Do Players Who Use Courses Really Improve 4.6x Faster?
If you’re reading this, you probably saw our message that “Courses users improve 4.6x faster” and thought, “Really?”
We know it sounds like a bold claim, but we assure you we didn’t pull this number out of thin air!
You might have heard that Courses are Chessable courses, now launched on Chess.com. Since the two companies merged a couple of years ago, we’ve recently been able to compare data from both sites to answer a very interesting question: “Does Chessable course training translate into actual rating gains?”
We examined more than 10,000 Chess.com members who owned Chessable courses and those who didn’t. We measured their rating change over 180 days, normalizing for account tenure. So if the account tenure of someone who started a Chessable course was 3 years, we compared them to other members’ rating progression starting from that account age. That way, we could compare players at a similar point in their chess journey.
We found that in a period of 180 days, Chessable course purchasers increased their rating on average by 40.5 points, whereas those who didn’t own a course only increased their rating by 8.9 points. 40.5 is 4.55 times 8.9, so we round our figure to 4.6.
Hence, people who use Courses improve 4.6x faster!
Of course, correlation is not causation. Without a doubt, players who use Courses are also doing puzzles, reviewing games, doing lessons, and other things to improve. However, Courses seems to be an important ingredient in their success. Below you can compare Courses to other Chess.com training features.
- Puzzles: 2.5x faster
- Game Review: 2.8x faster
- Lessons: 2.9x faster
- Courses: 4.6x faster
All this is to say: we firmly believe that using Chess.com Courses is an awesome way to improve your game, and we hope you give it a try.
