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You might not ever get titled, but a 1400 online is very much good enough to join your national chess federation and be middle of the pack competitive in local rated chess tournaments and the like.

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I feel weird doing a 'well actually' in a post about something so serious and sad, but it might be worth pointing this out to prevent someone from getting the wrong idea about their chess strength: the meaning of '1400 online' varies greatly depending on the site and the time control. According to https://chessgoals.com/rating-comparison/, Chesscom blitz 500 = Lichess classical 1400, and chesscom blitz 1400 = lichess rapid 1880. (I don't know how accurate that site is, but the general point is definitely true; AFAIK Lichess and Chesscom use different rating systems with different means, and within each site the strength of the player pool varies across the time controls.)

Lichess defaults starting rating to 1400 I think so it's about -200 less than chess.com, which defaults to 1200.

Also the player pool for the latter is much larger. Not sure if that has an impact on elo which is basically normalized across playerbase

1500

Well, it is lichess and online (as I'm sure you're aware) is a very different kettle of fish than OTB.

But thank you for your kindness.

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