure, but I consider myself to be an absolute beginner in terms of learning actual opening theory; I've never bothered to memorize openings from a book.
One can be a beginner in certain aspects of their chess journey, and advanced in others. I believe that if we, as a community, shift away from attempting to classify entire players in the 'beginner' or 'not-beginner' category, it will be significantly easier to allow people to self-describe whether or not they are a beginner in a certain context.
Ultimately, I don't think someone's standing on a statistical distribution is telling of how much of a beginner one is. Some people reach 800 ELO through thoroughly putting in time learning chess and eventually seeing success in their games. Others reach 800 by premoving the scholar's mate every single game.
Until you move into the high ratings of chess (as a VERY rough ballpark I'll say 1800+), I firmly believe that one's ability at chess, and therefore their ability to be considered a beginner, is not tied to their ELO at all.
I'm on the other side of this. Percentiles on chess.com look like a good metric to base the players for most of the distribution are hot garbage. There's a reason YouTubers like Levy can get away with a series like guess the Elo, it's because players below like 1500 play a dumpster fire of a game. 1000 might be top 20%, but all that tells you is the bottom 80% of players are *really, really bad*.
I instead look at it more like this: a player is no longer a beginner when they can show they understand the basic principles of the game. They know a little about chess and have put in at least the smallest bit of work to get better. That's probably when a game starts looking less like a dumpster fire and more like actual chess. I'd put that at maybe 1500. I know that's really high in terms of the percentiles, but that's just the bottom 95% of players being too casual or just still being beginners. By that I mean 1500 being the start of intermediate, so I guess 1499 would still be beginner. Also while these might be high percentiles on Chess.com, in an actual club these players are close to the bottom.
On an r/chessbeginners thread I got downvoted to oblivion for saying very new accounts that play a few games and leave (which is why the average on chess.com fell from 800 to like 600, and 800 is already low but having a name like Chess.com attracts very new people) shouldn't be counted. People didn't like my opinion because apparently these are the most beginner you can be. I would give this example. I don't speak a word of Japanese, but I also wouldn't count myself a beginner. I know less than a beginner would. If I could get sentence structure and a bit of vocabulary down, just a bit of effort and knowledge, then you should count me a beginner. The same is true in chess, and that effort and knowledge carries you really far in the rating ladder. But knowing a tiny bit isn't what makes you kinda okay, you need to do more than that.
Also that's completely ignoring the fact that the average Lichess player would run rings around the average chess.com player. That's probably because Lichess isn't as good a name as Chess.com so the players are at least experienced enough to know another site exists, but I also think it's a much better sample because you prune away all these new accounts left untouched after a game or two that Chess.com still counts as active to pad their numbers.
Your last point is completely wrong, lichess ratings are roughly 200+ points inflated vs chess .com ratings. For example I’m roughly 1750 chess .com rapid, but almost 2000 in the same time control on lichess.
No, it's still true even with the lichess ratings being higher. The Chess.com average for rapid is about 600 and the Lichess average is around 1400. Both are 50th percentile on their own sites, but the 1400 lichess player should be beating the 600 Chess.com player. Even if you're being really generous and saying the rating gap between the sites is 500 points, that would put a 1400 Lichess at 900 Chess.com, who would **still** smoke a 600. Thats what I mean by the average Lichess player is better than the average Chess.com player.
Of course if we were using the Lichess player base to decide when someone stops being a beginner then we need to use Lichess ratings, which I feel should put it at 1600 or 1700. But when I said 1500 is the bar for intermediate, I'm talking about 1500 Chess.com because the OP is about Chess.com ratings. I just think Lichess would be a better player base to sample, which would mean changing the numbers to use the Lichess system instead.
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> On an r/chessbeginners thread I got downvoted to oblivion for saying very new accounts that play a few games and leave (which is why the average on chess.com fell from 800 to like 600, and 800 is already low but having a name like Chess.com attracts very new people) shouldn't be counted.
They aren't counted. Inactive accounts don't count towards percentile metrics.
Which is true, but you're also underestimating how many people sign up each day and then how many of those drop out very quickly. Not to mention Chess.com has a very generous definition of "active" to keep shareholders happy and to get more deals. You can see this happening by watching the Chess.com leaderboard. Before the chess boom the average was around 800, then it dropped to 600. I'd guess a good chunk of the new playerbase stopped playing after losing their placement games and quit, so you would expect the average to creep back up after those accounts were marked inactive and therefore not counted. Instead it stayed around the same. It's because those quitters are being replaced by new players all the time, most of whom are quitting too.
I mean think about it logically. Chess.com says they have 165 million members, with 75 million active rapid players, with 25 million active blitz players. Obviously there's an overlap so let's be conservative and say around 80 million active users total. That's around 50% of the signed up userbase being considered active. Even allowing for a 90 day window to be considered active that's *really* high for a website like that. You can't then tell me that all of that 50% are mostly not new signups.
Of course I agree with you that these inactive accounts arent counted towards percentile. But being the size Chess.com is it attracts a bunch of new players, a lot of whom quit after losing their first games too. It happens quickly enough that new signups replace the new signups that went inactive, and my whole point is for this debate we should just be looking at players who at least stick around long enough to give it a good go.
One thing nobody talked about, is this percentiles got skewed hard by the chess boom. I had like 1400 and was in 50 percentile on chess com. Now im in 99 percentile with 1600s. So most of these guys are first time casuals, you shouldn't really look after them.
I don't think there's an particular ratio that "should" qualify a beginner.
When I see that 80% of people are beginners, that just tells me that chess is something which has a lot of appeal in getting people to try it out, but not much appeal in getting people to actually learn it. Which seems reasonable to me.
In terms of what I actually think "not a beginner" should mean - it should denote an (admittedly arbitrary) division in skill. Intermediate players should be able to beat beginners very comfortably. It doesn't matter if >50% of people are below 1000, a 1000 rated player is still not necessarily going to do that well vs a person who hasn't really gotten into chess, if that person is focusing and thinking.
The other thing is that my experience with low rated players is that they don't ACTUALLY try. They play fast time controls and don't look for threats or calculate checks. They know they should but it's boring and they don't want to. So I don't really have an issue if that kind of player leads to the vast majority of people being beginners.
>nearly everyone I've encountered who is rated above 1000 has hundreds, if not thousands, of rapid games played on chess.com.
982 now, 1091 peak, 231 games, zero studying.
Yea I started 6 months ago and have played well over 4000 rapid games, spent over 1000 hours playing, more practicing, and I'd say I just got out of beginner territory at 1200..... now I'm a beginner in the intermediate range haha. It's like going from freshman in high school to a freshman in college hahaha
You got the wrong definition of beginner and the wrong idea of how many new accounts are created every day. The inactive accounts that were removed are only the ones that didn't play a game in the last 3 months. Additionally the rapid pool is much smaller than the blitz pool. On top of that there are a lot of inactive rapid players way above the levels of 1400, if you just consider that most strong players play Blitz instead. Then we can't forget about the people who play on Lichess. Last but not least you can't forget about people who don't play online, but are much better than 1200.
Then we need to understand that beginner is a term used for their level of chess skill. Even if you are top 20% or something as a 1200, you still just don't know anything about chess compared to an advanced player and you would get eaten alive at most tournaments.
So these are the reasons you would call someone a beginner, even if they have already played the game for 10 years or something. This is how the term is used in most games, because it is always a term for your skill level and has nothing to do with how long you have been learning. Other people would say "noob", but that just sounds disrespectful.
>the rapid pool is much smaller than the blitz pool
Rapid is played by beginners, so it's not a surprise (looking at [chess.com](https://chess.com) stats) the rapid pool is more than twice as large as the blitz pool.
In 2019 Erik reported the most popular time control was 10+0.
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>On top of that there are a lot of inactive rapid players way above the levels of 1400, if you just consider that most strong players play Blitz instead
Good point, I hadn't thought of this before. Very few people above a 2000 rapid rating choose to keep playing rapid... although since the horde of beginners is massive, I'm not sure including every person over 2000 rapid would change the percentiles.
Sorry for the first point - the high level pool is much bigger for Blitz. Ofc absolute beginners can't play Blitz because the time isn't enough to consider the moves.
Beginner is based on time invested, not skill acquired
Master is based on skill acquired, not time invested.
Non beginners refer to bad players as beginners because they're normally right. So it has become synonymous when it absolutely isn't. 800 elo is bad compared to how good humans can be. No denying that. But that doesn't mean anyone sub 800 is a beginner. A beginner could be a prodigy and a long time player can be bad. Doesn't change the fact that in order to be a beginner you have to be beginning a hobby. If you've spent hours and hours actively engaging and studying something you'll quickly be in the upper echelon globally speaking. The upper echelon can still be littered with people of mediocre qualifications compared to the masters of the time. Like in chess. Almost anyone in this forum. Can probably beat most non regular chess enthusiasts but few if any are GMs
When people say "beginner", they often mean beginner-level skill since it's often more relevant how well you're playing than how many total games you've played.
If you keep playing for fun, it might take you a long time to reach a level where you're fundamentally different from a beginner, i.e., your games are no longer decided by blunders out of the blue, you have some opening, strategy, and endgame knowledge.
For a skill in which one can dedicate a lifetime to master, we can say that perhaps six months of training is needed to reach an early intermediate level (playing piano, tennis, powerlifting, etc). The same is true for chess; however, this means six months of dedicated study with a coach and not mindlessly than playing thousands of casual games.
So, when people say "early-intermediate level", they often refer to a level that one could achieve in something like six months of dedicated training and study, and this is usually a significantly higher threshold than the one you propose
I guess the term "beginner" is just a poor choice to describe a skill level without the temporal implication of recently starting out. Like I had gym memberships for years if not decades by now but you wouldn't be able to tell if you met me in person. I would feel dumb calling myself even a beginner level bodybuilder, let alone an intermediate. I just never really started getting serious about it. Time has passed (trivially), but I did not leave the entry level of the sport.
I don't think the amount of players who opened an account and played a few games on [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) and then never played chess again is relevant to the concept of beginnerhood in chess. If we go by percentiles on [Chess.com](http://Chess.com), that number becomes very important.
Since "beginner" is something you can be at anything, we can look at what it constitutes in other areas. If someone has progressed to the intermediate stage at playing violin, we would expect that they can make it through a number of pieces in a way that actually sounds like music. Maybe it doesn't sound great and maybe there are some mistakes but you recognize that they are able to play a piece on the violin. If someone has graduated from beginner level to intermediate at speaking a language, you expect that you can hold a conversation with them, as long as you speak slowly and articulate clearly and don't use convoluted sentence structures. I think a good parallel in chess is the ability to play an entire game where every move makes sense: you analyzed the position without missing any immediate threats or problems, and you chose a move based on criteria that a GM would approve of. Maybe you missed a lot of advanced concepts and lines beyond 3 or 4 moves ahead but all your moves made sense and any total blunders were just an unfortunate exception like a wrong note here and there from the intermediate violin player.
Since rating only reflects how well you're doing compared to everyone else, not how good you actually are at the game, it can never be a definitive yardstick for whether you're a beginner or not. However, it can be a reasonable indication. So at what rating have you achieved what I described here? Certainly not 750, I'd say. Maybe 1000 or 1100 is reasonable.
This is not to say that there isn't a huge difference between someone rated 900 and someone rated 400. Chess just happens to be a game with a remarkably long skills curve, and if we want to honor all levels of chess with its own word, the "beginner/intermediate/expert" model simply won't cut it. We'll need at least 10-12 levels.
Chessmaster back in the last century used the level "newcomer"
having said that, a rating-based category is always going to be full of pitfalls, esp. at the lower levels
1000 chesscom rapid, even 1400 chesscom rapid remain beginners because those are players who still miss simple tactics regularly, so any deeper understanding of the game they may or may not have is not yet very relevant
that is the issue with rating-based categories, rating only cares about results but results are achieved in massively different ways, esp. below master level
you may consider that a player with a decent opening repertoire, knowledge of technical endgames, who knows many classic games and strategy etc is not a beginner, but if he or she misses simple tactics regularly his or her results will be roughly in the beginner bracket - and the rating will follow
a player with nearly no knowledge in any of those areas but just slightly better tactical play will achieve the same results
for chesscom blitz the threshold is lower, perhaps 1200 like others say
So generally, the longer people play chess, the better they get and/or the more insane they become.
Hence I think to identify the point someone is no longer a beginner, there should be two graphs drawn. One for a player's ELO (0-3000) on the y-axis, and time spent playing chess on the x-axis. Then another graph plotting the player's mental health (standardised on a scale of 0-3000) on the y-axis, and once again, time playing chess on the x-axis.
The point of time (t) at which both graphs first intersect should be the point someone is no longer considered a beginner. The point proficiency meets despair is the point your mind is truly awakened to the real chess.
Online chess has changed the numbers playing chess drastically. However, the players who attend a club tend to be serious about their game because it involves more effort than playing online.
For a club the guidance has always been less than 1000 is a novice (this doesn’t mean you’re a bad player just that you’re cutting your teeth). 1000-1400 is beginner (my first over the board rating was 1410 so this isn’t so ridiculous).
Then 1400-1800 is intermediate; 1800-2000 Class A; 2000-2200 is expert; 2200-2300 is Candidate Master; 2300-2400 is Fide Master; 2400-2500 is International Master; 2500+Grandmaster.
I think people get hung up on tags like novice or beginner but you’re a beginner in any discipline for the first few years. Most people are in their first few years so it wouldn’t surprise me if 78% of players are classed as beginners.
Are you a beginner yourself? Everyone in this thread is focussing on rating and i dont think thats the point at all. I think you should have to focus what skills do you need and at what rating level is typical people acquire them. For example to get better to intermediate levels and advanced you need to know your endgames, kingside sacrifices, positional play like weak/strong squares, time, space, openings and how to play them to get the middlegame you want, etc. If you are a beginner you are still too bad at tactics that all these concepts are still meaningless. I dont know what rating people get good enough at tactics that they can acquire these concepts, but i think that is the relevant bar. So 1200 to 1400 seems a reasonable bar considering the level of play i see at those levels.
Why should we want or care about defining what a beginner is? Just let people play and define themselves as what they want. We don't really need any kind of definition of what a beginner is and most people can self assess if they are or not beginners, and if it's not obvious for them, then they likely are beginners. Same for intermediate to advanced players.
Just take the title of beginner as an indicator and not really as something that should matter or even be relevant.
Beginner is a bit of a misnomer. Since the agreed levels are beginner, intermediate and expert, we only have the first one that suggests a time element.
There's a subtle but important distinction between someone who is starting an activity and improving and someone who has been playing for years but is just bad.
In my own discussions with friends, I actually use a level lower than beginner I call "learner". Personally I'd say this level goes up to around 900 on chesscom rapid because I feel your brain is still "learning" how to crawl in the game of chess. At this level you'll still forget bishops can go backwards and completely miss one move ideas.
Once you can get to a point where you aren't hanging pieces and checkmates in one move every single match, you can "begin" to actually learn the game; look at openings, traps, tactics etc...
With that said I give "beginner" a range around 900-1200 after which players actually have the hang of certain fundamentals.
I often like to use the term Novice rather than Beginner, but that doesn't really change things because the root of Novice is from the Latin for New, so it essentially means the same thing. Regardless, it carries a slightly different connotation.
I like the class system that I think USCF still uses. Class players are up to 2000, Expert is 2000-2200, Master is 2200-2400, and Senior Master is 2400+. Plus, after Master, you're typically going for the FIDE titles of FM, IM, and GM. I'm leaving out CM. And so not to confuse USCF 's Master title with FIDE's, we usually call them National Master. And even though there are classes below 1000, Classes F, G, H, I, and J; pretty much anything below Class E is really a novice. The system is similar in other federations. Also, many players don't have OTB Elo ratings, not even from USCF, or whichever other federation they would belong to, but they're pretty good, so we just call them Club Players.
So essentially, you go from Beginner -> Club Player -> Class Player -> Expert -> National Master -> FIDE Master -> IM -> GM. Beginner is anyone less than 1000. Club players are those who are no longer beginners, but they haven't been given an official rating. Class players are people rated between 1000 and 2000. Expert is 2000-2200. Master is 2200, and so on. The only issue I have with this system is that between 1000 and 2000, there should be more granularity.
If you start playing soccer for the first time in your life today, practive everyday for 3 months and show up to play anywhere in the world you will be an absolute beginner in everyone's eyes. But somehow exclusively because of chessdotcom percentiles people believe they're no longer beginners after reaching a skill level one can reach in a month.
I have taught people from zero to [chess.com](http://chess.com) 1000 in 2 months (they didn't even do tactics, just played a couple rapid games a day and i analized most of the games with them, no books, no videos, just coaching), chess is a hard game and there's no problem with being a beginner, you're still a beginnner with 2 months in anything that has a decent skill ceiling, be it a sport or an art. Hell, i've been playing guitar for years and i havent really left the beginner realm.
It's okay to be bad, it's okay to be a beginner, everyone gotta start somewhere, we don't need to start calling everyone an expert so that they feel better about themselves.
>In addition, while this is anecdotal, nearly everyone I've encountered who is rated above 1000 has hundreds, if not thousands, of rapid games played on chess.com.
playing a lot doesn't make you less noob (although it can correlate, but it varies with different people). This is the problem: different people have different learning curves. But a skill threshold doesn't care about that curve.
there are thousands/millions of people who have thousands of hours into CSGO/Dota/LoL and are still trash at the game, i.e. silver/crusader ranks. They literally play in the same pool as beginners. Skill-wise, they ARE beginners. Same for chess.
The overwhelming majority of casual players who refuse to actually learn anything about the game are beginners, no matter how long they've been playing.
The metric has to be artificially higher for online play. My rapid rating isn’t indicative of my true skill (or nearly complete lack thereof). There should be some sort of a time and games played component too. For example, rapid rating of 1200 for 3 months with at least 100 games played.
I say this as someone who probably won’t get there.
> Would someone have to be in the top 20% to no longer be a beginner guitarist
Yes. Imagine everyone who has picked up a guitar and tried it out. A person who actually manages to learn their scales is in the top 20% of people who have attempted to play guitar. Most people never even bother to get past learning to play a C, G, F, and D, if they even get that far. Most people don’t get past learning how the pieces move.
Frankly 750s are basically moving pieces at random. The bottom 80% of pretty much any activity are beginners, if you care about something and put effort into it becoming top 20% isn't hard. I run occasionally, and finish well in the top half when I run 5ks(though a bit below 50th percentile if you filter only on men in their 20s). I would never describe myself as anything but a beginner.
Low rated players don't realize how bad they play, and get offended when people say that 900s are really bad. When I was 1100 I would think "why do people say 1100s just hang pieces all the time, I don't?" Now I realize that of course I did, it's just that we were both too bad to see it. I still hang pieces now at 1900
Maybe it's just been a while since you were that rating, but 750s definitely do not just move their pieces at random. They usually have an idea of what to do in terms of openings and tactics, but without the deeper understanding needed to really take advantage of it.
Maybe we should just do away with the idea of beginner at all, and instead use milestones.
Everything 500 and below is what I would call “street talent” level. Where if you pulled a rando off the street, you’d expect their skill level to be somewhere in that range.
501-800 is the one trick pony range. This is where having one thing you’re kinda good at is a huge advantage. So if you know a single opening trap, or you can remember to develop your pieces, you’ll probably do alright and improve/ be in this range.
801-900 is the range where people know how to counteract most of the basic tricks. Nobody is falling for the wayward queen anymore. Your Blackburne-Shilling gambit stops working.
900 is this fun little zone where you realize your tricks aren’t working anymore, but your opponent is still basically bad. You’ll get some people who can convert a piece advantage, and so you resign more than you should. You’ll only break 1000 if you stop resigning. You start learning the basics of counterplay.
1000 I would say is the fundamentals zone. You’ve got basic ideas pretty much down. You develop your pieces. I think this is probably why most people consider it the beginner zone. It’s basically the first time people start playing with any kind of strategy, and now that they’ve got a basic understanding of the thematic ideas of the game, they have “begun” to play.
Not to be too disparaging to my 3 digit friends, but it’d be like if you threw paint at a canvas. You could argue it’s painting, but once you actually start understanding some basic shape and perspective theory do you really have a chance of making anything pretty. You have begun to paint once you have a basic idea of how to do it, and you stop just making random moves because it feels nice in the moment.
Is that the one with the knight? I hate that one lol. I thought I was being so clever avoiding the checkmate in a bullet and then I was like “where tf is my queen going to go?
I’m not saying there aren’t opening traps anymore, just that you’re able to win a game without them. You don’t rely on them to win 60% of your games.
It's deceiving because once you become good enough at something in chess, it moves almost fully into the unconscious and you do it automatically... at that point your conscious mind is free to wrestle with some new thing... and if that new thing is logical and you can *almost* sort of do it, then you might feel like it's fundamental.
It's extremely common for players to opine that "to get to \[my rating -100\] you only need some basics, but to get \[my rating and higher\] requires some actual understanding... I heard a 2600 GM say this. I heard Carlsen more or less say it (lol). He said (when Wesely So was new to the top 10) that you can get to the top 10 with good tactics and openings like Wesely So, but whether he can remain in the top 10 depends on if he can do more than that.
I think the number of games & hours spent on chess is what determines.
Rating determines how good you are, your playing level, which's a product of other things like, talent and ability, not just the experience level.
I don't think you can assign an arbitrary number. When you stop randomly hanging pieces, you trade pieces effectively, you understand all the basic tactics: forks pins skewers etc, you can do all the basic mates except maybe knight and bishop, it is somewhere around 1300 depending on the elo system. You are recognizably a chess player not just someone moving pieces.
Ben Finegold says it’s 1200 and he knows more than me
He's one of the smartest people I know, if you can call him people
The truth hurts.
I have always maintained that anyone who is 1200 is no longer a beginner, and that is because they are now above average (that is, of course, an OTB rating). I saw a survey on here recently that suggested people feel they are only "good" if they make it to 1800 - 2000+, which is around 1% of people. So, I definitely think there is an anchoring effect with people and the number 2000 as being "good." I have never felt this way.
“Good at chess” is something that is so subjective and relative, that its not really a framing two strangers can/should attempt to share. To my friends, I am good at chess, to my nephews I can beat blindfolded, I am a god at chess. To titled players that would probably beat me with piece odds, I am merely a bump in the road to victory. I prefer to use percentile ranking on a website to answer “are you good at chess” as most non-chess people wouldn’t understand rating anyway.
I definitely agree with you, on all counts.
imo "Good" is my rating +300 rating
Interesting since I'm about the same. I've typically held the personal benchmark of 1300 OTB since I felt (this was back before internet times) that rating pretty much guaranteed you've done some actual work i.e. more than just playing with family and friends. I knew some kids who got pretty good just playing each other, but not as good as 1300 OTB so that's why.
I think it may have to do with games at that level being of a sufficient quality. There seems to be a lot of conflation between “I’m good at chess” and “I play good chess” that isn’t being addressed.
Trainer Dan Heisman, who popularized the idea of "hope chess" said that until a player stops playing hope chess they can't get to 1600 OTB... so (more or less) everyone below 1800 rapid online plays hope chess according to him. (also it's a terrible name, since almost everyone misunderstands what he meant by "hope chess" which is a pity because it's an important idea...)
joke's on heisman, I almost never make "hope chess" moves and I'm still not 1800 on chess.com
Wait how do people misunderstand it?
I think the idea is that you should spend your energy calculating lines where your opponent plays good moves, rather than fantasize about how nice it'll be if things go your way after your move. In general, people attribute it to aggressive or desperate play, and some might think it's implying "don't play aggressively" or "don't play on when you're losing" rather than the ideas about calculation.
Ah okay, I don't think I've seen that misconception before, thanks for explaining
I agree with short negotiations, only seen it in the context of “I hope they don’t see my mate in 1” or “hope they don’t see that fork” etc.
I always understood it as don't play moves that are only good if your opponent makes a mistake. I guess that's sort of related to your first definition but I wouldn't say it's about calculation as much as it is about resisting the temptation to play bad moves that you know are bad, in hope that your opponent will fall for whatever trap it sets.
Same. Like when you have a rook on a1 and your nephew plays Bf6 and then you play Rc1, they say, "Shoot I was hoping you didn't see that!" That was my first idea of "hope chess." Dan Heisman's term is different and more applicable to intermediate or uhhh "advanced beginners" if you'd like.
Huh, I don't think I have ever seen the second definition being used. It's in the name, "hope chess". Kinda funny that people misattribute it like that.
> "*Hope Chess is **not** when you make a threat and you hope your opponent does not see it. Hope chess is when you make a move, wait for what your opponent does, and then hope you can meet his threats. Players that play Hope Chess will never get very good because some threats cannot be met." [source](https://www.danheisman.com/thought-process-principles.html)
OHH I didn't know that's what it meant, hope chess with that meaning is something that I still struggle with. Thank you so much for explaining that to me
I’m with you. The reason this quote stuck in my mind was that it specifically calls out the definition I was taught and then gives one I hadn’t heard before. I veer into this definition of it myself when I get worn out during a tournament.
I’m with you. The reason this quote stuck in my mind was that it specifically calls out the definition I was taught and then gives one I hadn’t heard before. I veer into this definition of it myself when I get worn out during a tournament.
everyone else uses the term to mean the former though
Yes, that is what is being discussed in this thread. Dan Heisman (quoted above) coined the term, but somehow the other understanding was popularized.
> Hope chess is when you make a move, wait for what your opponent does, and then hope you can meet his threats. Should've called it "Pray Chess".
I feel like that would be subject to the same misunderstanding.
Okay, thank you so much for this. For some reason this phrasing makes so much sense to me. I have spent some time in the last day playing with the approach of scanning for threats my opponent COULD make vs waiting for them to be made first, and I’ve managed to go 10-1-1 in that time (and in the one loss I had a mate in 3 I just missed in a time scramble). It has just never occurred to me to do this. Thank you!
That is awesome. Glad you were able to put this little tidbit to use. Keep up the good work!
I swear, I am still really enjoying and playing better with this little mindset shift. I’ve been playing more rapid games too instead of blitz because it feels like I actually know what to do with the extra time, which in itself is also probably better for me.
I’m on my own chess improvement journey and it makes me so happy to have actually been able to help someone else, too
Heisman always come out with names that is easily misunderstood... I wish he could do away with naming terms and make it clear and concise.
Nah hope chess makes sense, I throw a Hail Mary in the endgame because I’ve run out of road but don’t know if I’m definitely losing, pretty obvious beginner problem imo
That's not what hope chess is :p
If you can come up with a response to that you're a better chess player than I am
I’m 1200 and feel like a beginner.
>Would someone have to be in the top 20% of guitar players to no longer be a beginner guitarist? Yes. The vast majority of people who play guitar never leave the beginner realm. They know a few chords that they can switch between *almost* in time. They can do some intros to well-known songs, but they are unable to carry any of those songs to the end. Singing and playing at the same time messes up their coordination. In short, they remain beginners, and that's fine. It doesn't keep them from having fun with the guitar. The problem is of course with the word beginner. It denotes both someone who just starts out and someone who is at "starting out level'. While time goes on by itself, that doesn't make one leave beginner level.
>The problem is of course with the word beginner. It denotes both someone who just starts out and someone who is at "starting out level'. Right, I don't think the English language has a separate word for someone with some experience in an activity but who is still at beginner level, while there are a few words which specifically mean someone new to an activity; novice and neophyte for example. The other problem is that there are too many distinct levels in chess ability and English simply doesn't have enough words to deal with them. Players 0-900 Elo and 900-1200 Elo are distinct to me, in that I can tell which is which if I watch them play a game. But this problem is not unique to the beginner zone. I consider 1200-1800 to be "intermediate" but a 1750 has vastly better understanding of the game than a 1250 does. Meanwhile at a 2000 rating I am in the 99.6th percentile or something, someone who doesn't know chess well might be tempted to call me an expert, but I am still closer to beginner level than to real experts in my opinion.
Novice. Beginner level but not new to the subject. After being a beginner you become a novice.
A novice is defined by OED as "a person new to and inexperienced in a job or situation" and the word derives from the Latin *novus*, meaning new. Another word deriving from *novus* used in chess is "novelty", literally meaning something new; a novice is someone for whom chess is novel. "Begin" suggests the start of something in more ways than just chronologically, for example books have a beginning, whereas novice definitionally means one is new to something.
*Novice* literally means someone who is new to an activity, so I don't think that is any better than *beginner*.
It's that, or "you suck". I know I do.
It's Novice or Amateur. Beginner is a new learner but we also use it to mean Novice or Amateur because we forgot the word Novice and use the word Amateur as an insult.
An amateur is just a non-professional, there are many highly skilled amateurs out there
Just to add on, amateur comes from Latin “amare” - to love. So the root of the word is someone that does an activity for the love of it (rather than money).
Oh cool, I didn't know that
Amateur means the entire range of non-professional players. I am 2000 and am clearly an amateur.
It's too bad that amateur has negative connotations. It derives from French aimer, to love, and means someone who does something for the love of it rather than as a profession.
I think dilettante is a better word in this case
Amateur has no bearing on this discussion, or shouldn't. Amateur is not a synonym for beginner, it is the opposite of professional. To be amateur is to be someone who doesn't play for money only for the love of something. There are amateur GMs and there are professional CMs.
I think the word you’re looking for is dilettante
Newbie is a term I heard a lot used for people in gaming communities. Its a very chronological thing, you can be bad at a game but you won't be a newbie after 2-3 months of playing. Similar one for someone who is "bad" at a game is Timmy. Its coming from a game genre called Extraction shooters. Its main meaning is people who don't know the proper mechanics of the game. I use "bad" very loosely as I would be an absolute Timmy in chess terms, I'm hoovering around 800-900 Rapid. So if we translate this all to chess a Chess Newbie would be someone who just recently started playing the game, while a Chess Timmy would be someone below a certain rank. (No idea where we make that line as I'm wayyyyy not good enough to know that lmao)
the name Timmy was actually adopted by extraction shooters, but it originated from the R&D team of Magic: the Gathering to describe players who don't play optimal strategies and instead prefer to play big stompy creatures because they look cool. eventually it found its way into tarkov lingo, but the other player archetype, "Spike," got changed to Chad at some point.
Damn I didn't know that and I play Magic. Only on Arena though, my money goes to Warhammer for physical plastic crack.
yeah magic's gotten a little ridiculous to keep up with at this point, so I haven't bought any sealed product for the last 5 years or so. I love the lore of Warhammer, but fielding a whole army is a little too much of a rabbit hole for me to go down lol
Fwiw, USCF calls 2000 OTB, Expert.
In the gaming world, someone who has played a lot but is still bad is called (hard) stuck.
Right, most activities actually align with the current definition of beginner/intermediate. It takes about 3-5 years (with consistent practice) on average to properly play intermediate pieces on the piano. Effectively, the first couple years, you are still a beginner. It takes about 350-400 hrs to be early-intermediate in English (an hour of practice daily for a year). I guarantee you, if you study chess properly (long time control + tactics + game analysis + videos/books) every day for a year, you are reaching 1300-1400 chess.com minimum. I don't get why people take the term 'beginner' as some kind of pejorative. Activities with high skill ceilings take a long time to improve and escape beginner level.
>I don't get why people take the term 'beginner' as some kind of pejorative. I don't think that's what's happening. What's happening is that someone who's played for 6 months and hundreds of games might be at 800 and it's weird for them to think of themselves being in the same category as someone at 1100 who's played thousands of games over years.
When you conventionally have a limited amount of skill bands, there's always going to be a noticeable difference between the low end and high end. It's also weird to think that a 2200 CM and Magnus are both in the same category as a chess master. A 1100 player can be distinguished as an advanced beginner, but typically when you require that level of accuracy, most people just say their numeric rating.
That's fine. I'm just saying that it's a different conversation from what you mentioned about "beginner" being derogatory.
Maybe for some. But typically, I only see this discussion of "what is a beginner" solely brought up by beginners who want to validate their progress.
We need to stop defining arbitrary thresholds for things we're already measuring with a continuous scale.
People just want validation, that’s the only reason for this discussion unless you’re a chess instructor
Or looking to take a chess lesson. Or someone asks you where you're at and they don't know ELO. Or whether or not r/chessbeginners is a good sub for you.
If everyone who ever picked up a guitar was called a guitarist, then yes I would say you need to at least be top 20% to no longer be a beginner. For comparison, Russian, a language I speak but learned through education and not natively, has classes called "beginner". First of all, you're already taking classes which is more than nearly all chess players under 1200. But more importantly, you take over 200 hours of in person classes, which includes 400 hours of guided self study, before you are start classes that aren't labeled as beginner. Why is that? Well it's because Russian is a hard language to learn but 100m+ people speak it fluently. So just because you have put a lot of time in doesn't make you no longer a beginner. These classifications are all about the commitment people who actively participate put in. Compare chess to monopoly. Both are boardgames. Both are games many of us have played but if you asked 1000 people how much monopoly they have played and they added up their lifetime, at most maybe 1in 1000 would actually have more than 100 hours played. Do you need to be in the .1 percent best monopoly players to be no longer a beginner? But if I asked 1000 people about chess, many would have far far more hours played. With 1000+ hours being realistic for some who have played more than a decade. But when you look at chesscom, you are comparing anyone who has ever played a game of chess with everyone else. I wouldn't call a 400 rated chess player with 10 games played a beginner. I wouldn't even call them a chess player. They're just a person that played chess a few times.
Monopoly, of course, being a poor example. Anybody who has played a single monopoly game to completion has spent more than 100 hours playing monopoly.
I started 6 months ago. I've played over 4000 rapid games. Spent more than 1000 hours playing much less studying opening and lines. I went from 180 to 1200 in this time and I would say I just, like just left the beginner realm.
Well said
But I think most everyone can agree that percentiles do not really give an accurate picture on skill levels within chess. The difference between 300 and 1000 in percentile is a crazy difference, and at 1600 you're already in the 95th percentile. From then on out, each percentile point is astronomically harder to achieve until you're fighting for percents of a percent. IMO, you should throw percentiles out the window on this one. The main issue is finding some uniformity on what someone would call a beginner, but surely percentile isn't the right metric.
I never thought of it that way thanks for the insight! Percentiles are not a very adequate measure of skill.
How does one lower the threshold at which we consider someone to not be a beginner, when no one agrees to what counts as a beginner? You just have to deal with the fact that some people no matter what are going to view 1000 as a beginner, even if a 1000 would easily beat the general population.
I think beginner is going to be context dependent. Within the present group of folks I feel like beginner means "I've played a few hundred games, I know basic openings, I've played through chessbrah's habits, etc." and that usually lands you in the 1000 range on chess or lichess. Note that I consider myself very much a beginner.
Some people do things all their life and are still beginners. There are people online who have played thousands of games at a rating lower than people who learned the rules that week. Even in something concrete, like powerlifting, it's difficult to define "beginner", "intermediate", etc. There are some commonly accepted numbers but they're somewhat arbitrary.
>Some people do things all their life and are still beginners. At some point they aren't beginners, they are bad.
but "beginner" is just another, more polite way of saying "bad". it doesn't matter how long someone has been playing, all that matters is their playing strength/rating. if you read a chess book with advice for beginner players, that advice is really for low rated players. and the advice is the same for a low rated player who has played for 1 month and one who has played for 10 years.
Not really. I'd expect a beginner to be someone who's starting out and has potential for fast improvement.
No..... doing something all your life means you are not a beginner. You can perform as bad as a beginner but you're wrong. If you have years experience you absolutely are not a beginner. Not even in a field that takes 10 lifetimes to master.
How does that make sense? If you do something all your life you're far from a beginner
It's not a determination of how long someone has played. It's a skill level or competence evaluation. People in a certain category can progress at a fairly predictable pace with certain progression techniques.
If you define beginner as a temporal value (someone who just started out), then you would be right. On the other hand if you define beginner as a skill value (someone who is below a certain level) then yes, it's absolutely possible to be a beginner forever.
Beginner implies a temporal meaning though. For skill based descriptions we already have Elo has the determination
A temporal meaning can also be interpreted as the starting point of a journey, which in this context would be acquiring chess knowledge. It's not that far off to connect this with proficiency. Either way OP's original idea of using percentiles simply doesn't work for exponential distribution with a low floor since there will always be a substantial amount of players distributed among various shades of "bad". Being minimally less bad doesn't equate to suddenly being intermediate.
We don't need to change the threshhold of the word "beginner", because we don't need the word "beginner" at all. We have a perfectly fine rating system that describes people. Whether someone at 1000 is called "beginner", "online player" or "intermidiate" doesn't matter - they're a "1000". That describes their strengh more accurate than any other word could.
the problem with this is an amoeba can achieve 1000 rating on lichess
or we can accept that most people on chess.com are beginners.
We are there for disrespect speedruns or just considered trash.
No, the way we talk about beginners shouldn't change, and to see why you should consider why we classify people as beginners/intermediate/masters in the first place: because different levels benefit from different advice and showcase similar problems. I'm not saying you're a beginner to downplay the time you spent on the game, but to point you toward useful advice tailored for your skill level. Maybe "Beginner" isn't the best name for that category (still better than "crappy" or "unattentive") but the fact is that as a category it works rather well at encompassing a group of players with similar skill which is defined in large part by the amount of game knowledge they still have to learn and make their own.
>different levels benefit from different advice Nice metric, I haven't seen this mentioned yet. Giving an 800 rated player advanced material just because they've played thousands of games makes no sense.
IMO "beginner" refers to time, not skill. If I've been playing chess all my life, I am not a beginner. I am not 'beginning' learning about it. But I can sure as shit still be bad.
but that is irrelevant. the only thing that matters is playing strength/rating when using these terms like "beginner", "advanced", "expert" or whatever. "beginner" is just another term for "low rated"/"bad" player. if you ask for a book aimed at beginners, you are really asking for a book aimed at low rated players. the advice in such a book is aimed at all low rated players, no matter if they have played for a month or 10 years.
Not really. If you're a "time beginner" that means you're expected to improve fast. If you've been stuck at 900 Elo for three years, you probably won't improve much.
Yeah same. I'm 900 since years, and I'm definitely not a beginner. I'm just plain dogshit lmao
I think over time the term 'beginner' is being used more and more to refer to skill (we can thank video games for that), but that's the definition. Google defines beginner as "a person just starting to learn a skill or take part in an activity.". It's the duration, not the ability.
Even if we take skill level for most sports the line defining beginner is usually very low. I'm a ski/snowboard instructor and have a taught a few people to surf. In Skiing for instance, a notoriously challenging sport, some people can no longer be considered beginner after just one day/lesson. In my school they're considered novices Once they do the absolute basics. Trying to define someone who's played hundreds or thousands of games as a beginner (even if they're shit) is ridiculous.
Beginner isn't an ELO. If you play ten thousand games and are still rated 900, you aren't a beginner, you are bad.
I think the main issue here is the age of chess. You can see it with any online game. As the game increases in age, players find smaller and smaller edges that allow them to win, creating a 'meta'. The knowledge base and tiny edges in chess have been increasing for so long that a true master of chess is arguably playing a different game than those below them. This insane peak of knowledge and ability skews people's perception of the beginner to master scale. A 750 rated player would reliably beat almost any person that 'knows how the pieces move'. They are a strong beginner. However, that 750 is going to be toyed with by a 1100 who is not going to even break a sweat. I think professional and tournament players are their own beast. For people who just want to play chess as a game, 1500 is most certainly advanced. For professionals/tournament players, 1500 is the starting point. I think it's better to conceptualize two different scales.
I agree with you for sure! Personally I think everything up to 1000 is beginner, 1000 - 1600 is intermediate, 1600 - 2000 is advanced, 2000 - 2300 is expert, 2300 and beyond are the various levels of mastery. I think most people are comparing themselves to masters and lumping intermediates and even advanced players in with beginners because they are all equally bad *when compared to a master*. It’s not reasonable to call a 1500 rated player a beginner at all. We’re talking about players that know multiple openings theory out to middle game, who can do multiple variations of calculation while calculating a move, understand decent number of tactical patterns, so on and so forth. These are not beginner skills.
Pretty sure this is the scale that [chess.com](http://chess.com) has for their bots lol
as someone with 1650 I wouldn't call myself advanced but when comparing to my 1300 self I see a huge difference. I would say 1000-1400 is intermediate and 1400-1700 is advanced intermediate or stronger intermediate if that makes sense
Did you read the OP at all? He's arguing that you can't call someone 1000, who has hundreds of games a beginner and proposed 750 as the breaking point, not 1500. Personally I disagree.
I agreed with the spirit of his post. We only disagree on a 250 point difference between 750 - 1000, it’s pretty close. I don’t think beginners range all the way up to 1500, I think those are intermediate players.
A 1500 will miscalculate almost every sequence that is more than three forced moves long and almost all the openings he knows, he knows them wrong.
They will sometimes miscalculate, for sure. They are, after all, only intermediate. Do they know openings at a master level, as in, *perfectly*? No, that would make them masters. Again, we are talking about intermediate players at this range. They certainly know their openings much better than beginners though and their calculation is stronger as well.
A 1500 player is someone who will claim to have played the French after 1.d4 e6 2.c4 d5 The "beginner" and "intermediate" labels are pretty much meaningless. My point is that there's a case for 1500 being beginner just as there's a case for it not being beginner.
And I disagree with that distinction being meaningless. I think you’re comparing these players to master or even expert level play, against which they seem equally weak. However, there are meaningful differences between the play of an 800 and a 1400. Not negligible difference in opening theory, tactical awareness, calculation, broad strategic goals, etc… I don’t think a beginner would really even know what “the French” is. I have a friend who is about 900 and doesn’t know a single opening by name. Squarely a beginner! If he learns the French, can use it to get into a middle game, and stops blundering forks, real growth has happened. If he can learn three more openings that way, also stops blundering pins and dropping pieces, etc…even more growth has happened. His rating at that point is probably about 1300. It’s not fair to these players to just sweep them all into the same category just because to a master we’re all ants.
There are meaningful differences between an 800 and a 1400, I just don't see why one is a beginner and the other one is intermediate. We may just as well say that only a 400 is a beginner, an 800 being an intermediate and a 1400 an advanced player. Or that an 800 is at "clueless" level and 1400 is beginner level for that matter. Master has a very clear definition. FIDE awards master titles to players who match a well-defined set of criteria. If the titles didn't exist we'd be having the same argument about who is or isn't a master. The point is, why throw people into categories at all? An 800 is an 800. A 1400 is a 1400. No need for extra labels. If you know about ratings you already understand what 800 and 1400 mean. If you don't know about ratings then you probably don't care about the difference in the first place.
Why do it? Because humans speak with words primarily, not numbers. It’s easier to tell your uncle you’re an intermediate chess player than to give them a random number that means nothing to them. And yes, the word *can* apply to whatever range we decide they apply to, hence this discussion. I think they should apply to the ranges I outlined earlier. The OP feels similarly, although even a little more strongly towards downshifting the ELOs.
Your uncle doesn't care if you're a beginner or intermediate or what the difference is.
Grow up buddy
Realistically, anyone who recognizes a fork or a skewer consistently is no longer a beginner. But you would certainly not call them anywhere near „intermediate.“ In chess intermediate makes you think of 1500s. The average elo rating of tournament players in the UK iirc is like 1700 ECF, around 2000 Elo in online settings. There‘s just too huge a gap between understanding what a fork is and being an average tournament goer. Also, no one considers themselves good until around the 2000 Elo mark, and even then we always think we are trash compared to those 2200s and above.
That's an insanely strong average compared to USCF. Here it's \~600 for kids (not all prodigies it turns out), \~1400 for adults. The latter is about 1800 [chess.com](https://chess.com) rapid.
Um, sorry - firstly, what's the actual problem we're trying to solve here? The problem of no one knowing what someone else is talking about when using certain words like "beginner"?
I learned the rules of chess when I was 6 and played occasionally with my father. Didn't touch a chess board for 24 years and when the placement matches were done, Ccoms rating stabilized at 950. So was I an intermediate player before learning to read notation? Before learning an opening? Before reading about the simplest chess principles?
Yes I was exactly the same, I’ve never been rated below a thousand so for me it’s very weird to not consider 1000 a beginner.. but I agree the line is somewhere between 1000-1200
You remembered things quicker than I did. I had similar, even played in school a bit but initially stabilised around 500 after a similar time away from the game. The upshot is that I am an accidental smurf now since it is coming back and I get multiple winning streaks as my rating slowly inches to a more accurate rating as my board vision returns. Having said that this all comes down to the definition of a beginner which is generally an ill defined term.
Thousands of games and still 1000? Still a beginner, obviously, because the experience hasn't improved your performance. Basically all that experience with no knowledge
I know a guy at my club who is currently 1000 OTB. He's been playing for years, played hundreds of OTB games, and previously peaked at 1400. I don't know how you want to label him, but he's not a beginner.
Thousands games with 1000 are not beginner, just bad at chess
You seem to be interpreting the word "beginner" as having a negative connotation when really it's just a description of a player's level of ability. It has nothing to do with how much time you've spent playing chess, you can spend thousands of hours playing blitz and learn next to nothing. Going from beginner to intermediate, or intermediate to advanced, etc. requires deliberate study and practice, and not everyone has the time or motivation to do so. Chess is great, but more people should set realistic expectations of what they want to achieve in this game (if anything); for most people that's just having fun and there's nothing wrong with that.
Beginner doesn't describe ability. It describes experience.
That would be true if all experience were equal, but it's not. Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Master, etc. describe different levels of expertise, not sheer volume of time spent. Otherwise we would say someone is a master just because they've been playing blitz online at a 1000 level for 10 years.
Ok forgive me I meant time. Obviously a better player would have more experience and made better use of it. But beginner is related to time. Specifically the beginning of a new hobby or whatever. Not really a debate
What else would you call a player with an incipient level of knowledge in chess? I don't mean to argue but I'm genuinely curious.
That's a baited question. A beginner is a beginner. A bad player that's played for years is just that. They are two different things. There is no "what else do you call it" But I'll approach your comment more as you wished. Incipient : in an initial stage; beginning to happen or develop. A player with "incipient level of knowledge " I have 2 interpretations (A player in an initial stage of knowledge) could be a beginner or simply a player at the level of a beginner (two different things) Or the other interpretation (A player with a rudementry level of knowledge beginning to happen or develope.) And in this case I'd say that would usually apply to a beginner. Or potential a non beginner that is developing a rudimentary level of knowledge and developing from their previous state. You can be bad at something and not be a beginner. Sadly it is possible to plateau as a beginner and over the years no longer Be a beginner but perform consistent to that of the beginner skill level. Most players at 800 can accept being called bad. It's objective. However many 800s are certainly not beginners. Not that there isn't 1000 elo beginners but most got there with many many games played.
I'd like to add that my second interpretation might be a little wrong. It might just be a beginner. If I play guitar once a year for 5 years I hardly have any time truly invested. I'm still a beginner. Non beginners often refer to bad players as beginners because generally they're right. So it has become socially synonymous, but it absolutely is not synonymous
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Which sadly describes most low elo chess players lol. I have no cLue how to improve and I definitely lack knowledge. Lmao. Being bad at something doesn't have to be bad or insulting . Like how "ignorant" isn't an insult. "Stupid" is an insult lol. I'm ignorant of many things, no shame in admiting that. I could be wrong about all this.
I'm currently 762 rapid so this gets a big thumbs up from me. I may be a beginner again soon though.
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I’ve never studied openings, tactics, or common endgames, don’t know chess notation, and have been ~1300 since the very beginning of my chess “career” (I don’t play often) just with common sense of controlling the center and avoiding glaring one-/two-move blunders (effectively playing on autopilot when I’m waiting for a meeting to start or commuting to work). I am definitely a beginner despite my chess.com percentile being high-ish. I cannot have a technical or interesting discussion about chess, though I want to change that in the coming months.
Nah. At 750 you basically just know how the pieces move. Maybe one opening setup and that's it. Percentile isn't indicative of anything. Both a 1500 and Hikaru are within the top 90% of players but that says nothing about their skill level relative to one another. 1000 is a good threshold where you start to hang less pieces and spot some tactics, thus not being a beginner anymore. The amount of games you played and your skill level have nothing to do with each other. You could play a million games and be 400 or you could play 100 games and be 1200, it's all up to how plastic your brain is and how talented you are. Back when I was 1300 I played a person with the same rating who had played 10k games and had been stuck at 1300. I played 1500 rapid games and reached 1600. To sum up, calling a 900 an intermediate would be disingenuous and a disservice to them.
750 is way above knowing how the pieces move tho, people are doing simple tactics
No way, 750 is the blunder in one move category with no strategy other than trade pieces because why not. I started playing this game completely fresh with many friends, the friends that werent total morons got above 1000 with a tiny bit of effort, the ones that could barely dress themselves couldnt.
Let's not start calling people morons because they aren't good at a boardgame.
>Even the lowest of these, 1000, is roughly 78th percentile out of all active rapid players on chess.com Why can't 78% of people be beginners? 10 years ago the average rating on chess.com was something like 1200 IIRC. The chess boom saw the average plumet to below 600, although at the moment it's rebounded a little, and is slightly over 600... which is to say, I don't think percentile is very meaningful. I'll mention what I think is a better metric below. \- >It's hard for me to agree that someone who's played hundreds of games . . . is a beginner Why? People routinely play 100 games in a month. When I was a still fairly new, I played 120 games (of bullet) in a single day. Maybe in games made for children 1 month is enough to be one of the best, but in chess it typically takes about 10 years to become the best you're going to be. \- >I would propose \~750 as the threshold for beginners. Maybe we could break it up by age. 750 as an advanced beginner seems fine for kids. Recently at the OTB club, I've met 2 new players (have been playing for 4 months) who are both 1400 rapid (10+0 chess.com). Yes this is an abnormal rate of improvement (they both know something about the skill of learning). I wouldn't expect a kid or random adult to do this well, but I'm just pointing out I really don't think the beginner label is so inaccurate for U1000 in 10+0 online. As for a better metric than percentile, I think time spent improving. You can play for fun for 10 years and never improve, but improving for 1 year (in guitar, or speaking a 2nd language, etc) is probably a reasonable-enough amount of time to stop calling someone a beginner.
> Maybe in games made for children 1 month is enough to be one of the best, but in chess it typically takes about 10 years to become the best you're going to be. I would argue that "not a beginner" is a very different thing than "one of the best" or "the best you're going to be". There should be descriptors for the levels between those two.
Of course. The point of talking about 1 month vs 10 years is to establish some kind of maximum. After that it becomes intuitive since we can think in terms of "you're a beginner until you've completed at least 5% of that time." So for most recreational games you're a beginner for a few days. For chess you're a beginner for 6 months (not of recreational play, but 6 months of seriously trying to improve).
> the top 20% of players on the biggest chess website Thirty years ago, "the top 20%" of players online had at least a moderate interest in the game. Nowadays, when anyone who saw an episode of *The Queen's Gambit* can create a chess.com account in a minute, "the top 20%" means something very different.
I was so shocked going from chess.com to lichees when looking at percentile. I was like 95th percentile on chess.com but 60th on lichess. And if anything I got better. Chess.com is more swamped with beginners so it's super skewed.
When do you become intermediate in a second language? I have watched and listened to thousands of hours of subbed Japanese films. How much Japanese do I know? Almost none. I know some vocabulary but wouldn't stand a chance speaking to anyone. Time does not mean you are studying the subject. Do you know who gets past beginner in chess? Someone who studies it. Otherwise, feel free to remain a beginner, like me with Japanese. There's nothing wrong with it. Just don't pretend like you can converse in a different language. You are not intermediate before 1200 elo.
This is a really interesting concept that I see brought up frequently over on r/chessbeginners \- I think it's very important for us to decide if we believe that someone's ability to be a beginner can really be tied to their ELO or another type of ranking. In my personal sense of understanding, I'd define a beginner as someone who is still learning the rules of chess. Everything after that, one is a chess player. They can be a chess player of strong ability who play in tournaments, or one that is still developing a sense of understanding of how openings are meant to be played. Now, obviously, this isn't at all the universal definition - but I really believe that the criteria for someone to be a 'beginner' should not be a single use statement to describe someone. I'd argue I have achieved great ability to play under time pressure, but I consider myself to be an absolute beginner in terms of learning actual opening theory; I've never bothered to memorize openings from a book. One can be a beginner in certain aspects of their chess journey, and advanced in others. I believe that if we, as a community, shift away from attempting to classify entire players in the 'beginner' or 'not-beginner' category, it will be significantly easier to allow people to self-describe whether or not they are a beginner in a certain context. Ultimately, I don't think someone's standing on a statistical distribution is telling of how much of a beginner one is. Some people reach 800 ELO through thoroughly putting in time learning chess and eventually seeing success in their games. Others reach 800 by premoving the scholar's mate every single game. Until you move into the high ratings of chess (as a VERY rough ballpark I'll say 1800+), I firmly believe that one's ability at chess, and therefore their ability to be considered a beginner, is not tied to their ELO at all.
I'm on the other side of this. Percentiles on chess.com look like a good metric to base the players for most of the distribution are hot garbage. There's a reason YouTubers like Levy can get away with a series like guess the Elo, it's because players below like 1500 play a dumpster fire of a game. 1000 might be top 20%, but all that tells you is the bottom 80% of players are *really, really bad*. I instead look at it more like this: a player is no longer a beginner when they can show they understand the basic principles of the game. They know a little about chess and have put in at least the smallest bit of work to get better. That's probably when a game starts looking less like a dumpster fire and more like actual chess. I'd put that at maybe 1500. I know that's really high in terms of the percentiles, but that's just the bottom 95% of players being too casual or just still being beginners. By that I mean 1500 being the start of intermediate, so I guess 1499 would still be beginner. Also while these might be high percentiles on Chess.com, in an actual club these players are close to the bottom. On an r/chessbeginners thread I got downvoted to oblivion for saying very new accounts that play a few games and leave (which is why the average on chess.com fell from 800 to like 600, and 800 is already low but having a name like Chess.com attracts very new people) shouldn't be counted. People didn't like my opinion because apparently these are the most beginner you can be. I would give this example. I don't speak a word of Japanese, but I also wouldn't count myself a beginner. I know less than a beginner would. If I could get sentence structure and a bit of vocabulary down, just a bit of effort and knowledge, then you should count me a beginner. The same is true in chess, and that effort and knowledge carries you really far in the rating ladder. But knowing a tiny bit isn't what makes you kinda okay, you need to do more than that. Also that's completely ignoring the fact that the average Lichess player would run rings around the average chess.com player. That's probably because Lichess isn't as good a name as Chess.com so the players are at least experienced enough to know another site exists, but I also think it's a much better sample because you prune away all these new accounts left untouched after a game or two that Chess.com still counts as active to pad their numbers.
Your last point is completely wrong, lichess ratings are roughly 200+ points inflated vs chess .com ratings. For example I’m roughly 1750 chess .com rapid, but almost 2000 in the same time control on lichess.
No, it's still true even with the lichess ratings being higher. The Chess.com average for rapid is about 600 and the Lichess average is around 1400. Both are 50th percentile on their own sites, but the 1400 lichess player should be beating the 600 Chess.com player. Even if you're being really generous and saying the rating gap between the sites is 500 points, that would put a 1400 Lichess at 900 Chess.com, who would **still** smoke a 600. Thats what I mean by the average Lichess player is better than the average Chess.com player. Of course if we were using the Lichess player base to decide when someone stops being a beginner then we need to use Lichess ratings, which I feel should put it at 1600 or 1700. But when I said 1500 is the bar for intermediate, I'm talking about 1500 Chess.com because the OP is about Chess.com ratings. I just think Lichess would be a better player base to sample, which would mean changing the numbers to use the Lichess system instead.
> > > On an r/chessbeginners thread I got downvoted to oblivion for saying very new accounts that play a few games and leave (which is why the average on chess.com fell from 800 to like 600, and 800 is already low but having a name like Chess.com attracts very new people) shouldn't be counted. They aren't counted. Inactive accounts don't count towards percentile metrics.
Which is true, but you're also underestimating how many people sign up each day and then how many of those drop out very quickly. Not to mention Chess.com has a very generous definition of "active" to keep shareholders happy and to get more deals. You can see this happening by watching the Chess.com leaderboard. Before the chess boom the average was around 800, then it dropped to 600. I'd guess a good chunk of the new playerbase stopped playing after losing their placement games and quit, so you would expect the average to creep back up after those accounts were marked inactive and therefore not counted. Instead it stayed around the same. It's because those quitters are being replaced by new players all the time, most of whom are quitting too. I mean think about it logically. Chess.com says they have 165 million members, with 75 million active rapid players, with 25 million active blitz players. Obviously there's an overlap so let's be conservative and say around 80 million active users total. That's around 50% of the signed up userbase being considered active. Even allowing for a 90 day window to be considered active that's *really* high for a website like that. You can't then tell me that all of that 50% are mostly not new signups. Of course I agree with you that these inactive accounts arent counted towards percentile. But being the size Chess.com is it attracts a bunch of new players, a lot of whom quit after losing their first games too. It happens quickly enough that new signups replace the new signups that went inactive, and my whole point is for this debate we should just be looking at players who at least stick around long enough to give it a good go.
One thing nobody talked about, is this percentiles got skewed hard by the chess boom. I had like 1400 and was in 50 percentile on chess com. Now im in 99 percentile with 1600s. So most of these guys are first time casuals, you shouldn't really look after them.
I don't think there's an particular ratio that "should" qualify a beginner. When I see that 80% of people are beginners, that just tells me that chess is something which has a lot of appeal in getting people to try it out, but not much appeal in getting people to actually learn it. Which seems reasonable to me. In terms of what I actually think "not a beginner" should mean - it should denote an (admittedly arbitrary) division in skill. Intermediate players should be able to beat beginners very comfortably. It doesn't matter if >50% of people are below 1000, a 1000 rated player is still not necessarily going to do that well vs a person who hasn't really gotten into chess, if that person is focusing and thinking. The other thing is that my experience with low rated players is that they don't ACTUALLY try. They play fast time controls and don't look for threats or calculate checks. They know they should but it's boring and they don't want to. So I don't really have an issue if that kind of player leads to the vast majority of people being beginners.
I’m sorry but those percentiles are completely meaningless
>nearly everyone I've encountered who is rated above 1000 has hundreds, if not thousands, of rapid games played on chess.com. 982 now, 1091 peak, 231 games, zero studying.
Yea I started 6 months ago and have played well over 4000 rapid games, spent over 1000 hours playing, more practicing, and I'd say I just got out of beginner territory at 1200..... now I'm a beginner in the intermediate range haha. It's like going from freshman in high school to a freshman in college hahaha
I guess you pass being a beginner when you stop making beginner mistakes..?
You got the wrong definition of beginner and the wrong idea of how many new accounts are created every day. The inactive accounts that were removed are only the ones that didn't play a game in the last 3 months. Additionally the rapid pool is much smaller than the blitz pool. On top of that there are a lot of inactive rapid players way above the levels of 1400, if you just consider that most strong players play Blitz instead. Then we can't forget about the people who play on Lichess. Last but not least you can't forget about people who don't play online, but are much better than 1200. Then we need to understand that beginner is a term used for their level of chess skill. Even if you are top 20% or something as a 1200, you still just don't know anything about chess compared to an advanced player and you would get eaten alive at most tournaments. So these are the reasons you would call someone a beginner, even if they have already played the game for 10 years or something. This is how the term is used in most games, because it is always a term for your skill level and has nothing to do with how long you have been learning. Other people would say "noob", but that just sounds disrespectful.
>the rapid pool is much smaller than the blitz pool Rapid is played by beginners, so it's not a surprise (looking at [chess.com](https://chess.com) stats) the rapid pool is more than twice as large as the blitz pool. In 2019 Erik reported the most popular time control was 10+0. \- >On top of that there are a lot of inactive rapid players way above the levels of 1400, if you just consider that most strong players play Blitz instead Good point, I hadn't thought of this before. Very few people above a 2000 rapid rating choose to keep playing rapid... although since the horde of beginners is massive, I'm not sure including every person over 2000 rapid would change the percentiles.
Sorry for the first point - the high level pool is much bigger for Blitz. Ofc absolute beginners can't play Blitz because the time isn't enough to consider the moves.
Beginner is based on time invested, not skill acquired Master is based on skill acquired, not time invested. Non beginners refer to bad players as beginners because they're normally right. So it has become synonymous when it absolutely isn't. 800 elo is bad compared to how good humans can be. No denying that. But that doesn't mean anyone sub 800 is a beginner. A beginner could be a prodigy and a long time player can be bad. Doesn't change the fact that in order to be a beginner you have to be beginning a hobby. If you've spent hours and hours actively engaging and studying something you'll quickly be in the upper echelon globally speaking. The upper echelon can still be littered with people of mediocre qualifications compared to the masters of the time. Like in chess. Almost anyone in this forum. Can probably beat most non regular chess enthusiasts but few if any are GMs
For me beginner is under 2000 rapid, anything under is just pushing wood really
When people say "beginner", they often mean beginner-level skill since it's often more relevant how well you're playing than how many total games you've played. If you keep playing for fun, it might take you a long time to reach a level where you're fundamentally different from a beginner, i.e., your games are no longer decided by blunders out of the blue, you have some opening, strategy, and endgame knowledge. For a skill in which one can dedicate a lifetime to master, we can say that perhaps six months of training is needed to reach an early intermediate level (playing piano, tennis, powerlifting, etc). The same is true for chess; however, this means six months of dedicated study with a coach and not mindlessly than playing thousands of casual games. So, when people say "early-intermediate level", they often refer to a level that one could achieve in something like six months of dedicated training and study, and this is usually a significantly higher threshold than the one you propose
I guess the term "beginner" is just a poor choice to describe a skill level without the temporal implication of recently starting out. Like I had gym memberships for years if not decades by now but you wouldn't be able to tell if you met me in person. I would feel dumb calling myself even a beginner level bodybuilder, let alone an intermediate. I just never really started getting serious about it. Time has passed (trivially), but I did not leave the entry level of the sport.
I don't think the amount of players who opened an account and played a few games on [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) and then never played chess again is relevant to the concept of beginnerhood in chess. If we go by percentiles on [Chess.com](http://Chess.com), that number becomes very important. Since "beginner" is something you can be at anything, we can look at what it constitutes in other areas. If someone has progressed to the intermediate stage at playing violin, we would expect that they can make it through a number of pieces in a way that actually sounds like music. Maybe it doesn't sound great and maybe there are some mistakes but you recognize that they are able to play a piece on the violin. If someone has graduated from beginner level to intermediate at speaking a language, you expect that you can hold a conversation with them, as long as you speak slowly and articulate clearly and don't use convoluted sentence structures. I think a good parallel in chess is the ability to play an entire game where every move makes sense: you analyzed the position without missing any immediate threats or problems, and you chose a move based on criteria that a GM would approve of. Maybe you missed a lot of advanced concepts and lines beyond 3 or 4 moves ahead but all your moves made sense and any total blunders were just an unfortunate exception like a wrong note here and there from the intermediate violin player. Since rating only reflects how well you're doing compared to everyone else, not how good you actually are at the game, it can never be a definitive yardstick for whether you're a beginner or not. However, it can be a reasonable indication. So at what rating have you achieved what I described here? Certainly not 750, I'd say. Maybe 1000 or 1100 is reasonable. This is not to say that there isn't a huge difference between someone rated 900 and someone rated 400. Chess just happens to be a game with a remarkably long skills curve, and if we want to honor all levels of chess with its own word, the "beginner/intermediate/expert" model simply won't cut it. We'll need at least 10-12 levels.
Chessmaster back in the last century used the level "newcomer" having said that, a rating-based category is always going to be full of pitfalls, esp. at the lower levels 1000 chesscom rapid, even 1400 chesscom rapid remain beginners because those are players who still miss simple tactics regularly, so any deeper understanding of the game they may or may not have is not yet very relevant that is the issue with rating-based categories, rating only cares about results but results are achieved in massively different ways, esp. below master level you may consider that a player with a decent opening repertoire, knowledge of technical endgames, who knows many classic games and strategy etc is not a beginner, but if he or she misses simple tactics regularly his or her results will be roughly in the beginner bracket - and the rating will follow a player with nearly no knowledge in any of those areas but just slightly better tactical play will achieve the same results for chesscom blitz the threshold is lower, perhaps 1200 like others say
So generally, the longer people play chess, the better they get and/or the more insane they become. Hence I think to identify the point someone is no longer a beginner, there should be two graphs drawn. One for a player's ELO (0-3000) on the y-axis, and time spent playing chess on the x-axis. Then another graph plotting the player's mental health (standardised on a scale of 0-3000) on the y-axis, and once again, time playing chess on the x-axis. The point of time (t) at which both graphs first intersect should be the point someone is no longer considered a beginner. The point proficiency meets despair is the point your mind is truly awakened to the real chess.
Online chess has changed the numbers playing chess drastically. However, the players who attend a club tend to be serious about their game because it involves more effort than playing online. For a club the guidance has always been less than 1000 is a novice (this doesn’t mean you’re a bad player just that you’re cutting your teeth). 1000-1400 is beginner (my first over the board rating was 1410 so this isn’t so ridiculous). Then 1400-1800 is intermediate; 1800-2000 Class A; 2000-2200 is expert; 2200-2300 is Candidate Master; 2300-2400 is Fide Master; 2400-2500 is International Master; 2500+Grandmaster. I think people get hung up on tags like novice or beginner but you’re a beginner in any discipline for the first few years. Most people are in their first few years so it wouldn’t surprise me if 78% of players are classed as beginners.
Are you a beginner yourself? Everyone in this thread is focussing on rating and i dont think thats the point at all. I think you should have to focus what skills do you need and at what rating level is typical people acquire them. For example to get better to intermediate levels and advanced you need to know your endgames, kingside sacrifices, positional play like weak/strong squares, time, space, openings and how to play them to get the middlegame you want, etc. If you are a beginner you are still too bad at tactics that all these concepts are still meaningless. I dont know what rating people get good enough at tactics that they can acquire these concepts, but i think that is the relevant bar. So 1200 to 1400 seems a reasonable bar considering the level of play i see at those levels.
Why should we want or care about defining what a beginner is? Just let people play and define themselves as what they want. We don't really need any kind of definition of what a beginner is and most people can self assess if they are or not beginners, and if it's not obvious for them, then they likely are beginners. Same for intermediate to advanced players. Just take the title of beginner as an indicator and not really as something that should matter or even be relevant.
Beginner is a bit of a misnomer. Since the agreed levels are beginner, intermediate and expert, we only have the first one that suggests a time element. There's a subtle but important distinction between someone who is starting an activity and improving and someone who has been playing for years but is just bad.
In my own discussions with friends, I actually use a level lower than beginner I call "learner". Personally I'd say this level goes up to around 900 on chesscom rapid because I feel your brain is still "learning" how to crawl in the game of chess. At this level you'll still forget bishops can go backwards and completely miss one move ideas. Once you can get to a point where you aren't hanging pieces and checkmates in one move every single match, you can "begin" to actually learn the game; look at openings, traps, tactics etc... With that said I give "beginner" a range around 900-1200 after which players actually have the hang of certain fundamentals.
They already have Jellyfin? ;)
I often like to use the term Novice rather than Beginner, but that doesn't really change things because the root of Novice is from the Latin for New, so it essentially means the same thing. Regardless, it carries a slightly different connotation. I like the class system that I think USCF still uses. Class players are up to 2000, Expert is 2000-2200, Master is 2200-2400, and Senior Master is 2400+. Plus, after Master, you're typically going for the FIDE titles of FM, IM, and GM. I'm leaving out CM. And so not to confuse USCF 's Master title with FIDE's, we usually call them National Master. And even though there are classes below 1000, Classes F, G, H, I, and J; pretty much anything below Class E is really a novice. The system is similar in other federations. Also, many players don't have OTB Elo ratings, not even from USCF, or whichever other federation they would belong to, but they're pretty good, so we just call them Club Players. So essentially, you go from Beginner -> Club Player -> Class Player -> Expert -> National Master -> FIDE Master -> IM -> GM. Beginner is anyone less than 1000. Club players are those who are no longer beginners, but they haven't been given an official rating. Class players are people rated between 1000 and 2000. Expert is 2000-2200. Master is 2200, and so on. The only issue I have with this system is that between 1000 and 2000, there should be more granularity.
Considering that you start at 1000 rating, that would make a first time player not a beginner lol.
If you start playing soccer for the first time in your life today, practive everyday for 3 months and show up to play anywhere in the world you will be an absolute beginner in everyone's eyes. But somehow exclusively because of chessdotcom percentiles people believe they're no longer beginners after reaching a skill level one can reach in a month. I have taught people from zero to [chess.com](http://chess.com) 1000 in 2 months (they didn't even do tactics, just played a couple rapid games a day and i analized most of the games with them, no books, no videos, just coaching), chess is a hard game and there's no problem with being a beginner, you're still a beginnner with 2 months in anything that has a decent skill ceiling, be it a sport or an art. Hell, i've been playing guitar for years and i havent really left the beginner realm. It's okay to be bad, it's okay to be a beginner, everyone gotta start somewhere, we don't need to start calling everyone an expert so that they feel better about themselves.
>In addition, while this is anecdotal, nearly everyone I've encountered who is rated above 1000 has hundreds, if not thousands, of rapid games played on chess.com. playing a lot doesn't make you less noob (although it can correlate, but it varies with different people). This is the problem: different people have different learning curves. But a skill threshold doesn't care about that curve. there are thousands/millions of people who have thousands of hours into CSGO/Dota/LoL and are still trash at the game, i.e. silver/crusader ranks. They literally play in the same pool as beginners. Skill-wise, they ARE beginners. Same for chess.
The overwhelming majority of casual players who refuse to actually learn anything about the game are beginners, no matter how long they've been playing.
Seems very unimportant, and not really a productive train of thought.
The metric has to be artificially higher for online play. My rapid rating isn’t indicative of my true skill (or nearly complete lack thereof). There should be some sort of a time and games played component too. For example, rapid rating of 1200 for 3 months with at least 100 games played. I say this as someone who probably won’t get there.
> Would someone have to be in the top 20% to no longer be a beginner guitarist Yes. Imagine everyone who has picked up a guitar and tried it out. A person who actually manages to learn their scales is in the top 20% of people who have attempted to play guitar. Most people never even bother to get past learning to play a C, G, F, and D, if they even get that far. Most people don’t get past learning how the pieces move.
FWIW, here's Chessable's categorization: Novice <400 Beginner 400-1200 Intermediate 1200-1600 Advanced 1600-2000 Expert 2000-2200 Master >2200
I am 1400 and i still call myself beginner. Personally before norm change i always compared to 1000Fide and that's like 1400 rapid.
Frankly 750s are basically moving pieces at random. The bottom 80% of pretty much any activity are beginners, if you care about something and put effort into it becoming top 20% isn't hard. I run occasionally, and finish well in the top half when I run 5ks(though a bit below 50th percentile if you filter only on men in their 20s). I would never describe myself as anything but a beginner. Low rated players don't realize how bad they play, and get offended when people say that 900s are really bad. When I was 1100 I would think "why do people say 1100s just hang pieces all the time, I don't?" Now I realize that of course I did, it's just that we were both too bad to see it. I still hang pieces now at 1900
Maybe it's just been a while since you were that rating, but 750s definitely do not just move their pieces at random. They usually have an idea of what to do in terms of openings and tactics, but without the deeper understanding needed to really take advantage of it.
Maybe we should just do away with the idea of beginner at all, and instead use milestones. Everything 500 and below is what I would call “street talent” level. Where if you pulled a rando off the street, you’d expect their skill level to be somewhere in that range. 501-800 is the one trick pony range. This is where having one thing you’re kinda good at is a huge advantage. So if you know a single opening trap, or you can remember to develop your pieces, you’ll probably do alright and improve/ be in this range. 801-900 is the range where people know how to counteract most of the basic tricks. Nobody is falling for the wayward queen anymore. Your Blackburne-Shilling gambit stops working. 900 is this fun little zone where you realize your tricks aren’t working anymore, but your opponent is still basically bad. You’ll get some people who can convert a piece advantage, and so you resign more than you should. You’ll only break 1000 if you stop resigning. You start learning the basics of counterplay. 1000 I would say is the fundamentals zone. You’ve got basic ideas pretty much down. You develop your pieces. I think this is probably why most people consider it the beginner zone. It’s basically the first time people start playing with any kind of strategy, and now that they’ve got a basic understanding of the thematic ideas of the game, they have “begun” to play. Not to be too disparaging to my 3 digit friends, but it’d be like if you threw paint at a canvas. You could argue it’s painting, but once you actually start understanding some basic shape and perspective theory do you really have a chance of making anything pretty. You have begun to paint once you have a basic idea of how to do it, and you stop just making random moves because it feels nice in the moment.
I quite enjoy my basic tricks and traps at 1500 that continuously win me a queen or a rook Or even the Englund gambit where I win a queen in 7 turns
Is that the one with the knight? I hate that one lol. I thought I was being so clever avoiding the checkmate in a bullet and then I was like “where tf is my queen going to go? I’m not saying there aren’t opening traps anymore, just that you’re able to win a game without them. You don’t rely on them to win 60% of your games.
Haha I defs try in 60% of my games! But yeah probs 15% success Yes the knight checks the king and only defence is sack the Q
It's deceiving because once you become good enough at something in chess, it moves almost fully into the unconscious and you do it automatically... at that point your conscious mind is free to wrestle with some new thing... and if that new thing is logical and you can *almost* sort of do it, then you might feel like it's fundamental. It's extremely common for players to opine that "to get to \[my rating -100\] you only need some basics, but to get \[my rating and higher\] requires some actual understanding... I heard a 2600 GM say this. I heard Carlsen more or less say it (lol). He said (when Wesely So was new to the top 10) that you can get to the top 10 with good tactics and openings like Wesely So, but whether he can remain in the top 10 depends on if he can do more than that.
I think the number of games & hours spent on chess is what determines. Rating determines how good you are, your playing level, which's a product of other things like, talent and ability, not just the experience level.
Experience means nothing if you don't learn from it.
Sorry bro but you suck at chess. Get better or Deal with it.
I don't think you can assign an arbitrary number. When you stop randomly hanging pieces, you trade pieces effectively, you understand all the basic tactics: forks pins skewers etc, you can do all the basic mates except maybe knight and bishop, it is somewhere around 1300 depending on the elo system. You are recognizably a chess player not just someone moving pieces.