The road to Legends Club

If you have played some games of Chess on chess.com you probably know about the Players League. A league based on actively scoring wins in bullet, blitz or rapid format. Being at the top of your division helps you promote to a higher division. The most active players get the opportunity to not only join the highest division, but also join a certain club. What does it take to join? After roughly a year I joined the Chess.com Legends Club! (and here is how I got there...)

Everyone who plays a game is placed in a division depending on how active you are on the website or mobile app. "Win your division of 50 players each week by earning the most trophies!" from chess.com/leagues. So I did. When the Players League was introduced, I started in the lowest division like everyone else . 

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The Wooden division - The introduction (2021 - Week 51)

The Players League is introduced. A large group of the chess.com community starts very actively collecting trophies to be promoted to the next league. Another league outside the Wooden division does not exist at the moment. So a race has started for who can be the first to reach the highest division. The 20 highest-scoring players promote to the Stone division. After a week the results are in. I became #7th with 290 trophies. I mainly played rapid games, because this time control was easy to manage on your mobile phone and I had best chances to gain a lot of rating really fast. Assuming I won about 50% of my games and a 10|0 game can take between 15 to 20 minutes it took me about 9h30 to 13h of playing in the first week.

These days, it is unthinkable that you need this many trophies to get promoted from the Wooden division. In fact, it is not possible to be relegated from a division. This created a huge inflation of points in the first weeks to promote every week. While there was a considerable deflation for trophies in the lower divisions. A year later, you literally had enough with 0 points to get into the top 15 of the Wood division!

The Bronze division - I went insane... (2022 - Week 1)

Now only 12% of all active players made it to the Bronze division. I was still determined to keep promoting to a higher league, but after the first few hours, I saw all players from the league collecting hideous amount trophies. Collecting trophies became my number one priority in the second week of the new year. Several hours were spent every day to stay near the top of the league. You noticed that everyone wanted to fight for a spot in the top ten. I noticed to myself that I had to invest an unhealthy amount of time at the expense of other important things in life. Every free minute in the day was being used. I therefore had to switch to a shorter time format. At the time, I was underrated for blitz and could therefore still earn points quickly. Unfortunately, I did make the mistake of playing 5|0 which is probably one of the least efficient ways to earn trophies quickly as you earn just as much with a 3|0 game in almost half the time. Besides, I made the other mistake of not playing in arenas where a lot of bonus points could be earned. I made a deal with myself that no matter what happened that after this week I would take a break from chess.com and drop out of the race to become the first player to make it to Legend division. But for now, my competitive heart spoke and I wanted to win! I secured the 8# place with a ridiculous 1,362 trophies. Considering the following assumptions; winning 50% of the games would have resulted in approx 540 games played in one week. I must have played somewhere between 72h and 90h of online chess in one week.

(Nowadays, this amount of trophies would be considered a ?? move)

The Silver division - a lesson learned (2022 - Week 6)

I needed a break from chess. I was now in the top 2.5% of most active players who were still in the race to be the first chess.com Legends club member. The upcoming week I got a grand total of 54 trophies and became (almost) dead last in my division. Apparently, I was the only one feeling burned out, because most players in the division kept collection trophies the best they could. This resulted in the insane trophy inflation even to reach 44th place! Or even worse... collect 1800 trophies and still not promote ?? Funny enough, the winner of the 2022 - Week 2 division has been caught cheating and got banned from the website. I wonder how many more divisions were filled with cheaters in the top rankings (?). 

For a long time, I thought I had reached my highest division. I was not going to invest so much time in chess again in a single week. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I did take into account a small fact. After all, it was not possible to be relegated at this point. So this meant that many more players had to make it to the Silver division at some point. Theoretically, every user of the website would eventually enter the top division. (as long as no new accounts are created, of course). I did not venture a calculation on this theory of course, but my expectation was that it could take months for access to higher divisions to become possible with little effort. In practice, however, it did not take months but only a few weeks. After being stuck in the Silver division for the second week, it became abundantly clear that the racers for the first member for Legends Club were long gone. A group of calmer and casual players were now also reaching the Silver division as I had done a few weeks earlier. The threshold for promotion to Crystal division also became a lot lower. Instead of not having enough of 1800 trophies, a mere 300-400 trophies was now enough. Thus, a few weeks later, I too was promoted to Crystal division. I collected 661 trophies which was enough for a safe #2 place. I still didn't play in arena. I would continue to make this mistake for many more weeks, but I avoided the 5|0 blitz format a bit. 

The Crystal division - Something to prove (2022 - Week 13)

I took a longer break once again. After all, only the top 3 in Crystal league would advance and there was still a high threshold to promote. I liked the blue badge on my profile and I was proud of what I had reached so far. This proud feeling would eventually fade. It came apparent that the threshold to promote became lower each week. So were 1300 trophies required to promote in the seventh week, but only just over 600 trophies a few weeks later. There was another change happening at this time. I got a job offer to work in an engineering company starting the 18th of April (well timed on Easter Monday ). This would cut in the amount of free time I recently had available to dedicate to climbing, drinking beers and Chess. Also, I had to prove myself. I never won my division. For one final time I would attempt to reach #1 place. So I did. With 860 trophies I became #1!

The Elite division - Out of nowhere (2022 - Week 27)

I never looked back at the Players League in the months that followed. I did play arena tournaments online with friends more and more often (with a few beers). And so, completely unexpectedly, I achieved enough trophies to be promoted to the Champions division. There had simply been so much deflation in points after six months that promotion was possible without much effort. For the first time, I also took some arena points. A nice bonus. Something I would finally use more often later on. An effective 3|2 time format helped me reach a total of 385 trophies and a 2# place. 

The Elite division - Week 27

I do like to compare this division with the racers six months prior. I am amazed by the sacrifice they made to reach this amount of points back in January. 

The (very first) Elite division - Week 6

The Champion division - The grand final (2023 - Week 4)

After the summer of 2022, I started a master's degree abroad. In the first few months of this study, I was unable to pick up chess. After a few months, however, I became depressed about the study I had started and started picking up chess again. By Christmas, I had decided to drop the study. I played chess for a little over a year and decided to summarise my experiences in my first year of my unprofessional chess career in a blog on chess.com. I had so much fun writing about my experiences that I would write a blog more often. The only problem is finding an interesting topic as a 1300 rated chess player. I am not a chess master, do not give wise lessons, have not played over the board tournaments or followed very many careers of super GMs. These are often the topics written about in the most popular blogs on chess.com. What topic was accessible to a chess noob? My eye fell on the website's achievements. Maybe an achievement hunt was interesting enough to write about? I soon found out with the achievements, though, that this was not why I liked chess so much. I wanted to play tournaments, improve myself in rating and learn new tactics. That's when I came up with the following idea. I was determined to win an online rapid 10|0 Swiss tournament (1200 <1499). Such a tournament was organised a few times a day and fell well into my rating range. I tried to participate in this tournament a few times a week, but only got a 2nd place with a 4-1-0 score. Lost the losing game on time. However, I did find out that with small successes at these arenas I had won quite a few trophies in the Champion division. Maybe enough to win! I switched my focus to getting enough trophies in the same week. And so I finished first in my division again. A couple more bullet games and gathering a total of 694 trophies secured #1! Red Bull Max Verstappen Style. 

The Champion division - Week 4 (2023)

I needed a lot fewer points than the first chess.com Legend Club member, MITerryble. 

The very first Legend Club member with 21,342 trophies

But what happens and when you join the Legend Club? In 2022, every month there was an arena with prizes. There are prizes for different rating ranges which is super cool! Often won by people who push the limit of ToS though, but that's a minor side note. Since December, however, the club has passed the quarter of a million participants. Now the format for the club is being reworked and time will tell what the future of the club will look like. Herewith the latest statement from chess.com about the club; 

From Chess.com:

Important Announcement!

Hello Legends Club members!

It's been a joy to see how many people have pursued making this club and playing in the monthly arena. Over a quarter million members and we're continuing to grow!

We want to deliver the best possible experience for players in this club — in light of this, we're going to pause the Legends Arena monthly events. 

Heading into this new year, we've reached the same conclusion that many of you have. The sheer size of this club coupled with the interest of the players involved means that we need to re-think the current format.

Rest assured that we're working on better alternatives to these monthly events, and you'll be updated as soon as there are any new developments.

Thank you all and we look forward to seeing you participate this new year!

I'm sorry I didn't get to play the arenas with the early birds of the Legends Club, but after writing this blog, I know exactly which topic suits my blogs best: A trip down to memory lane. A lot has changed and they were great memories. A story worth sharing. Many more memories will be made. 

See you soon at the Legends Club!

Loïc Barré