Do you want to know what a good chess rating is? Use my chess rating percentile calculator to find out how your chess rating compares to the average chess rating and distribution. And I have some rating percentile graphs too. Let’s do it!
Chess rating percentile calculator
Use this chess rating percentile calculator to find out in which percentile of chess players you fall. It’s based on the chess rating of Chess.com. It gives you a rough estimation, but it’s only accurate if you’re in the elo range between 200 and 1900.
Tip: We polled and found the 5 Best Chess Books for Beginners to improve your chess rating fast.
Chess rating percentile graph
The chess rating percentile graph below is from the online chess website Lichess. It shows that chess ratings are normally distributed with a fat tail on the low rating side and a long tail on the high rating side.
Also read: Best Chess Books: Top Picks for Every Skill Level
Chess rating percentile table
The table below shows chess rating percentiles for Chess.com, Lichess, FIDE and USFC ratings.
| Chess rating (elo) | Chess.com percentile | FIDE percentile | Lichess percentile | USFC percentile |
| 2000 to 2099 | 98% | 90% | 99% | 96% |
| 1900 to 1999 | 96% | 84% | 99% | 94% |
| 1800 to 1899 | 94% | 77% | 98% | 91% |
| 1700 to 1799 | 90% | 70% | 96% | 87% |
| 1600 to 1699 | 84% | 61% | 94% | 82% |
| 1500 to 1599 | 77% | 52% | 90% | 77% |
| 1400 to 1499 | 70% | 47% | 84% | 72% |
| 1300 to 1399 | 61% | 42% | 77% | 67% |
| 1200 to 1299 | 52% | 37% | 70% | 62% |
| 1100 to 1199 | 47% | 25% | 61% | 57% |
| 1000 to 1099 | 42% | 15% | 52% | 52% |
| 900 to 999 | 37% | 7% | 47% | 48% |
| 800 to 899 | 25% | 3% | 42% | 43% |
| 700 to 799 | 15% | 1% | 37% | 37% |
| 600 to 699 | 7% | 1% | 25% | 31% |
What is a good chess rating?
If all this math is a bit much for you and you still want to know what a good chess rating is, I have the following answer for you.
Hikaru Nakamura (the second best chess player in the world after Magnus Carlsen) says that 1200 is a good chess rating for beginners in chess. In the video below he recommends this goal to someone who is 30 and just started chess.
1200 is a good chess rating because it’s far higher than beginners, but still attainable for casual players. He also explains that the overall level in chess is now much higher than when he started because everybody uses artificial intelligence engines to learn much faster. So 1200 chess rating now is much higher level than 10 years ago.