Your child came home with a number and you have no idea whether it is good. Here is what it means, without the jargon.
A rating is not a score out of anything. It is a prediction: it estimates how likely one player is to beat another. A 200-point gap means the stronger player is expected to win roughly three games in four. That is all it is — a comparison, not a mark.
Beat someone rated higher and you gain a lot; beat someone lower and you gain very little. Lose to someone lower and you drop sharply. The system is self-correcting: if a rating is too low, the player wins more than expected and it rises quickly. This is why a new player's rating swings wildly for the first thirty games and then settles.
Below 800 is a beginner still learning patterns. 800–1200 is a club player who knows the rules and some tactics. 1200–1600 is a strong club player. 1600–2000 is genuinely good — better than almost everyone they will ever meet socially. Above 2000 is expert territory, and titles start around 2200.
They are separate systems that do not talk to each other, and they use different starting points and different pools. A 1500 online rating and a 1500 national rating are not the same achievement, and neither is more 'real' — they measure performance within their own population.
It depends far more on how long they have played than how old they are. A useful benchmark: after a year of regular club play, most children land somewhere between 600 and 1000. After three years, 1000 to 1400 is common for a child who plays weekly. Anything above that is genuinely strong for their age.
Ratings go down. This is not failure — it is the system correcting an estimate that was too high, usually after a lucky run. A rating that only ever rises is a rating that is not being tested. The number to watch is the trend across six months, not the movement after one tournament.
Ask what they learned, not what they scored. A child whose self-worth is attached to a rating will quit chess within two years — this is the single most common way promising young players are lost. The rating is feedback on the last ten games, not a judgment of the person.
Whether they are still playing in a year. Every strong adult player was once a child who kept turning up. Enjoyment predicts long-term rating better than early rating does.
After a year of weekly play, 600–1000 is typical. After three years, 1000–1400. Time played matters far more than age.
Almost certainly they beat lower-rated opponents and lost to someone lower-rated too. Losing to a much weaker opponent costs far more than beating one gains.
They measure real performance within that site's player pool. They are not directly comparable to national ratings, but they are not fake.
No. Focus on whether they are enjoying it and still playing in a year. Rating follows enjoyment, not the other way round.
Everything above is the practical layer — the part that decides whether a club survives, whether a child keeps playing, and whether a coaching business pays. It is also the part almost nobody writes about, because it is less interesting than opening theory and far more useful.
If you are teaching, the two things that move the needle fastest are structure and measurement: a session that has the same shape every week, and a number each student can watch go up. Neither requires you to be a strong player. Both require you to be organised, and organisation is the thing you can actually control.
The rest of this Library covers the chess itself — twenty-one openings written from both sides, seven complete guides to tactics, endgames, checkmate patterns and strategy, and twenty variants with a guide each. All of it is free, and all of it is playable on a live board, which matters more than reading it.
Grandmaster Gains gives coaches a private classroom — your roster, your students, their ratings, and a dashboard showing who actually practised between sessions.
♔ See the trainer classroom197 interactive lessons, 20 variants and a full engine, free in the browser with no sign-up. Open the Academy or browse the complete guides.