It turns out that watching GothamChess doesn't make me a chess player.
Thank you for that. It's mildly interesting analyzing the source of why I was so wrong:
As someone who aspired to be pro at Dota (but was never too skilled at it), my "competitive instincts" have been calibrated for games where you do indeed start at some baseline, even among competitive players, because you will quickly be balanced out to the proper ELO. For example, in HoN (precursor to Dota 2), 1700 was widely considered pro, whereas everyone started at a baseline of 1500. The noobs were quickly punted down to lower than that. (It could've even been 1300 and I'm misremembering, but the point is, the competitive scene was still balanced around 1500 as a baseline.)
Ditto for Dota 2, back when they had explicit MMRs. (MMR = ELO.) Nowadays they don't have MMR, they have ... tiers? ... since they realized that it kind of sucks having a community obsessing over what your actual number is, rather than what division/tier you're in. So they were like "Ok, congratulations, you've reached Immortal tier, you're now a pro."
Anyway, when there was MMR, it still started at some baseline. Because again, the noobs would quickly be punted down to where they belong. 5k was widely considered pro back in those days, back when 5k meant something. But MMR inflation meant that the benchmark then became 6k = pro, and eventually 7k was top tier (I think?), so this was already a de facto tier system.
Point is, saying "1,500 isn't the starting point" for chess, but yes of course it's roughly average among people who play Chess competitively. The competitive scene is all that matters. Me blatantly not reading the article was based around the assumption of "Of course this is referring to the competitive scene."
As I said, it's interesting just how wildly wrong those assumptions were. :)
It's also worth pointing out that now that the bar to entry for playing online Chess is so low, a lot more players are playing in some form of ranked competition. So the lower end is filling in with unskilled people who hardly ever would've "played ranked" in the pre-Web days.
It turns out that watching GothamChess doesn't make me a chess player.
Thank you for that. It's mildly interesting analyzing the source of why I was so wrong:
As someone who aspired to be pro at Dota (but was never too skilled at it), my "competitive instincts" have been calibrated for games where you do indeed start at some baseline, even among competitive players, because you will quickly be balanced out to the proper ELO. For example, in HoN (precursor to Dota 2), 1700 was widely considered pro, whereas everyone started at a baseline of 1500. The noobs were quickly punted down to lower than that. (It could've even been 1300 and I'm misremembering, but the point is, the competitive scene was still balanced around 1500 as a baseline.)
Ditto for Dota 2, back when they had explicit MMRs. (MMR = ELO.) Nowadays they don't have MMR, they have ... tiers? ... since they realized that it kind of sucks having a community obsessing over what your actual number is, rather than what division/tier you're in. So they were like "Ok, congratulations, you've reached Immortal tier, you're now a pro."
Anyway, when there was MMR, it still started at some baseline. Because again, the noobs would quickly be punted down to where they belong. 5k was widely considered pro back in those days, back when 5k meant something. But MMR inflation meant that the benchmark then became 6k = pro, and eventually 7k was top tier (I think?), so this was already a de facto tier system.
Point is, saying "1,500 isn't the starting point" for chess, but yes of course it's roughly average among people who play Chess competitively. The competitive scene is all that matters. Me blatantly not reading the article was based around the assumption of "Of course this is referring to the competitive scene."
As I said, it's interesting just how wildly wrong those assumptions were. :)