What's a Good Accuracy Score on Chess.com? (Broken Down by Rating)

You finish a game, run the review, and the first thing your eye lands on is a percentage: 84.2% for you, 79.1% for your opponent. It feels like a report card. So the obvious question is — is that good? And what number should you be aiming for?

The honest answer is more useful than a single threshold: accuracy means less than it looks like, it depends heavily on your rating and the kind of game you played, and treating it as a target can actively make you a worse player. Here's how to read it properly.

What does accuracy actually measure?#

Accuracy is a percentage that summarizes how close your moves were to the engine's preferred moves across a whole game — but weighted by how much each move affected your chances of winning (Chess.com Help Center). A single dumb move in a sharp position tanks it; a dozen slightly-imperfect moves in a quiet position barely register.

That weighting is the key thing. Accuracy isn't "what percent of your moves were best." It's built on the same Expected Points model behind the Brilliant/Blunder labels — how much your win probability moved with each decision. A move that's technically the third choice but changes nothing costs you almost no accuracy. A move that flips the game costs you a lot.

So it's a real signal, but a narrow one. It tells you roughly how clean a specific game was against an engine's standard. It does not tell you how well you understood the position, and it definitely isn't a measure of your ability.

What's a good accuracy score on Chess.com?#

For a general benchmark, most players treat 80% as a solid, clean game. Around 85% is a very good game, and 90%+ means you played close to flawlessly — most of your moves were the engine's top pick and you didn't hand anything back.

But "good" is relative to the game. A calm, symmetrical game where nothing happened can score 90% without you making a single interesting decision. A double-edged tactical slugfest where you correctly navigated three sacrifices might land at 78% — and be a far better game of chess. High accuracy in a boring position is easy; moderate accuracy in a chaotic one can be genuinely impressive. Never compare the number across two different types of games and think it means much.

What accuracy should you have for your rating?#

People constantly ask what accuracy corresponds to their level. Based on widely-reported player data, the rough averages look like this:

• 1000–1499: around 70–80%
• 1500–1999: around 80–85%
• 2000–2499: around 82–87%

Two things jump out. First, the numbers climb slowly — a 1000-point rating gap might be 10–12 accuracy points, not 40. Second, the ranges overlap heavily. A strong 1400 can out-accuracy a 1900 in a given game. That's exactly why you can't reverse-engineer someone's rating from their accuracy, and why accuracy makes a terrible measuring stick for your own progress. Your rating already does that job far better.

Why the number lies to you constantly#

Accuracy is distorted by things that have nothing to do with how well you played. Two big ones:

Game length. Short games swing to extremes — win a 20-move miniature cleanly and you'll post a high number because there were few chances to slip. Longer games tend to drift down toward the low 80s, because you rack up plenty of "good" and "excellent" moves that aren't quite "best," and each one shaves a little off. A 90% in a 22-move game and an 82% in a 60-move game can represent identical skill.

Winning positions. Once you're clearly ahead, the engine's idea of "accurate" is the fastest forced win. But a sensible human often plays the safe consolidating move that avoids counterplay instead of the flashiest mating net. The engine dings you for it even though it's the wiser practical choice. So paradoxically, playing safely to convert a won game can lower your accuracy. This is the same tension behind why you sometimes throw away winning positions — and it means a lower accuracy in a won game isn't necessarily a mistake.

Should you try to raise your accuracy score?#

Here's the trap. Once people fixate on the percentage, they start playing to please the engine rather than to understand the position — avoiding sharp lines they can't calculate, memorizing "accurate" moves, and treating a high number as the goal of the game.

That's backwards. Accuracy is an output, not an input. You can't play "for accuracy" any more than you can drive "for miles per gallon" — you control the inputs, and the number follows. The inputs that matter are the ones every improvement guide comes back to: stop hanging pieces, check your opponent's threats before you move, and don't rush in critical moments. Do those, and your accuracy climbs on its own — while your rating, which is the number that actually matters, climbs with it.

There's also a subtler cost. Fixating on a clean percentage makes review passive. You admire the 88%, note the one blunder, and close the tab — never doing the active work that actually teaches you anything.

A better way to use your review#

Accuracy is fine as a five-second gut check: did this game go roughly to plan, or did it fall apart? Beyond that, it's the least useful thing in the report. The useful parts are the specific moments the game turned — your Blunders and, especially, your Misses.

Instead of reading the score and the verdicts, go back to your worst two or three moments and re-solve them yourself: cover the answer, decide what you'd play, then check. That "predict, then verify" loop is the whole reason we built ChessSolve as an active alternative to Game Review — it puts live Stockfish arrows on the board so you generate the move before the engine shows you, instead of reading a percentage and nodding. The score tells you how the game went. Working the positions yourself is what makes the next one go better.

So — what's a good accuracy score on Chess.com? Above 80% is clean, 85% is very good, 90% is near-flawless, and all of that shifts with your rating and the game you played. But the more important truth is that accuracy is a loose summary, not a scoreboard for your skill, and aiming at it makes you worse, not better. Read it in five seconds, then spend your real energy on the moves that decided the game.

Want to review those moments actively, with engine arrows on the board instead of a number in a sidebar? Download ChessSolve — free, works on Chess.com and Lichess.