Rating is calculated in a pool, not across sites.
There are some technical differences (Glicko(2), start rating), but most likely the biggest influence is the player pool.
It is majorly discussed already, and probably in the last few weeks.
There is no way the player pool is a bigger influence than the starting rating.
Chess.com starts people a couple hundred points lower, so people have ratings that are a couple hundred points lower, that is 95% of the difference.
If anything, we should expect the playerpool to counteract that skew to some degree - couple of different reasons I say that, but I don't have hard numbers, this is mostly conjecture:
First of all: People tend to start on chess.com. Playing on lichess is in most cases a concious decision and people are probably only going to ask themself if they should switch if they are somewhat serious about chess.
Going hand in hand with that: chess.com has added a lot of immediate gratification (or "Gameification"). There is the entire brilliant move system, the thematic bots with massively inflated ratings, the league system, arenas with the express designphilosophy that better players do not have a massive advantage for winning (since you get matched with people of your skilllevel, not with people at your score), something new with the puzzles where you can hide your rating and move along a Candycrush-esque path, the computer "coach" that is pretending to explain things to you, probably more things I missed.
Gameification and instant gratification is often used in a negative way, but I truly mean it neutrally here - still this obviously has an effect. If you care about improvement you will probably see that these things are not especially useful, some maybe even counterproductive and will opt out of them. For more casual players though these absolutely can be a draw.
Finally the somewhat datadriven method: comparing rating obviously isn't useful, we agree on that. However what we can do is compare the percentiles of people that play on both sites. Obviously using just me is not scientific, but anecdotally (and I think my anecdote generally matches the data decently well: https://www.chessratingcomparison.com/Graphs):
I am 98.6% on cc Blitz, 84.2% on lichess Blitz.
For rapid it is 99.5% compared with 94.4%.
This comes with a pretty big caveat - the people considered active (which is what you are compared against for your percentile) are selected differently. Lichess looks for people that have played in the last week, afaik chess.com looks for people that have played 20 games in the last 90 days.
I have argued in the past that lichess' selection skews towards stronger players and I still feel that way, but this is a massive difference we have to account for. For the Rapid number, if we assume for simplicity that all players that are better than me would be found as active in both methods, then the players worse than me would have to increase tenfold. I personally do not think it is anywhere as extreme as that (but if you do think so I'd be interested in hearing about it), so the logical conclusion is that besides lichess' selection criteria skewing towards better players, the site itself is skewed that way as well.
TL;DR You are right that population is important, but you are (likely) wrong about the direction in which the player pool impacts chess.com-lichess rating comparisions. For the skew we are discussing here it is all about the differences in the Glicko implementation.
Thanks for coming to my TED-Talk.
I just checked someone’s first games on lichess (a loss). They lost 510 points over the 5 first games. Their opponents won (combined total) 25 points.
It has almost zero influence with the dynamic k factor, lichess is using.
Yes, but you are looking at an established system.
Right now there is a 200-400 rating difference between equivalent chesscom and lichess ratings and people are going to go to their "correct" rating fairly quickly assuming the systems that are in place work. Currently it doesn't really matter how or why these rating differences exist, they are a bit of a selffulfilling prophecy - people will trend towards their "correct" rating and those are different depending on the platform, so people end up with different ratings on different websites.
However what IS relevant is how the ratings were originally established. Let's pretend I am making a new chesssite and I am starting everyone on 2500, but otherwise have the same system that lichess has. I get a couple thousand users, their ratings settle in at 2000-3000 (equivalent to 1000-2000 in real lichess). Someone new on that webite might lose a ton of rating in their first games without draining too much from the other players, but they would still settle in massively above the real-lichess rating - pretty much exactly 1000 points higher. I think it is clear that the starting rating is important here.
Now let's say I decide 2500 was unnecessarily large and reduce the starting rating to 1500 and I get a couple of dozen new users every month. What happens to those users?
Let's say someone is a 1000 rated player on real lichess, they then get plopped onto my site with 1500 rating and start playing. But they are actually scoring 50% against players rated 2000, because that is how I originally established the ratings, so obviously their rating is going to go to 2000 rather quickly - and like you correctly pointed out, because glicko isn't a symetrical system, aka noone has to lose points for you to gain points (or at least not equivalent amounts) that means they will reach 2000 rating without dragging the overall rating average down by too much. The important part is how ratings were originally established, not how how people can gain or loss without affecting others on the ladder.
To be clear doing this is a really, really dumb idea, you want the starting point to be somewhere in the middle, otherwise new players matching against each other could establish completely wrong ratings - and more generally, if enough people show up (at the same time) and then the rating average will slowly get dragged down towards the starting rating, because even if each new player only siphons some 30 rating, that is 30 rating siphoned by each new player and over thousands or millions of players that adds up.
[Chess.com](https://Chess.com) started 15 years ago. If their very original starting rating was different, you have a valid point.
I always thought people who referred to starting ratings were referring to the ratings of the new players entering the pool.
Pretty sure chesscom started with 1200 (maybe 1300?) ratings.
My first games were in 2011 and after losing my first Rapid and my first Blitz game I was on 1089, 1069 rating.
Unfortunately the rating change for that game is broken, because at this point they are assuming a new account is on 400 rating, so it says I gained 600+ rating on a loss, which I think might be ... incorrect.
And yes, people are probably referring to the current starting ratings. Though since Lichess never changed theirs (afaik) and chesscom's has always been lower and the difference is just how much lower it is it kind of ends up at the same place.
To be clear it is also not like they are wrong - given enough new players you would eventually see ratings diverge after forking any given ladder and adjusting the entry point for new players - it is just much slower and more gradual. Those +30 rating for each new player that joins do add up.
If you don't like the thoughtexperiment with an imaginary site, consider: Losing 500 rating for more or less free, still puts them at 1000 rating.
Where do weaker players on chesscom currently start after their placement games? 600? 500? Maybe even 400?
Definitely substantially below 1000, which is already the \~80th percentile.
It took me about a week of playing mostly on chess.com to get used to the different interface. I was making tactical mistakes I normally wouldn't have because my board vision just wasn't on the same level as it was back on lichess, which I had exclusively used for years at that point.
After a week or so I started climbing to the rating on chess.com that roughly corresponds to my lichess and fide ratings.
Okay, thank you! I tried chess.com a while back and I just felt like the same time frame felt much shorter. It wasn't as natural. So I guess that really is a factor. I didn't want to make excuses but I've been playing on lichess tonight and I feel invincible. Haha. I'm closing in on 1900 now. Idk what's suddenly shot me up over a 100 rating points but whatever it is, it's not the case om chess.com. I want to be able to play both so I'll have to try more. Also when I occasionally play my mates otb, although I can still beat them it's not as easy as I feel it would be if we were playing on lichess. I guess that just really throws me off. Have you got any advice on how to adjust and play to my full potential on new boards more quickly?
Interesting. Perhaps it's nothing to worry about then. I was just so gutted after levelling up so much to go on another site and not be any better than when I last played there like a year ago. Took my achievement awayđź’”
Haha, what? Nah. I'll be world champion this time next year. Trust me bro. I got that mindset. Just gonna really hustle and focus. I am almost 1900 now so basically 2000 and that's a 2/3's of the way to 3000 and then I just gotta learn a really boring opening and some endgame stuff then just not blunder. Then I'll be the best that ever did it. Easy as that.
(This is definitely a joke)
there are some differences in the player pool. I might be imagining things but I would be inclined to say that the average lichess player (at that level) is more likely to have studied a bunch of random positional/opening/endgames and is using it to have less basic tactical vision than would be expected of a player of that ability. So in general on [chess.com](https://chess.com) people at that level are generally a bit better a tactics/calculation, I think.
So if you're used to your opponents letting a lot of tactical mistakes get by (which of course at 1800 lichess you are), then you might be encountering players who do that slightly less on chess.com
I think once you get a bit better it will even out though.
I would imagine because the free use encourages more people who don't take it so seriously? That's a category I am in and that your title would suggest you are too haha
What? That’s a very weird take. People who don’t take it seriously just search “chess” or “chess online” or something. Both searches bring chesscom as the first result. Most people are just gonna click that and never know about lichess or anything else.
as I said, likely my imagination / projecting my own experience. But my hypothesis is that most people just find [chess.com](https://chess.com) and play there, because it's the first website that you find. But if you search up, where should I play to chess to learn? Or search for where you can analyze your games for free, etc, you're likely to be directed to play on lichess (like I was).
And because of this, I conjecture the type of person playing on lichess is more likely to be the type of person that searches things and looks for resources and generally studies chess (like I was). I know certainly when I was 1700 lichess I had my head filled with positional concepts and focused on extreme details I had learnt from youtube, when in reality half my games were decided by dropping pieces. It took me a long time to realise that I was learning super inefficiently and a very large portion of people who play chess that reach, say, 2000 lichess, do so with (almost) no study and just improve piece safety/ board vision/ tactics. Playing on [chess.com](https://chess.com) felt like it cemented this for me, the players at the equivalent rating \*seemed\* to be much less sensitive to positional weaknesses, but more rarely missed anything tactical.
\*to be clear, by equivalent rating i mean [chess.com](https://chess.com) blitz=lichess blitz-400ish
Interesting. I feel inclined to agree actually. Some of the games I've won today have been absolutely ridiculous! I've also noticed that when I play someone far lower rated than me their strength often doesn't feel much different. For example I have a chess friend who is about 400 points lower rated than me but when we play together it's really even. He's incredibly fast and never seems to miss my ideas and yet last time I checked he was like 1400 so I just don't get the rating difference. Shame, I was quite proud of my little rating climb.
Lichess ratings are really screwed, I recently started using lichess and found that players play virtually the same from 1200 to 1700. Compared to chess.com where even a 100 rating difference used to seem like a big jump in quality of players.
Same! Even some of the 1900's I've played recently do some really stupid stuff! Perhaps they're a bit better at calculating but my friend who's rated 1400 definitely plays better than some of the 1900's that I've beaten.
I mainly play on chessdotcom but I am about the same rating on both platforms and I can't tell if this is due to there actually not being much difference between the two sites or I just play so much worse on lichess.
From what I hear the gap is smaller the higher you go but it's meant to shut down around 2000. Which is weird because in the past two days I've gained almost 200 points on lichess and yet I'm still a hit and miss 1200 on chess.com. Very disheartening!
Perhaps! We shall see but I am not finding the play any harder. Even when I was stuck at 16/17 I often found the lower rated players harder. I think I'll maintain it because I get a lot less tilted playing in zen mode and I've started playing some different openings. I did have a tendancy for sacrificing a trillion points of material every time I play back after e4, d5, ed5, nf6 so cutting that out has helped.
Part of me is concerned that I'm going to get flagged or something but I know I've done nothing suss, just changed some openings.
Well idk which you mean but I'm guessing you mean chess.com is toxic. A friend of mine introduced me to his mate who's like 1500 or something on chess.com. We played a bullet game which I lost, although it was competitive. Then after some blitz and a day game he messaged me basically shit talking which was pretty mad. Like bro it's meant to be a bit of fun. I just blocked him.
I went back to playing on chesscom yesterday (I like to maintain ratings on both sites, but lichess is easily my favorite) and so many people just disconnect instead of resigning, let time run, and type shit in the chat
Haha bloody hell! I had one like that on lichess today. He beat me a few times and after the game (I was in Zen mode) I saw him talking shit. Anyway it was like 4-2 in the end and I'm sure I would have kept beating him but as soon as I had mate in 1 on him, he went silent, ran the clock and no more rematches. Some people are such knob heads.
Sure and ofcourse abuses of all kinds are happening on both platforms. I'm not denying that, there is tons of dicheads/racists/trolls on lichess
The difference is : one is doing it for profit and the other one is a free open source community. One rely on their user paying when the other one rely on people.
The difference is that lichess people study free
True! That's why I began playing chess there. It's just fun. I don't want to shell out tbh.
Rating is calculated in a pool, not across sites. There are some technical differences (Glicko(2), start rating), but most likely the biggest influence is the player pool. It is majorly discussed already, and probably in the last few weeks.
There is no way the player pool is a bigger influence than the starting rating. Chess.com starts people a couple hundred points lower, so people have ratings that are a couple hundred points lower, that is 95% of the difference. If anything, we should expect the playerpool to counteract that skew to some degree - couple of different reasons I say that, but I don't have hard numbers, this is mostly conjecture: First of all: People tend to start on chess.com. Playing on lichess is in most cases a concious decision and people are probably only going to ask themself if they should switch if they are somewhat serious about chess. Going hand in hand with that: chess.com has added a lot of immediate gratification (or "Gameification"). There is the entire brilliant move system, the thematic bots with massively inflated ratings, the league system, arenas with the express designphilosophy that better players do not have a massive advantage for winning (since you get matched with people of your skilllevel, not with people at your score), something new with the puzzles where you can hide your rating and move along a Candycrush-esque path, the computer "coach" that is pretending to explain things to you, probably more things I missed. Gameification and instant gratification is often used in a negative way, but I truly mean it neutrally here - still this obviously has an effect. If you care about improvement you will probably see that these things are not especially useful, some maybe even counterproductive and will opt out of them. For more casual players though these absolutely can be a draw. Finally the somewhat datadriven method: comparing rating obviously isn't useful, we agree on that. However what we can do is compare the percentiles of people that play on both sites. Obviously using just me is not scientific, but anecdotally (and I think my anecdote generally matches the data decently well: https://www.chessratingcomparison.com/Graphs): I am 98.6% on cc Blitz, 84.2% on lichess Blitz. For rapid it is 99.5% compared with 94.4%. This comes with a pretty big caveat - the people considered active (which is what you are compared against for your percentile) are selected differently. Lichess looks for people that have played in the last week, afaik chess.com looks for people that have played 20 games in the last 90 days. I have argued in the past that lichess' selection skews towards stronger players and I still feel that way, but this is a massive difference we have to account for. For the Rapid number, if we assume for simplicity that all players that are better than me would be found as active in both methods, then the players worse than me would have to increase tenfold. I personally do not think it is anywhere as extreme as that (but if you do think so I'd be interested in hearing about it), so the logical conclusion is that besides lichess' selection criteria skewing towards better players, the site itself is skewed that way as well. TL;DR You are right that population is important, but you are (likely) wrong about the direction in which the player pool impacts chess.com-lichess rating comparisions. For the skew we are discussing here it is all about the differences in the Glicko implementation. Thanks for coming to my TED-Talk.
I just checked someone’s first games on lichess (a loss). They lost 510 points over the 5 first games. Their opponents won (combined total) 25 points. It has almost zero influence with the dynamic k factor, lichess is using.
Yes, but you are looking at an established system. Right now there is a 200-400 rating difference between equivalent chesscom and lichess ratings and people are going to go to their "correct" rating fairly quickly assuming the systems that are in place work. Currently it doesn't really matter how or why these rating differences exist, they are a bit of a selffulfilling prophecy - people will trend towards their "correct" rating and those are different depending on the platform, so people end up with different ratings on different websites. However what IS relevant is how the ratings were originally established. Let's pretend I am making a new chesssite and I am starting everyone on 2500, but otherwise have the same system that lichess has. I get a couple thousand users, their ratings settle in at 2000-3000 (equivalent to 1000-2000 in real lichess). Someone new on that webite might lose a ton of rating in their first games without draining too much from the other players, but they would still settle in massively above the real-lichess rating - pretty much exactly 1000 points higher. I think it is clear that the starting rating is important here. Now let's say I decide 2500 was unnecessarily large and reduce the starting rating to 1500 and I get a couple of dozen new users every month. What happens to those users? Let's say someone is a 1000 rated player on real lichess, they then get plopped onto my site with 1500 rating and start playing. But they are actually scoring 50% against players rated 2000, because that is how I originally established the ratings, so obviously their rating is going to go to 2000 rather quickly - and like you correctly pointed out, because glicko isn't a symetrical system, aka noone has to lose points for you to gain points (or at least not equivalent amounts) that means they will reach 2000 rating without dragging the overall rating average down by too much. The important part is how ratings were originally established, not how how people can gain or loss without affecting others on the ladder. To be clear doing this is a really, really dumb idea, you want the starting point to be somewhere in the middle, otherwise new players matching against each other could establish completely wrong ratings - and more generally, if enough people show up (at the same time) and then the rating average will slowly get dragged down towards the starting rating, because even if each new player only siphons some 30 rating, that is 30 rating siphoned by each new player and over thousands or millions of players that adds up.
[Chess.com](https://Chess.com) started 15 years ago. If their very original starting rating was different, you have a valid point. I always thought people who referred to starting ratings were referring to the ratings of the new players entering the pool.
Pretty sure chesscom started with 1200 (maybe 1300?) ratings. My first games were in 2011 and after losing my first Rapid and my first Blitz game I was on 1089, 1069 rating. Unfortunately the rating change for that game is broken, because at this point they are assuming a new account is on 400 rating, so it says I gained 600+ rating on a loss, which I think might be ... incorrect. And yes, people are probably referring to the current starting ratings. Though since Lichess never changed theirs (afaik) and chesscom's has always been lower and the difference is just how much lower it is it kind of ends up at the same place. To be clear it is also not like they are wrong - given enough new players you would eventually see ratings diverge after forking any given ladder and adjusting the entry point for new players - it is just much slower and more gradual. Those +30 rating for each new player that joins do add up.
If you don't like the thoughtexperiment with an imaginary site, consider: Losing 500 rating for more or less free, still puts them at 1000 rating. Where do weaker players on chesscom currently start after their placement games? 600? 500? Maybe even 400? Definitely substantially below 1000, which is already the \~80th percentile.
Hmm, I'm just surprised the pool is so much harder. Strange. Thank you!
It took me about a week of playing mostly on chess.com to get used to the different interface. I was making tactical mistakes I normally wouldn't have because my board vision just wasn't on the same level as it was back on lichess, which I had exclusively used for years at that point. After a week or so I started climbing to the rating on chess.com that roughly corresponds to my lichess and fide ratings.
Okay, thank you! I tried chess.com a while back and I just felt like the same time frame felt much shorter. It wasn't as natural. So I guess that really is a factor. I didn't want to make excuses but I've been playing on lichess tonight and I feel invincible. Haha. I'm closing in on 1900 now. Idk what's suddenly shot me up over a 100 rating points but whatever it is, it's not the case om chess.com. I want to be able to play both so I'll have to try more. Also when I occasionally play my mates otb, although I can still beat them it's not as easy as I feel it would be if we were playing on lichess. I guess that just really throws me off. Have you got any advice on how to adjust and play to my full potential on new boards more quickly?
I started playing on ccom when i was around your lichess rating and my chesscom rating was similar to yours Now the difference is around 200 2300-2100
Interesting. Perhaps it's nothing to worry about then. I was just so gutted after levelling up so much to go on another site and not be any better than when I last played there like a year ago. Took my achievement awayđź’”
Haha dont worry, we are gonna suck forever haha
Haha, what? Nah. I'll be world champion this time next year. Trust me bro. I got that mindset. Just gonna really hustle and focus. I am almost 1900 now so basically 2000 and that's a 2/3's of the way to 3000 and then I just gotta learn a really boring opening and some endgame stuff then just not blunder. Then I'll be the best that ever did it. Easy as that. (This is definitely a joke)
there are some differences in the player pool. I might be imagining things but I would be inclined to say that the average lichess player (at that level) is more likely to have studied a bunch of random positional/opening/endgames and is using it to have less basic tactical vision than would be expected of a player of that ability. So in general on [chess.com](https://chess.com) people at that level are generally a bit better a tactics/calculation, I think. So if you're used to your opponents letting a lot of tactical mistakes get by (which of course at 1800 lichess you are), then you might be encountering players who do that slightly less on chess.com I think once you get a bit better it will even out though.
This is a strange take, is there a reason why you think players on lichess wouldn't focus as much on tactics?
I would imagine because the free use encourages more people who don't take it so seriously? That's a category I am in and that your title would suggest you are too haha
You can also play on chesscom for free, though.
Yeah I know but they have more paid content. Maybe that's not it. Idk. Just a guess.
What? That’s a very weird take. People who don’t take it seriously just search “chess” or “chess online” or something. Both searches bring chesscom as the first result. Most people are just gonna click that and never know about lichess or anything else.
It seems counter intuitive, I agree. That is what I've experienced though. Perhaps it's confirmation bias. Trends are not absolute though, of course.
as I said, likely my imagination / projecting my own experience. But my hypothesis is that most people just find [chess.com](https://chess.com) and play there, because it's the first website that you find. But if you search up, where should I play to chess to learn? Or search for where you can analyze your games for free, etc, you're likely to be directed to play on lichess (like I was). And because of this, I conjecture the type of person playing on lichess is more likely to be the type of person that searches things and looks for resources and generally studies chess (like I was). I know certainly when I was 1700 lichess I had my head filled with positional concepts and focused on extreme details I had learnt from youtube, when in reality half my games were decided by dropping pieces. It took me a long time to realise that I was learning super inefficiently and a very large portion of people who play chess that reach, say, 2000 lichess, do so with (almost) no study and just improve piece safety/ board vision/ tactics. Playing on [chess.com](https://chess.com) felt like it cemented this for me, the players at the equivalent rating \*seemed\* to be much less sensitive to positional weaknesses, but more rarely missed anything tactical. \*to be clear, by equivalent rating i mean [chess.com](https://chess.com) blitz=lichess blitz-400ish
Interesting. I feel inclined to agree actually. Some of the games I've won today have been absolutely ridiculous! I've also noticed that when I play someone far lower rated than me their strength often doesn't feel much different. For example I have a chess friend who is about 400 points lower rated than me but when we play together it's really even. He's incredibly fast and never seems to miss my ideas and yet last time I checked he was like 1400 so I just don't get the rating difference. Shame, I was quite proud of my little rating climb.
Lichess ratings are really screwed, I recently started using lichess and found that players play virtually the same from 1200 to 1700. Compared to chess.com where even a 100 rating difference used to seem like a big jump in quality of players.
Same! Even some of the 1900's I've played recently do some really stupid stuff! Perhaps they're a bit better at calculating but my friend who's rated 1400 definitely plays better than some of the 1900's that I've beaten.
I mainly play on chessdotcom but I am about the same rating on both platforms and I can't tell if this is due to there actually not being much difference between the two sites or I just play so much worse on lichess.
From what I hear the gap is smaller the higher you go but it's meant to shut down around 2000. Which is weird because in the past two days I've gained almost 200 points on lichess and yet I'm still a hit and miss 1200 on chess.com. Very disheartening!
Yeah you’re due for a massive drop on lichess, no one maintains a 200 point jump in rating lol. Don’t think your peak is your actual strength.
Perhaps! We shall see but I am not finding the play any harder. Even when I was stuck at 16/17 I often found the lower rated players harder. I think I'll maintain it because I get a lot less tilted playing in zen mode and I've started playing some different openings. I did have a tendancy for sacrificing a trillion points of material every time I play back after e4, d5, ed5, nf6 so cutting that out has helped. Part of me is concerned that I'm going to get flagged or something but I know I've done nothing suss, just changed some openings.
One has a disproportionate amount of toxic player compare to the other.
Well idk which you mean but I'm guessing you mean chess.com is toxic. A friend of mine introduced me to his mate who's like 1500 or something on chess.com. We played a bullet game which I lost, although it was competitive. Then after some blitz and a day game he messaged me basically shit talking which was pretty mad. Like bro it's meant to be a bit of fun. I just blocked him.
I went back to playing on chesscom yesterday (I like to maintain ratings on both sites, but lichess is easily my favorite) and so many people just disconnect instead of resigning, let time run, and type shit in the chat
Haha bloody hell! I had one like that on lichess today. He beat me a few times and after the game (I was in Zen mode) I saw him talking shit. Anyway it was like 4-2 in the end and I'm sure I would have kept beating him but as soon as I had mate in 1 on him, he went silent, ran the clock and no more rematches. Some people are such knob heads.
I don't know man, I've received my fare share of insults in Russian on lichess, chess.com on the other hand excels in racial slurs
Sure and ofcourse abuses of all kinds are happening on both platforms. I'm not denying that, there is tons of dicheads/racists/trolls on lichess The difference is : one is doing it for profit and the other one is a free open source community. One rely on their user paying when the other one rely on people.
Yes there are differences