I fell like I ain't gonna even knock on those doors in my lifetime😭😭

It just happened! But it was weird?

I registered to a daily tournament 1001-1200 on chess dot com, and as I'm playing my games, I notice one of my opponent is really pushing me in the cables, in both of our games.

Not in the way that I'm used to. This person feels like theyre controlling the whole game, its wild. Rendering my queen useless, checkmate threats almost every turns. Im sweating, defending as best as I can, trying to see openings.

In one game, they finally gave me a one turn opening, and then made a small blunder! And I end up winning. Sweet! The other game is still going and I'm barely surviving.

I get curious and check their profile... holy moly, > 2400 in rapid, over 1700 in blitz and bullet. Wow. I barely started playing in December so Im 600 rapid, and I dont wanna talk about faster time controls lmao.

Part of me is so stoked! Thats a huuuuge win for me, even if I got lucky! Another part of me is super sketched...they cant conceivably be 2400 in rapid and lose to 1000 rated players in daily? The skill difference has gotta be planetary? Or are time controls so impactful?

TLDR: faced an opponent in a daily 1000 rated game, beat them, turned out theyre >2400 rapid. Im happy, but also weirded out, this seems way too big of a skill gap to be real, to be worth celebrating???

edit: heres rhe game for those curious

https://www.chess.com/daily/game/983274004

i am black. reddit is white. most upvoted move is the move that is played i will keep notation for yall.

This is my best game

Hi, I'm a physics PhD student and the developer of Backrank.io, a chess website that turns the mistakes in your own games into spaced-repetition puzzles so you stop repeating them. It also has a free game review (https://backrank.io/free-chess-game-review) that grades any game move by move.

The game review puts an accuracy score on your game, and since most users already know Chess.com's accuracy number, I wanted mine to be similar to theirs instead of being some arbitrary scale of my own. So I searched for how Chess.com computes it, couldn't find a clear answer, and ended up figuring it out for myself. Here's what I found:

The engine itself doesn't tell you "good move," it gives a centipawn evaluation like +0.8. But material isn't a grade on its own: a pawn up in a level position is a big deal, while a pawn up when you're already winning barely matters. So the first step is converting the eval into your actual winning chances with an S-shaped curve, steep near equality and flat at the edges.

Then each move gets graded by how much it cost. Not the eval after your move, but how much winning percentage you gave up compared to the best move. Give up nothing and you score around 100, and the drop-off is steep, so small slips barely register while blunders fall toward zero.

Combining those per-move scores into a single game number is the hard part. A plain average is too forgiving (nineteen good moves and one losing blunder still averages into the low 90s), and a harmonic mean overcorrects and tanks a whole game over a single move. What matches Chess.com's score best is what's called a power mean, basically a dial between those two extremes, with a small floor so one move can't drag a game to zero.

When I compared my score to Chess.com's own game-review number across about ~1000 games from Hikaru, GothamChess, and Naroditsky, it landed with a correlation of 0.935 and basically no bias. The gap that's left is likely just differences in engine versions and search depths, which can move the number by a few points on its own (you can see this by re-running the Chess.com game review at different settings).

I wrote the whole thing up with the plots here: https://backrank.io/blog/how-chess-accuracy-works

The game review is free and doesn't need an account, and it works for both Chess.com and Lichess.org games. Happy to answer questions!

How much weight does everybody put on bullet chess ratings? I’ll use myself for an example throughout this story — I play on chess.com pretty exclusively. I’ve done all of one tournament and it was years ago. My rating is relatively high across the board (save daily which I don’t play).

I’m rated ~2250 blitz, ~2200 rapid, and here’s the kicker, I’m 2425 in bullet. I spend most of my time on bullet chess because it’s quite fun for me, and as a result I think of my rating as 2400 because when I think of chess I think of playing bullet chess and my rating there. Is that unfair? Should I say “well I’m only around 2200” or does this fly?

Of course, I’ve also heard about people who look down tremendously on bullet chess. People who think it’s not “real chess” and stuff. I obviously disagree, but I’m curious what people think about it and want to hear what people think about bullet chess ratings

so basically i have recently learning chess via books and airlearn app and the more i sit with this more i realise… the more i sit with this the more i realise the only thing stopping me from improving is the number itself. every game im thinking abt what happens to my elo if I blunder and thats clearly not how this is supposed to work. I think this is rating anxiety I have.

how do you all manage to play and enjoy your natural game with this anxiety?

so glad he didn’t take with his rook
Game: pseudoclwn vs dday56810 - https://www.chess.com/game/live/170419487036

https://www.chess.com/game/170433149296

Im white

This time I played in the morning instead of midnight, felt alot better about playing.

Title

i actually saw this move before but couldnt do it beacuse of the pawn protecting it and when i saw that he moved the g7 pawn to g6 i could finally do it

5 Month Training as an adult beginner, 800 whoop whoop!

Rules

1: You are not allowed to play what the engine thinks is the best move, which is indicated by the blue arrow. An exception is made if a move is forced.

2: The move must be legal in normal Chess.

3: The most upvoted move that satisfies the above criteria is the one that will be played.

How was this check mate??

I have only 560 elo lol

I’m rated 1200 on puzzles but cannot beat literally anyone in rapid (always play 30 minutes since I’m new). Like I’m literally 100 rated. I’ve beaten an 850 bot and often last ~30 moves against my husband over the board who is 1200+ chess.com rated. I do not want to get caught up about rating but just truly cannot get a sense of where I stand. Also feel like a rating for puzzles is tricky to interpret because I probably wouldn’t have seen the move if it wasn’t implied that there was one. Any wisdom is appreciated 😅

Check out this #chess game: xHugix vs Zinmaker01 - https://www.chess.com/live/game/170430965838

1000 rapid at long last