In recent months, I've been playing chess online at chess.com. I would classify myself as an adult beginner -- I never played seriously... ever, really, even now. I joined because a friend invited me to play a few games (we moved over from facebook chess, I forget why).

What surprises me is that I seem to be fairly good for having had no formal training or studying. I have run my rating up to 1900 or so (as evidenced by my profile). You start at 1200, and your rating fluctuates as you win or lose. Master level ratings start at about 2200.

One thing I wonder is how what my rating would be if I were playing live instead of online. For a variety of reasons, I think it would be much lower. It turns out there are significant differences between online and real life play.

Perhaps the biggest is the analysis board. The site provides an easy mechanism for moving pieces around on the board without actually making any moves. That means you can look five or six moves ahead without having to actually remember the board state changes. This makes analysis hugely easier for me. Presumably it also helps my opponents, but I don't know how much they take advantage of it, and the gape may be smaller for them if they actually have the skill of holding future positions in their heads.

There's also an opening book where you can go look at a database of master level games and see what the common moves are early in the game. This isn't as helpful as it sounds -- it basically means you never fall into opening traps, but unless you deliberately choose some weird fork, following a few rules in openings gets you a lot of the way through an opening you don't know: don't move a piece twice before you move another piece once; activate pieces doing nothing before improving pieces doing something; try to develop rooks (castling is good for this); try to control the center; don't move out your queen too early; and so on. But avoiding traps is definitely a good thing for someone who hasn't played much.

Also, all the games are played with tons and tons of time -- usually two or three days allowed per move. This means you can look at a position to your heart's content, which I rarely do, but never having time pressure is definitely a big deal. My time per move is always much lower than my opponents, but I think that's a function of always being near a computer (I play from my phone at the poker table, for instance) rather than analysis done.

And finally, I suspect people often don't take it very seriously. I see good players throw away pieces due to dumb moves pretty often. Presumably this happens in real life as well, but usually during a live chess game the players are concentrating on the game instead of glancing at it while reading email or whatever.

So which of those things constitutes skill in chess? Certainly being able to look ahead without an analysis board is; memorizing openings might be, but who wants to do that? I suspect I'm not going to find out. Playing much live chess requires big blocks of time I'd much rather spend playing poker or seeing friends, especially how hard big chunks of time are to come by these days.