The secret to winning Chess.com leagues, week after week. Get all the way to Legend League!

What are leagues all about?

In case you don't know anything about Chess.com's leagues, the purpose of them is to give a weekly opportunity for players to 'win' in a division of around 50 other players.

You get placed into a division the moment you play a normal auto-match pool game (including regular game play, open seeks, arenas, and tournaments), and the others in your division will have coincidentally joined at about the same time as you. The others in your division won't necessarily be players from the same part of the world as you, or with a similar rating to you, or anything like that - their only connection with you (unless by chance) is that they joined at about the same time as you.

To win, to will need to earn the most 'trophies' (trophies are simply points gained as a result of winning or drawing games). For Bullet format games, a win gets you 3 trophies, a draw gets you 1, and a loss gets you nothing. For Blitz format games, a win gets you 9 trophies, a draw gets you 3, and a loss gets you nothing. For Rapid format games, a win gets you 15 trophies, a draw gets you 5, and a loss gets you nothing. You can earn extra trophies by competing in an arena in your chosen format. By the way, Hyper Bullet (10 second or 30 second formats) doesn't give you any trophies.

Chess.com warns you that any attempt to game the system (such as throwing games to lower your rating for subsequent games, or playing multiple games or intentionally only playing lower rated opponents) might result in you losing your trophies or your account being terminated.

If you manage to finish top of your division by Sunday 12pm Pacific Time (UTC -7), you get promoted to the next league. You can't go down a league, so once you get promoted, you can enjoy your new status forever (or until your account is terminated! LOL). That's a nice feature if you're going off on holiday or just taking a break from Chess for a while.

You don't necessarily have to finish top either. If you're in the Wood league, you only really need to finish in the top 20 to get promoted. If you're in Stone, you only need to finish in the top 15. If you're in Bronze, you only need to finish in the top 10. If you're in Silver, you only need to finish in the top 5. If you're in Crystal (yes, I know it's annoying that this one isn't named Gold), you only need to finish in the top 3. If you're in Elite, you only need to finish in the top 3 as well. If you're in Champion, you DO need to finish top though. And that results in you getting promoted to Legend League, which is the highest. There's no promotion available at that point.

If you haven't already realised, you can find out what league you're in by clicking on the cup icon at the top left of your profile.

What's the point???

Some people enjoy the feature - the further gamification of the Chess experience. And some don't. Which side of the fence you choose to sit on is entirely up to you. So maybe you don't feel there is a point. And that's fine. For me, I noticed there were various league awards (achievements which display as badges on my profile) and I simply wanted to collect them. And there's a small measure of prestige being in a higher league. But some things don't matter at all to some people and I totally get that.

Who am I?

I'm a nobody and I'm not particularly good at Chess. I very much enjoy playing though, and I believe I'm learning from each game and improving. I've made some pretty good friends through the game and that's another part of why I enjoy it. But I've managed to go from Wood league all the way up to Legend league with an ELO between 400 and 1,000 (it rose over time, as I played through the leagues and got a bit better). The point is I'm no Magnus Carlsen and I never will be. I would describe myself as high beginner / low intermediate level. Hopefully that gives you confidence that whatever your level is, you can reach Legend league without too much trouble.

What was my experience, advancing through the leagues?

I didn't find opponents any more difficult to play against as I advanced. And that was to be expected because (as I mentioned before) the only determinant of who you find in your division is who else has played their first game of the week at around the same time as you.

Well done for making it this far, reading my blog. Now onto the more interesting stuff. I want to share a few useful things I found out.

1) You're free to join the new week's division at the very moment the old division ends, in other words a few seconds past 12pm Pacific Time (UTC -7) on a Sunday. But doing that means you'll have to compete for a full week against players who are probably very keen to get started on winning, and you don't really want to compete against keen people because it makes your life harder :) I made that mistake a few times, and often found the people at the top of the division were amassing trophy counts of 3,000 - 10,000. To put that in perspective, 10,000 trophies is equal to winning over 650 Rapid games in a week, which is more than 90 per day. If each of those games takes up to 20 minutes to play, it's hard to imagine those players even spend any time eating or sleeping. Instead, I often chose to wait until part way through the week before joining, and I found that paid off nicely. I tended to get placed in divisions with far fewer keen players and those at the top of the division rarely scored more than 500 trophies from the point of joining until close of play on Sunday. That's a much easier proposition to compete against. I tested my theory by joining later and later in subsequent weeks but there seemed to be a point where I had joined too late, and got placed in a weird division which ran for the rest of the week up on Sunday (as normal) PLUS the whole of the following week! The sweet spot seemed to be lunchtime on Tuesday. That gave me a division with only 5 days left to play until the promotions were handed out.

2) I exclusively played Bullet games. It's so easy to blunder pieces when moving incredibly quickly, so initially I hated it but the reason Bullet is best is as follows: 

• • • If you play Rapid, you might earn 15 trophies from something like a 20 minute game. So that's 45 trophies per hour, assuming back to back games and assuming a 100% win rate. Let's continue to assume back to back games but let's assume only a 50% win rate, for realism. So that's actually 22.5 trophies per hour.

• • • If you play Bullet, you might earn 3 trophies from something like a 2 minute game. That's 90 trophies per hour. Again, assuming back to back games and a 50% win rate, you'll earn 45 trophies per hour. And if you play enter a tournament 'arena' (you'll see that in Chess.com when you click Play), you can earn bonus points for each game depending on the nature of the win - how fast was it, etc. I frequently found myself earning 75-120 trophies per hour from Bullet tournaments. So with that potential, I could play for just 2 hours per day and comfortably earn 200 trophies. Over the 5 days I was competing (Tuesday - Sunday) that was enough time to earn 1,000 trophies, which was frequently enough for a comfortable first-place position win.

3) There's some psychology involved in competing. Hopefully that doesn't surprise you. But what I'm trying to say is that if you can work harder on the first few days (Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday) using the Bullet method I've described above, and earn something like 400 trophies per day, giving you 1,200 trophies by Thursday night, that always seemed enough to demoralize my opponents, who simply gave up and hardly logged in at all for the remainder of the week. If, however, I took it easier, and 'only' scored 100 trophies per day, I was frequently chased all the way to Sunday by opponents who seemed to smell blood. Your experience might vary, of course. But I found that worked nicely, week after week. And allowed me to relax at the weekend, knowing my Sunday promotion was all but guaranteed.

Has getting to Legend league been worth it?

No.

As I mentioned before, my motivation was simply to earn all the awards for league promotions, and to get a tiny bit extra prestige on my profile. And from that perspective, it was something I wanted to achieve.

So why do I say it wasn't worth it? I think overall it felt like a chore, grinding out wins hour after hour. It made chess into a bit of a misery, rather than a relaxing fun experience. Once I discovered Bullet form was best, I then ignored Blitz and Rapid. And that's a shame because I really enjoy the more relaxed pace of Rapid. Blitz is just crazy (very exciting mind you but...) with the winner frequently being the person who blunders least, rather than the person who develops the most skilled attacks. So I would say that leagues (in their current format) encourage players to abandon other aspects on the game and be overly business-like with their approach, and grind out wins as quickly as possible rather than savouring each one (and running the analysis and learning how to improve from each).

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I hope this helps Thanks for your time.