So, where do you really rank among active players?

I like the feature on the USCF rating website which tells you where you rank among active players in America (active players are those who have had a rated game in the last year). However, the ranking is a little deceptive, since there are large numbers of junior players ranked below 1000. Naturally, one would probably want to compare oneself to adult players or at least reasonable chess players, no slight on underrated juniors intended. The discrepancy can be pretty great, since there were 46,000 active players, but 33,000 of them are juniors and those are mostly toward the low end of the spectrum. I was bored, so I did a little exercise. I picked a random junior player with a rating of around 1450. His overall ranking was in the 77th percentile and his junior ranking was in the 92nd percentile. Approx 11,000 out of 46,000 and 2700 out of 33,000 respectively.

Now, suppose you're an adult player of a similar rating and want to figure out how you compare to adult players only. It's a simple bit of math: (11,000-2700)/(46,000-33,000). This puts you at around the the 25th percentile, which is a lot worse than the 75th percentile, I tell you what. A better adjustment might be to disregard the juniors rated beneath you, but include the ones rated higher than you, so the equation becomes 11,000/(46,000-33,000+2700) which is again around the 25th percentile. I think this ranking is much more reasonable for an adult player of that rating.

Then again, I find low rankings and bitter defeats to be inspiring: I'll fight for a higher ranking and learn from my defeat. Some people don't get motivated by that, so they probably should not find out that, instead of being in the 80th percentile, they're really in the 30th. Me, I just like having another metric to track my progress and evaluate my performance.

EDIT: For instance, in this method, a 1700 rating only puts you at the median. I think that seems realistic. A 2000 rating puts you at only the 80th percentile of active adult players and a 2200 is about 95th - perhaps a little harsh. It might be a good idea to include all juniors above a threshold rating rather than just those higher rated than the test rating. Perhaps above 1300.

EDITED AGAIN: A junior rated 1200 will be ranked around 4900/33,000. I think that's a good point to start at. This would put somebody with a 2000 rating at around the 86th percentile of active players. I think that's still kind of surprising.