r/chess Weekly Discussion Thread

https://x.com/GMHikaru/status/2110779407325372641?s=20

Every week someone asks "I'm 1500 on Lichess, what's that on Chess.com?". The usual answers are a self-reported survey or a guess.

I wanted the real numbers, so I started to think about how we can compare at scale. The answer was: find the same people, active on both site, playing their best on both sites, fingerprint their repertoire to make sure they are the same person.

EDIT: Updated dataviz' from redditer's feedbacks on the blog

TL;DR

• A blitz player rated 1500-1599 on Lichess is typically around 1160 on chesscom (about 390 points lower). In rapid, around 1230 (about 320 lower).
• The gap shrinks as you climb the ladder: about 480 points at 1300-1399, 310 at 1700, 40 at 2000. In blitz it closes around 2100 and flips above 2200, where people are about 85 points higher on Chess.com.
• Below 2000, the rapid gap is smaller than the blitz one (355 vs 455 points at 1400-1499).

How I did it

1. First pass: start from Lichess. I took about 30,000 active Lichess players from blitz and rapid arenas and looked for each of them on Chess.com. Banned accounts and players whose rating is still provisional (the "?" rating) are filtered out.
2. Second pass: start from Chess.com. The first pass only finds people whose main home is Lichess. So I went the other way too: I took everyone those players had met in their recent Chess.com games (about 147,000 players, active on Chess.com by definition) and looked for each of them on Lichess. About 27,000 had an account there. In the end, 43% of the active pairs came from this second pass, and it's what makes the second table (from Chess.com to Lichess) possible.
3. Finding the same person on the other site. Two ways: the profile links to the other account (that's a sure match), or the same username exists on the other site (that's only a guess, see step 5). Cross-check: if the account on the other site links to a different account, the pair is dropped. A player found by both passes counts once.
4. Only real, current ratings. A player counts only if they played more than 30 games in that time control in the last 6 months, on both sites. Blitz and rapid are handled separately: you can be in the blitz data and not in the rapid data. Your rating here is the average of your rating over your games of the last 6 months, not today's number, so one good or bad week doesn't move you.
5. Making sure a same-name account is really the same person. "magnus123" on Lichess isn't always "magnus123" on Chess.com. So I compared what each account plays in the opening: their first move with White, their answer to 1.e4, and their answer to 1.d4. People are creatures of habit, so the same person plays almost the same openings on both sites. Two strangers usually don't.
6. Setting the bar for "same openings". I measured how similar the openings are for pairs I know are the same person (the 119 profile links from step 3), and for random pairs of strangers with the same rating. Then I picked the cut-off that best separates the two: it keeps 88% of known twins and lets through only 8% of strangers (image 7). Separate cut-offs for players under 1200, 1200-1800 and over 1800 landed on the same value. 22% of same-username pairs failed the check and were dropped.
7. Result. 3,363 matched rating pairs: 2,276 in blitz, 1,087 in rapid (someone active in both time controls counts once in each). Image 6 shows how many were left after each step. For each 100-point band, I give the median rating on the other site (half the players are above, half below) and the range of the middle half of players.

All of this comes from two public APIs, and I want to say how good that is. chesscom gets a lot of criticism, but its public API needs no key, no account and no payment. Lichess is the same: open, free, no token needed for public data, and its whole database is open too.

• Collecting 30,000 Lichess players from arenas took about 40 minutes.
• On chesscom, checking accounts and downloading recent games took 96,087 requests over about 20 hours, with zero "slow down" errors (HTTP 429). I sent one request at a time.
• Lichess game downloads are heavier: over 5,248 requests, Lichess asked me to slow down 74 times, and I paused each time. Fair enough for a free service run by a non-profit.

So, thank you Lichess and thank you Chess.com. Open data like this is what makes a study like this possible for anyone with a laptop.

Happy to answer questions about the method, or run another cut (bullet, time of day, country) if people are curious.

Hint: After two unsuccessful stalemate trap black goes for our "Private H"

Im genuinely curious, I don't even know what the Moscow being referred to is

Interesting position I found myself in. First time forcing a draw by perpetual check.

I was playing with black in this game which ended up as a draw. I'm a pretty decent player but would have never found this sequence in a blitz game. When i was doing game analysis i was surprised i had a mate in 5 here. Can you find it?

From Play Winning Chess, The Pawn Chain section.

Seirawan suggests White might break Black’s pawn chain by playing f4-f5 then fxe6. But when he moves f5, wouldn’t exf5, so he’s down a pawn? The chain would be broken, but he’s lost a pawn in the process. Is it worth it? Also it’s White’s move so that might change things at any rate. Is it just an idea of something we might try if we are free to, and is the pawn sac worth it?

Until Vishy had only the FIDE championship titles, he recalled random people coming up and saying, "Well done, but its not the real title," causing him great annoyance. Upon beating Kramnik in 2008 and becoming the undisputed champ, he was happy he wont have to talk to another idiot about which title is more important.

He says the Kramnik match was his best one. The Topalov match next was harder and the subsequent one against Gelfand 'he barely scraped by'. Feeling the fatigue of constantly playing matches, he felt FIDE was giving him a match every year at one point. By 2012, even his team said: "Okay, we can't take this anymore. It's year-after-year work. It's great we’ve got this far, but we’re probably moving along".

Thus he has sympathy with Magnus for deciding to walk away from it all, saying maybe he would have too, had he played 2 more matches.

For Gukesh's current struggles, he says life as a WC is not supposed to be perfect and one will face criticism for bad performances as it comes with the territory. But you wont appreciate the title until you have lost it.

"If fans buy the tickets, they have the right to say whatever they want, whether it’s just or not."

He suggests Gukesh to ignore the criticism and just focus on playing good chess.

Source: This is an extremely well done and informative interview with Anand by Lichess in May 2026.

Remember : Black is not obligated to make a queen

I recently rejoined chess.com and started an account from scratch. I’m typically around 2100 to 2200 elo online. But I was floored by how strong this rating range was, especially the 1300’s. I had tougher opposition there than players hundreds of points higher. I actually lost twice there. Just curious if anyone else has observed anything similar.

^^ By similar I mean have you found a lower elo range more challenging than a group(s) above it?

They went from being the #2 app for chess to being stuck between other apps with little to no appeal. A low rating and low rating numbers will make it so people new to chess will probably never download it. I don’t know why they needed to delete the original app off the App Store and create a whole new one, but it was a very poor decision. I feel like if they wanted an updated UI or code, they could’ve just overwritten the existing code. But who knows what they were thinking.

Link to the game: Oparin Grigoriy vs Liang Awonder - U.S. Chess Championships 2026

Spoiler:26. b6! Awonder blundered mate in two with 26...Bd8 27.Bh7+ and black can't escape the backrank mate with 28.Rxf8# If Awonder took the pawn on b6 instead, the line continues 27.Bxe5 dxe5 28.Qxb6 and black's position collapses - c5, e5, b7 all hanging

Hi everyone,

Just to keep you updated on the simul I played today against the french GM.

This was kinda funny, I was seated next to a guy with a profile similar to mine but stronger (2200 chess.com, no theoritical knowledge) and we had the same experience... Down a piece in the first 10 move, I then did my best and hanged on my dear life to not fall too quickly but she just put more and more pressure until I resigned move 36, she was going to win 2 pawns + the extra piece. The other guy got mated on move 35.

We were 21 players and 21 loss, with multiple good players.

This was a very good experience and I wanted to thank you all for the advices. I tried to apply them but after a heavy day of work, my wife and I went into a heated argument and I could obtain peace just before going to bed, so no time to prepare at all.

I was stupid enough to go into a sharp line I did not know (then again, I barely know any line) and it backfired very quickly.

This shows the limits of my style anyway, I cant survive the opening in most circumstances against strong opponents or well prepared. And to be honest, at some point I had an opportunity to go for a solid opening but I wanted to try and see what I could get from something sharper and I know the answer now lol.

Thank you all for the tips and amazing ressources shared, I learnt a lot.

I came across this whilst looking through the analysis of a game I just played. It's not necessarily massively difficult as a puzzle, but there are a couple of moves that aren’t 100% intuitive/obvious, and I thought it was quite fun.

I'd just played: Bg5, hoping that Black would then make the mistake of: h6, which they did. In the event — Black actually then made a further mistake and I won in two, but at this position there's also a forced mate in eight...

a local chess club hosts a monthly blitz tournament. over the past 6 months, chess has become my biggest hobby, and i feel like it’s time to put my money where my mouth is. i know that i probably don’t have a chance to win, the people that win these tournaments are generally ~1800-2000 rated and i am merely 1200. at the same time i’ve found that just because i am lower rated online doesn’t mean that i can’t pose a real challenge to these players.

i told my roommate about it last night and now im starting to feel nervous. would it be best to just sit out, wait till im better, or to really give it my all?

i just know that with money on the line ($20 buy in no big deal) i’ll really kick myself for blundering, but a blitz tourney i’m bound to blunder.

all in all, my rating has climbed >200 points in the past 6 months and i really feel like i have a deeper understanding of the game. pawn structures, building pressure, advantageous trades, transforming the position… so i feel confident that i can ‘punch up’ so to speak.

any tips on calming my nerves and preparing for this tourney? i’ve been building a pretty deep repertoire, playing a lot of games and analyzing the sort of blunders i make

edit: to be honest my rapid rating has climbed to 1200 my blitz rating is still 800. blitz online frustrates me sometimes because i feel like i don’t have enough time to think through the positions as much as id like to so i feel like im choosing between risking a blunder or risking losing on time

I’m not taking this too seriously, it’s just a silly online 960 tournament, but I’m curious why it’s possible for someone to join a tournament division well below their ELO if they are using an account without history?

I suck at 960 and am in the sub-1000 division. matched against a 1600. He has no 960 game history, so obviously he just has his account set to start him at 1600 based on his experience level. His ELO for other forms of chess shows that’s a valid decision (2000+ rapid etc).

even with no history in a particular category, shouldn’t people be placed in the division that corresponds to the rating they told the app is most appropriate for them? why would someone with a 2000+ rapid rating even WANT to play a bunch of 700-900s in a tournament?

is this a loophole, or an actual rational policy and I’m just missing the reasoning?

Hei chess community!

My girlfriend is working on a small chess app and she doesn’t have reddit so im posting this on her behalf (i said posting on a brand new account looks sus and bot). i was hoping you could share your thought on four questions please. Thanksb!

1. When playing chess digitally, where do you feel the most friction today?
   
2. What could make it more fun to play digitally? All thoughts are welcome!
   
3. Do you feel like playing online gives you the progression you want or expect? If anything - what is missing?
   
4. If you were playing an online game lasting several days - what in the experience would be important to you?

Dans sa préface, Nimzowitsch énumère ce dont il est fier, et il cite nommément un passage : « Comme ils sonnent simplement, les cinq cas particuliers des septième et huitième rangées — mais comme ils furent difficiles à arracher au chaos ! » Les voici. https://blog.site2wouf.fr/2026/10/nimzowitsch-raconte-le-promeneur-et-le-brigand.html