The chess.com grade that is given is not ELO or ECF, it is a hybrid that they use based on the games you play. I notice some players do have an ECF grade at the bottom of their stats page on chess.com, I'm not sure at the moment how they get that.

When new players come on to the LMS, it starts them off at 1800, it is a ridiculously high starting point, designed in originally as they thought they were going to be dealing with players of elite standard, so they had that as the default. But it is, for our purposes, far too high.

It seems that out of all of our grades, I am the only person in our club (currently) who has had an ECF grade previously. (I have searched up Alan B by the way, but it is not showing anything for him previously.... perhaps he may be able to dig something out?) So we should be able to use me as a bit of a guide to all of our ability.

Based on my previous ECF rating when I was last playing competitively a few years ago, 1293 in July 2022. As a rough rule of thumb it is believed that for every year out of playing competitively, you should reduce the previous grade by 1% per year which would put me at 1267. So if you want to use me as a reference, you can start to estimate what your grading is. My chess.com by the way is 1156 which again, they have their own rating system and it is not directly equivalent with ELO so I think we can say this seems to hold true as well.

So let's put this to the test, just for the sake of argument, I'll include a sample of players for no particular reason other than demonstration:

Tom chess.com (daily) 1156 ECF LMS 1868

Jason Dilley (honorary member of BCC extremely high standard player)

chess.com (blitz) 2108 (rapid) 2099 (std) 2149 LMS 2040 (rapid)

Peter Weinberger (player I used to beat a few years ago)

chess.com (daily) 1283 ECF grade on chess,com 1488 (looks like he has improved beyond me over the last few years)

Peter Walker ( very high rated club player a few yrs ago, used to beat me easily)

LMS 1923 (this is an extremely reliable grade to make note of, as this is a regular club chess player who has played competitively for many years and I would say this grade of 1923 is very accurate) Note the difference on LMS of Peter Walker and Jason Dilley - this is how good these two players are.

Paul Spencer (player I used to have great, close games with many years ago)

LMS 1766 chess.com (daily) 1914 ECF on chess.com 1774 (so here we have an extremely clear example of how utterly crazy it is for me to have an LMS of 1868. This chap, a far superior player to me, has clearly improved markedly in the years that I was not playing, has a daily rating on chess.com of 1914 compared to my 1156.

So you could say, that until our LMS gradings start to get more realistic, it might prove more accurate to pay attention to our chess.com ratings.

Now let me add a few of ours, just to demonstrate how inaccurate they are:

Matt 1948 on LMS (which would suggest being better than Peter Walker and marginally lower than Jason Dilley.....utterly crazy) and 822 (daily) on chess.com

Ben 1307 on LMS and 1222 (daily) on chess.com

Peter Berry (Alan B as we know him), 1541 on LMS which would tend to suggest he would comfortably beat Ben

As you can see (I hope), it is a mess. At this early stage it is a mess anyway. So I suggest we don't really pay too much attention to grades on the LMS. As I say, I think a more reliable one would be the grades on chess.com (if the player plays regularly on it).

I hope that helps everyone a little bit - please, none of the examples above are intended to insinuate any judgement on anyone on my part, far from it actually, merely just giving us all a rough idea of where we all individually are. Hopefully, each of you reading this, can look up these details on here and compare yourself to any of those shown to give you a better idea of where you are.

If you have any comments/questions, please add them below....

Bourne Chess Club

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