6 ms·

And unfortunate choice of news outlet. As a developer, I can't help mentioning how baffling it is part of the chess community keeps using a proprietary website

by lvass 5y ago

And unfortunate choice of news outlet. As a developer, I can't help mentioning how baffling it is part of the chess community keeps using a proprietary website filled to the brim on dark patterns while a better and free as in freedom alternative is available.

dubeye 5y ago
Do you use both? I regularly use both and there is definitely some aspects that li is not better.
anoncow 5y ago
Are you referring to lichess? I second that if yes.
ajkjk 5y ago
I think that chess.com pays some people to use their website on streams, etc. Although Lichess isn't perfect and it's kinda annoying. One of the bad things about Lichess is how unrealistically inflated their ratings are; 2100 on Lichess is equivalent to about 1800 on Chess.com. Chess.com is much more similar to the FIDE rating and other real-world systems. Lichess is just super inflated for some reason and it makes it kinda hard to compare your progress to other metrics.
- aflag 5y ago
  That's not exactly true. chess.com matches closer to FIDE in the 1400-2000 range and lichess matches in the 2000+ range, whereas chess.com gets inflated in that range. All in all, they are all different systems with different player bases.
- __s 5y ago
  https://www.chessratingcomparison.com/Graphs https://www.chessratingcomparison.com/Graphs There's also https://chessgoals.com/rating-comparison https://chessgoals.com/rating-comparison if you prefer a table
  - ajkjk 5y ago
    I'm amused to plug in my 2100 rating on Lichess and find that I was almost exactly right; the site says it's 1780 on chess.com +- 100 or so.
- thaurelia 5y ago
  You cannot compare ratings between these websites and FIDE for two reasons: - they use different rating systems (Elo for FIDE, Glicko-2 for LiChess and afair, Glicko/Glicko-2 for chess.com) - ELO / Glicko rating is calculated for a _player pool_. Which means it will never correspond between FIDE-registered players and chess websites because they don't have the same player base. It has nothing to do with being “inflated” or “unrealistic”. The difference is “by design”
  - not_kurt_godel 5y ago
    The bottom line is still that a chess.com rating will be more indicative of what a theoretical FIDE/USCF rating would be, and there's value in that, even if it's not rigorously tethered.
    - thaurelia 5y ago
      Comparison sites will give you ±150 Elo relative error (with I assume P=0.95). 150 Elo on levels below 2700 FIDE is almost night and day difference. Chess.com ratings show nothing about theoretical FIDE ratings. Comparison tables have been built with data mining and lucky guesses, there's no quality difference between Chess.com <-> FIDE and LiChess <-> FIDE.
      - ajkjk 5y ago
        Yes they do show 'something'. They correlate with them. It's just a fact that chess.com ratings are closer to 'real' ratings than Lichess are. It's not perfect but that doesn't mean it's a zero-information statement either.
  - zeven7 5y ago
    I am not a chess player, but as a go player who has played on several different servers, all of that can be true and it can still be easier to compare progress relative to a real world association on one server vs another. ajkjk's point still makes sense to me.
  - amalcon 5y ago
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Just forego pathetic chess.com and fide ratings, lichess is the best thing that happened to chess since castling.
  - travelhead 5y ago
    Totally agree! Here’s why: https://travelhead.medium.com/rampant-cheating-on-chess-com-9d29a7a625d8 https://travelhead.medium.com/rampant-cheating-on-chess-com-...
  - azinman2 5y ago
    Why is lichess so good? Just because it’s free?
    - lvass 5y ago
      It's because there's a very hard working person focused on making great software without relying on profitable privacy abuse. Go donate to them.
      - azinman2 5y ago
        Sorry, I meant to ask what makes it so good.
        ajkjk 5y ago
        It's just good in almost every way. It's super well-made, has tons of features, and is free, even including compute tasks like having servers run analysis on your games. It's like one of the nicest things on the internet, I swear.
        aflag 5y ago
        The study and game analysis features in lichess are waaay ahead anything in chess.com. The only thing chess.com does better is having more content, lessons, etc. But you're probably better off buying courses in chessable, reading books and getting a good coach anyway.
- hcnews 5y ago
  Its just a relative number. After getting to your stable rating, you don't care about the actual number, you are just focussed on improvement. Lichess is overall better in my opinion, better & slicker product, free analysis, opening explorer etc. Chess.com only leads in video content imo.
  - ajkjk 5y ago
    I don't care except when I am talking to people IRL -- if I talk about chess and we compare ratings, we also have to talk about site they're from, essentially only because Lichess is such an outlier.
- oli5679 5y ago
  If you want to know why the ratings are centred around 1500 it is simply because this is the value in the original glicko2 paper [1]. It doesn't seem unreasonable for them to implement the algorithm as the designer specified. With rating systems, the absolute scale doesn't matter, all that matters is the predictive power of the system. Every time I have benchmarked, glicko does a better job in predicting win/loss/draw probabilities than ELO ratings used by FIDE. If you want to know your rating relative to other players on the site, you can check the distributions here [2]. If you want to compare them to FIDE ELO, or chess.com, you can use this site although I am not sure about exactly what methodology they use [3]. I wouldn't agree that lichess ratings are inflated or unrealistic relative to FIDE Elo, or any other rating system any more than kilometers are unrealistic and inflated relative to miles. They are simply different measurement systems. [1] http://glicko.net/glicko/glicko2.pdf http://glicko.net/glicko/glicko2.pdf [2] https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/rapid https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/rapid [3] https://chessgoals.com/rating-comparison/ https://chessgoals.com/rating-comparison/
icelancer 5y ago
Indy streamers do a better job in this case (and most, probably). GM Ivanchuk covers all games live on his Twitch channel, and is my choice for analysis.
toolz 5y ago
I can't get over how incredibly laggy chess is. It's the single reason I moved to lichess as I started on chesscom.
- not_kurt_godel 5y ago
  I have the opposite problem - Lichess lags like a dog for me while chess.com is almost invariably rock solid.

by lvass 5y ago

dubeye 5y ago

Do you use both? I regularly use both and there is definitely some aspects that li is not better.

anoncow 5y ago

Are you referring to lichess? I second that if yes.

ajkjk 5y ago

I think that chess.com pays some people to use their website on streams, etc. Although Lichess isn't perfect and it's kinda annoying. One of the bad things about Lichess is how unrealistically inflated their ratings are; 2100 on Lichess is equivalent to about 1800 on Chess.com. Chess.com is much more similar to the FIDE rating and other real-world systems. Lichess is just super inflated for some reason and it makes it kinda hard to compare your progress to other metrics.

aflag 5y ago
That's not exactly true. chess.com matches closer to FIDE in the 1400-2000 range and lichess matches in the 2000+ range, whereas chess.com gets inflated in that range. All in all, they are all different systems with different player bases.
__s 5y ago
https://www.chessratingcomparison.com/Graphs https://www.chessratingcomparison.com/Graphs There's also https://chessgoals.com/rating-comparison https://chessgoals.com/rating-comparison if you prefer a table
- ajkjk 5y ago
  I'm amused to plug in my 2100 rating on Lichess and find that I was almost exactly right; the site says it's 1780 on chess.com +- 100 or so.
thaurelia 5y ago
You cannot compare ratings between these websites and FIDE for two reasons: - they use different rating systems (Elo for FIDE, Glicko-2 for LiChess and afair, Glicko/Glicko-2 for chess.com) - ELO / Glicko rating is calculated for a _player pool_. Which means it will never correspond between FIDE-registered players and chess websites because they don't have the same player base. It has nothing to do with being “inflated” or “unrealistic”. The difference is “by design”
- not_kurt_godel 5y ago
  The bottom line is still that a chess.com rating will be more indicative of what a theoretical FIDE/USCF rating would be, and there's value in that, even if it's not rigorously tethered.
  - thaurelia 5y ago
    Comparison sites will give you ±150 Elo relative error (with I assume P=0.95). 150 Elo on levels below 2700 FIDE is almost night and day difference. Chess.com ratings show nothing about theoretical FIDE ratings. Comparison tables have been built with data mining and lucky guesses, there's no quality difference between Chess.com <-> FIDE and LiChess <-> FIDE.
    - ajkjk 5y ago
      Yes they do show 'something'. They correlate with them. It's just a fact that chess.com ratings are closer to 'real' ratings than Lichess are. It's not perfect but that doesn't mean it's a zero-information statement either.
- zeven7 5y ago
  I am not a chess player, but as a go player who has played on several different servers, all of that can be true and it can still be easier to compare progress relative to a real world association on one server vs another. ajkjk's point still makes sense to me.
- amalcon 5y ago
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Just forego pathetic chess.com and fide ratings, lichess is the best thing that happened to chess since castling.
- travelhead 5y ago
  Totally agree! Here’s why: https://travelhead.medium.com/rampant-cheating-on-chess-com-9d29a7a625d8 https://travelhead.medium.com/rampant-cheating-on-chess-com-...
- azinman2 5y ago
  Why is lichess so good? Just because it’s free?
  - lvass 5y ago
    It's because there's a very hard working person focused on making great software without relying on profitable privacy abuse. Go donate to them.
    - azinman2 5y ago
      Sorry, I meant to ask what makes it so good.
      - ajkjk 5y ago
        It's just good in almost every way. It's super well-made, has tons of features, and is free, even including compute tasks like having servers run analysis on your games. It's like one of the nicest things on the internet, I swear.
      - aflag 5y ago
        The study and game analysis features in lichess are waaay ahead anything in chess.com. The only thing chess.com does better is having more content, lessons, etc. But you're probably better off buying courses in chessable, reading books and getting a good coach anyway.
hcnews 5y ago
Its just a relative number. After getting to your stable rating, you don't care about the actual number, you are just focussed on improvement. Lichess is overall better in my opinion, better & slicker product, free analysis, opening explorer etc. Chess.com only leads in video content imo.
- ajkjk 5y ago
  I don't care except when I am talking to people IRL -- if I talk about chess and we compare ratings, we also have to talk about site they're from, essentially only because Lichess is such an outlier.
oli5679 5y ago
If you want to know why the ratings are centred around 1500 it is simply because this is the value in the original glicko2 paper [1]. It doesn't seem unreasonable for them to implement the algorithm as the designer specified. With rating systems, the absolute scale doesn't matter, all that matters is the predictive power of the system. Every time I have benchmarked, glicko does a better job in predicting win/loss/draw probabilities than ELO ratings used by FIDE. If you want to know your rating relative to other players on the site, you can check the distributions here [2]. If you want to compare them to FIDE ELO, or chess.com, you can use this site although I am not sure about exactly what methodology they use [3]. I wouldn't agree that lichess ratings are inflated or unrealistic relative to FIDE Elo, or any other rating system any more than kilometers are unrealistic and inflated relative to miles. They are simply different measurement systems. [1] http://glicko.net/glicko/glicko2.pdf http://glicko.net/glicko/glicko2.pdf [2] https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/rapid https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/rapid [3] https://chessgoals.com/rating-comparison/ https://chessgoals.com/rating-comparison/

icelancer 5y ago

Indy streamers do a better job in this case (and most, probably). GM Ivanchuk covers all games live on his Twitch channel, and is my choice for analysis.

toolz 5y ago

I can't get over how incredibly laggy chess is. It's the single reason I moved to lichess as I started on chesscom.

not_kurt_godel 5y ago
I have the opposite problem - Lichess lags like a dog for me while chess.com is almost invariably rock solid.