Virtual FIDE: from Lichess and Chess.com to a comparable Elo
Nexa chess estimates a FIDE-style Elo from your platform rating by time control. It is not an official FIDE rating — it is a benchmark calibrated with public tables and articles (ChessGoals, pngbase.com and other research) to guide training. All research sources are listed below.
Simulator by platform and time control
Same conversion the dashboard uses. Pick an app and time control, enter your rating, and press Calculate.
Enter your rating and press Calculate.
Lichess / Chess.com → virtual FIDE curves (ChessGoals)
Each curve maps that platform and time-control rating to virtual FIDE (same interpolation as the product). Example: Lichess Blitz 2100 → ~1925 virtual FIDE. Toggle time controls to compare.
Tables embedded in Nexa chess from ChessGoals (July 2025). ChessGoals publishes periodic updates; the app uses the code-pinned snapshot so metrics stay stable.
How Nexa chess picks the anchor time control
If you have imported games, we use the time control with the most volume (blitz, rapid or classical) among those with a valid FIDE conversion. On a tie, we prefer rapid > classical > blitz.
With no imported volume, the fallback order is blitz → rapid → classical. On Chess.com, the dashboard “Classical” column is Daily (correspondence) and does not anchor profile virtual FIDE.
What virtual FIDE is not
It is not a rating on ratings.fide.com, nor the World Chess/FIDE pilot for earning a first OTB rating online. It is a training heuristic, like Stockfish phase Elo.
More detail in the virtual FIDE FAQ.
Low online ratings
Public tables (e.g. ChessGoals) mainly publish FIDE equivalents from a certain online rating upward — on Chess.com, blitz from ~1000 and rapid from ~1230. Below that threshold we extend the first calibrated step so the dashboard can still show a rough virtual FIDE.
Sources and further reading
- ChessGoals — Rating Comparison
Primary source for our tables (July 2025 snapshot). Compares Chess.com, Lichess, USCF and FIDE across thousands of active profiles.
- pngbase.com — rating tables and comparisons
Public tables and comparison material between platform ratings and FIDE / OTB. Complements ChessGoals and other studies.
- Chess.com — What Is My FIDE Rating? (~50,000 profiles)
Study with officially matched profiles. Useful for uncertainty bands and the finding that Rapid looks closer to FIDE in scale, while Blitz predicted with lower error in their sample.
- World Chess / FIDE — white paper (online → OTB pilot)
A different official proposal: cautious conversion into OTB Rapid/Blitz with an ~1800 ceiling. Not what Nexa chess uses; we cite it to contrast approaches.