Use rated games to be matched with real players. After a few games that you will lose you will be matched with players against which you have roughly a 50:50 chance of winning / losing. Don’t focus on the ELO rating specifically at the start. Playing against humans is definitely different from the computer. In the lower ELO ranges you will see a lot of moves that don’t make sense and that the chess engine would never play. On the other hand opponents can be quite good at reading your strategy (as opposed to a dumbed-down engine).

Use the Analyse game function after the game to get an idea of the mistakes you made.

I would start with 10 minute games so that you can play a few games in a row (gives you more practice) but still have time to think.

It kind of seems they stole a decade off of Lasker.

oops, was already posted… Doesn’t the UI give a hint for that? I’ll look twice next time.

Not sure I understand everything, although I think I understand that an influx of new players can totally skew statistics.

It’s worth noting that this is about ELO ratings, so lichess may have a similar problem (I think it might be the case for Blitz on Lichess to suffer from a similar problem), but some of the proposed fixes are FIDE ELO specific (increasing starting ELO).

The problem seems to be that the ELO ratings aren’t accurate to estimate the correct probabilities for a match between a long-time chess player with higher ELO rating and a player from the “Queen’s gambit wave”.

Now the authors seem to paint this as a problem with the new players being underrated, the ELO distribution to be skewed. I agree that this can be a skew, I wonder however if the solution should be to boost ELO ratings of lower-ranked players.

• Overall the best fix would IMHO be to bring together higher-ELO with lower-ELO players in matches in order to allow the ELO distribution to move ELO points down from the upper end, so that the ELO numbers again match the winning-probabilities between two players. I guess there is hesitance to do that because it means the old-guys might lose rating points and people are naturally protective in this regard.
• bumping ELO points would lead to an inflation in ELO rating overall, it does not fix the root cause.

I am playing on Lichess and just dropped from 700-800 range where I frequently played >800 ELO numbers back to the 600 range and in some way its also true there. I dropped down on an evening where I probably should have just stopped playing and so now I have to make my way up very concentrated against players that objectively don’t develop their pieces well but somehow manage to make renegade moves that are challenging to counter…