Idiot chess puzzels

Beginners - be aware that chess.com puzzles are sometimes incorrect and occasionally violate the rules of chess. Worse yet, chess.com does not offer an easy method for reporting errant puzzles but is quite happy to take your money. I’ve pointed out dozens of stupid/wrong/illegal puzzles over my past year on their site but to no avail. A better and free site is ichess.org. Puzzles can be an effective training tool but beginners will not benefit by training on bad puzzles.

Can you link to some examples? I’ve tried over 5000 puzzles and found only one that was clearly wrong (had more than one correct solution). A few of them lacked distinct endings (winning a piece or mate), but they were still correct in terms of advantage. Perhaps I’ve been lucky 🤷🏻‍♂️. I find the quality to be remarkable.

Thanks for your reply  - please see below for two recent screen shots. And this doesn't even begin to cover puzzles throwing away high value pieces for no advantage. Then there is the roughly one-out-of-four puzzles showing back-rank mates  - ok, I get it already - a back-rank check is a valid move and devastating move but is seldom seen when playing anyone more experienced than a beginner. PS - don't let my 400 rating fool you. While I have only been playing a little over a year I do pretty well against intermediate players <1600 or so and like you I have played several thousands of puzzles both on chess.com and on ichess. In the two screen shots you can see a pawn moving diagonally into an empty square and a king refusing to recognize a check - this screen shots are the way the puzzle appeared before I even attempted a move.  

 

 

whoops - accidently copied two of the same screen shots - here's the other I talked about

En passant is a move and the second image is probably chess.com lagging because the king is highlighted but the square it moved to hasn't

en passant discovers a skewer on king and rook (though en passant can be tricky if you dont see the initial pawn move)

the second i dont understand since it says black to move but white king is in check but the position suggests black “sacrificing” knight on f3 with blacks queen and rook ready to deliver some serious punishment if white takes gxf3

(there is also a hanging knight on c7)

nevertheless, i dont disagree that there are terrible puzzles and the puzzle ratings themselves dont really help matters

some of the wonkiest/clunkiest/confusing puzzles are level 400’s on a puzzle rush where there is no “back rank” tactic for the first 5 or so

and the 1600-1700 puzzles around 30ish in puzzle rush are almost all geared to try and fool the player

@daxpoo "though en passant can be tricky if you dont see the initial pawn move" - precisely, since the white pawn was in  c4 when the puzzle was presented.  Maybe it was a glitch on my smartphone that the opening pawn move was not displayed. I'm all for challenging puzzles but not puzzles that require me to be psychic, Thank you for your post.

In the first puzzle the white pawn is highlighted, as is the square the white pawn came from.

Thus no psychic ability required, anymore.

The puzzles can be weird on here especially if you're not in the puzzle mindset. But I must say I've never come across an illegal move in a puzzle.

I don't think I've ran into any illegal puzzles but I just started them so maybe I'll look out.

I like the puzzles, being able to analyse them with the engine afterwards usually shows why the moves are as they are. 

I have done thousands of puzzles on this site so far, and I have only encountered one puzzle with multiple solutions as well. I think that all the answers they provide are at least one of the best, not outright wrong ones, so I'm not sure which puzzle are you referring to. 

And for today's "puzzle puzzle" - apparently this black queen on e6 has super powers. After trying several other moves, all of which were deemed wrong, I pressed the Hint then Move button - this is the "correct" move according to the puzzle god. Don't get me wrong, this is a nifty move it's just that when I play chess in person my opponents get miffed when I make a "super-queen" move like this - how can I explain this move to my vanquished opponents? After all if I were to use just a "normal" queen to take the white bishop on e3 that white pawn on f2 or the white queen on c5 are likely to "harsh my buzz" - Am I missing something?
powers