ELO ratings start at 600 for absolute beginner.
With a good amount of effort, a dedicated amateur can reach ~1500 without too much difficulty, and at that level you'll beat any casual player. 2000 is international standard. Best human player is around 2700.
Note - chess.com does not use ELO ratings - they have their own rating system which is more complex (includes an uncertainty factor based on how recently you have played), but is supposed to be roughly equivalent.
The author of the article is playing blitz chess (3 minutes a game) rather than standard chess, so the ratings are largely irrelevant to standard levels.
> With a good amount of effort, a dedicated amateur can reach ~1500 without too much difficulty
I read that kind of argument all over the place in the chess community, and that really strikes me as some kind of misplaced elitism.
ELO can be seen as a glorified indicator of where you stand in the distribution of a pool of players. Math aside, the ELO is a system that allows for the distribution of scores to evolve incrementally as matches are played.
All in all, if you want to interpret an ELO, you can always refer to the corresponding centile.
With an ELO of 1500 you are in the ~80 percentile of your pool (USCF). That places you as better than 80% of players (that are doing tournaments).
This requires a lot of work, and you would definitely not be a "regular amateur player".
The center of the distribution should be around 1200 ELO at the 50th centile.
Imagine what that would mean to be in the top 20% of all basket ball players that play tournaments.
I bet 2 years of daily effort and study would get most people to 1500.
How many people play for years without actual dedication, or join tournaments before they're at the 1500 level, or quit when they keep losing a lot to higher level people in tournaments, or whatever?
My definition of "dedicated" probably removes at least 50+% of the pool right away.
