My “full passport” challenge

Sometime after starting active playing on chess.com I noticed such feature of the site as “Passport”. After the first game with a player from particular country instead of empty square a flag of his country as the stamp in passport appears. When I noticed this Passport feature I already had about 150 flags from 237 possible flags collected. I decided to undertake a challenge and to collect all possible flags i. e. to play at least one game with players from all countries of the world featured on chess.com. Believe me it was not an easy task! On April 29, 2021 I successfully finished my “full passport” challenge and could congratulate myself.

I do not know is someone else did this kind of challenge before me so I want to share with you my friends and dear chess.com users my experience how successfully to finish such kind of challenge. It is just in case someone would like to try undertaking “full passport” challenge himself.

Let’s start. When choosing a playing partner majority of you are using “Custom Game” random partner selection feature or maybe accept some open challenges. In the “Open challenge” feature if you point the cursor on a challengers dot you can see the nick, his rating and the flag of his country. At the beginning of my “hunt” for 87 flags remaining to collect I tried to use this “Open challenge” feature. I tried to accept open challenges only of players from countries I never played. Although in such a way I somehow collected from 10 to 20 new flag stamps it was very had and long way of stamp collection. I understood that using only this way of flag collection I maybe never fulfill my task.

At some point I learned that exists another one and a very interesting chess.com feature:  Play – Leaderboard - Country ratings. There one can see the list all players from particular country, their ratings and also what is very important their current activity on chess.com i. e. are they online or not. I also noticed that if clicking on selected player one can use friendship feature “Add friend” and another feature “Challenge”. At the beginning I tried to ask to accept my friendship from players representing countries I never played who had similar ratings as myself and then challenge them to play. This strategy was only partly successful because I did not paid attention to their momentary online status at first. Due to this reason I sometimes had to way several days before one or another from my chosen players could accept my challenge. Nevertheless, undertaking my passport challenge in this way after some time I had about 190 flag stamps on my “passport”. I also got more chess.com friends.

As already mentioned above I noticed that on the Country ratings list it is possible to see momentary online status of the players. I started use this possibility inviting for a friendship and challenging only those players who were online at the same time as me. What concerns smaller countries with relatively small number of players I started do not pay attention to their ratings in comparison with my own. This improvement of tactics let me successfully finish my challenge. It took me more than one day to succeed in playing the game with the player representing Turks and Caicos Islands – the last country which stamp I got in my “passport”.

Beneath I will summarise some of my insights how to undertake this challenge in the fastest way:

1.      Before you collect 150-160 flag stamps just play using “Custom Game” random partner selection feature. If you will play Bullet games you finish this stage quicker.

2.      For the last 87-77 flags do not waste your time using “Open challenge” feature. Go straight to Play – Leaderboard - Country ratings feature, ask for friendship of players which are online at the same time as you are and challenge them to play.

3.      Before challenging each player look shortly into his or her profile and find out what kind of games he or she plays (do not challenge player who plays only Bullet games to play game with 10- or 30- minutes time control and vice versa).

4.      Go to Play but instead choosing New Game choose Players. There you will see your friends who are playing online. Choose one friend or one of requested friends who is currently playing and click on his country flag. Then you will see his game with another player. Challenge him immediately after he finishes the game you are observing. The chance that your challenge will be accepted is much higher if you choose the right moment to challenge as well as if you suggest the right time control.

5.      Use Connect-Members-Friends request feature to manage the list of you potential friends. Beware that there can be only 20 persons to whom you sent friendship requests. For some players who do not answer to your friendship request and do not accept your challenges you will have to cancel your Friends request and try to find other more friendly persons from the country you are interested in to play.

6.      Make a list of counties which flag stamps still are needed. Divide this list into several separate lists paying attention to countries time zones. Try not to seek possibility to play with players from particular country if it is 3 a.m. there. It means that to have possibility to play with players from some countries you will have to be online several times a day. For example. I tried to play with some players from Asia when it was morning in Lithuania, because then it was evening in those countries i. e. most suitable time for them to be on-line and play.

Using above-described approach I could get up to 10 flag stamps daily being online on chess.com for 4-5 hours per day.

This is the first half of my story about the “full passport” challenge. In the second part of this story, I will tell you who won the challenge what the result of the games was and something more. Thank you very much if you had patience to read this text!