What is a good chess rating? It depends on your pool, and here's how to check yours

A 1200 on one site is not a 1200 on another. Lichess says it directly: "It is not useful to think of ratings as absolute numbers, or compare them against other organisations." Ratings are relative inside one pool. The same digits on Chess.com, on Lichess, and in a FIDE list are three different comparisons.

Last checked: September 25, 2026. This page does not print a percentile for 1000, 1200, 1500, or 2000. Those figures were not on the official pages opened that day. Read yours on your own Stats page instead of trusting a table that mixes sites.

Which site

Chess.com uses Glicko with a rating deviation. Lichess uses Glicko-2 and starts a new rating at 1500 ± 1000, which means the system is 95% sure the rating sits somewhere between 500 and 2500. FIDE publishes its own list at ratings.fide.com. None of these numbers transfer. The mechanics are in Chess.com vs Lichess rating.

Which time control

Bullet, blitz, rapid, and classical are separate ratings on both major sites. Lichess assigns the bucket from estimated duration: initial seconds plus 40 times the increment. A 5+3 game is 420 seconds, which Lichess calls blitz. Your rapid rating can sit far from your blitz rating without either one being "the real you."

Who you compare with

A percentile against active players is a different question from a comparison with everyone who ever created an account, and both differ from a club or a national federation. Ask which group the number uses before you decide the rating is good or bad.

On Chess.com, open your Stats page and pick the game type from the menu. Chess.com defines percentile as the percentage of Chess.com members with a rating equal to or lower than yours, for that game type. The help article (updated February 9, 2026) says you can see it when the account is at least 7 days old, you have played 20 games of that type with at least one in the past 90 days, and the account is activated. Closed accounts are excluded.

On Lichess, open the weekly distribution for the time control you play: rapid, blitz, bullet, or classical. Read the chart on the page. This guide does not copy a curve from it, because the logged-out page opened on September 25, 2026 did not expose a percentile table we could quote.

1. Pick one time control, the one you play when you care about the result.
2. On Chess.com, open Stats and note the percentile for that type only.
3. On Lichess, open that type's distribution and see where your rating sits this week.
4. Write the number next to the date. Check it again in a month, not after one loss.

There is no sourced percentile on this page for any of those numbers. What changes as the rating climbs is the kind of mistake that still decides games. Use the band notes as a skills checklist, then confirm the comparison on your own site.

Is 1000 a good chess rating?

At this range the games are usually decided by one-move oversights: a piece left loose, a check missed, an opening that never develops. The 1000 band notes describe those habits. Whether 1000 is "good" is the percentile for that site and time control, not a universal grade.

Is 1200 a good chess rating?

Players here often reach a real middlegame and then drop a piece or the clock. See what tends to stall players around 1200. A 1200 on Lichess, Chess.com, and FIDE are still three different levels. Check the percentile for that exact type.

Is 1500 a good chess rating?

There is no RookMentor page titled exactly 1500. The neighboring notes are 1400 and 1600. Around there, one opening and one conversion habit usually explain more than the raw number. Do not borrow a percentile from a blog that mixes FIDE with online ratings.

Is 2000 a good chess rating?

2000 is a serious online or over-the-board result in most pools, and it is still a pool-specific number. The closest band note on this site is 1800, which is about habits at that online range. It is not a conversion into a FIDE rating.

Early on, the trend matters more than the digits. Chess.com's Glicko article (updated February 10, 2026) says a new player's rating fluctuates a lot in the first games because the rating deviation is high. Inactivity raises that deviation again. Lichess says the same thing more sharply: a new rating starts at 1500 ± 1000, and early results can swing by hundreds of points. A rating is provisional on Lichess when the deviation is greater than 110.

Chess.com's help article does not state a starting rating. This page does not invent one. Judge a beginner's account by whether the rating climbs over months in one time control, not by a single week's number. How long improvement takes is about that trend, not a calendar.

Ask whether the rating is moving, and what keeps returning in the games. Two players can share a number and lose for different reasons: one on time, one in a single opening, one in games started right after a loss. The rating cannot tell those apart. A drop is covered in why you might be getting worse. The broader method is on how to get better at chess.

A drill

1. Write today's rating for your main time control, and the percentile if your site shows it.
2. Mark three losses from this week with one cause each: clock, a loose piece, the opening, or a game you started right after a loss.
3. In a month, compare the rating and the labels. Keep the label that still shows up.

Common mistakes

• Treating a Chess.com rating and a Lichess rating as the same scale.
• Calling the blitz number your real rating when you only take rapid seriously, or the reverse.
• Reading one bad night as a new level. New and inactive accounts swing more because the deviation is high.
• Quoting a "top percent" from a page that never says which pool or which date.