What's your winning percentage?

When I play chess, I'm always evaluating my play especially if/when I lose. After all, how are you ever going to improve if you keep making the same mistakes? After each game on Lichess, I run the Computer Analysis to identify my inaccuracies, mistakes, blunders, average centipawn loss and accuracy. Naturally, I want to ensure that I make a minimum amount of mistakes, and try to eliminate any blunders. More importantly, I want to ensure I don't make the same mistakes I've made in other games.

The other thing I keep my eye on is my 'winning percentage' over time. Why is this important? Because I want to make sure I'm playing the best competition I can. If I'm winning all the time, that means my competition isn't very good. And, if my competition isn't very good it's difficult to improve. Remember, you're only as good as your competition. That is, if you keep playing and beating someone that has a 1500 Elo rating, how do you know if you can beat anyone with a higher rating? You don't.

So, what should my winning percentage be in chess? From all the research I've done (on chess forums), it seems that the consensus is 50%- is a good winning percentage. If your winning percentage is 70%, it means you're playing inferior competition, and you should up your level of competition. Likewise, if you're only winning 30% of your games, it means your competition is superior, and you should downgrade your level of competition. I know some will disagree with me on this. But to those that disagree, let me ask you this. Why do you play chess? Assuming you're not a pro and do it for a living. Isn't it to have fun? That's why I play. And, I don't think it's fun getting my butt kicked by a superior player all the time. That's why I think if you find a competitor where you can split your games say 50-50, you found a good one.

How do you calculate your winning percentage? It's easy, with the following formula. So, if for example, I played a total of 204 games, and out of those games I win 104, lose 73 and draw/tie 27, my winning percentage would be 58%. Here's the math:

The total games played, however, are just comprised of games that I played against Stockfish 4, Stockfish 5, and Maia9 BOT. That is, they're at different levels of competition. Supposedly, Stockfish 4 plays to a 1600-1700 Elo rating, Stockfish 5 plays to an 1800-1900 Elo, and Mai9 plays to a 1700 Elo. BTW, these ratings are Lichess Stockfish ratings and not to be confused with FIDE or USCF ratings, which would be much lower. What would be a more realistic winning percentage, rather than group them into one, is to find the winning percentage of each. So, that's what I did and here are the results using the winning percentage formula: Stockfish 4 winning percentage 82%, Stockfish 5 winning percentage 24%, Maia9 winning percentage of 45%. So, what's this tell me? It tells me that I should be playing against Lichess Stockfish 5 more often than Stockfish 4 and that Maia9 is a good competitor. I pretty much knew that already but it's more fun winning than losing which is why I play more games against Stockfish 4 than Stockfish 5 and Maia9 combined. ha.

Want to get better? Play to your level of competition....or maybe even better.