CAPS - The Value of the Score? - Chess Forums

JGRenaud

Mar 8, 2017

0

#1

Hey friends, thanks in advance for reading.

After any game where I felt it wasn't decided by simply me hanging material, I like to run a deep analysis and try to understand what I did right, what I did wrong, did I miss some tactics, etc.

The Chess.com premium package shows your "CAPS score", which is supposedly a predictive value of how well you played based off what you could've done vs. what you ended up doing and how close you were to playing machine perfect chess. Supposedly, a great score is closer to mid 80s to 90s. The scores have some metric posted here: https://www.chess.com/article/view/better-than-ratings-chess-com-s-new-caps-system

Now I played this game today under 10 minute blitz control, as I'm trying to learn and enjoy the the Colle Zukertort, as it's quickly becoming my favorite opening. I feel like I'm starting to learn the point of the attack and some themes to how it works. Obviously not super well, but hey, I'm an ~1100 ish rated player, so I don't really understand anything well yet. I suck!

After analyzing the game, it said that I played pretty terrible. In fact, my opponent, who hung his knight and traded a rook for a pawn, had a higher CAPS score than me. Which I found fascinating. I thought I played a pretty solid game.

How much should I value the CAPS system when analyzing my games?

Cherub_Enjel

Mar 8, 2017

0

#2

The CAPS system is not accurate at all generally. I much prefer average centipawn loss, with personalized threshold.

JGRenaud

Mar 8, 2017

0

#3

Cherub_Enjel wrote:

The CAPS system is not accurate at all generally. I much prefer average centipawn loss, with personalized threshold.

Can you share what you're talking about and where I could make use of that information and tool?

Cherub_Enjel

Mar 8, 2017

0

#4

Unfortunately, chess.com will mod out my comment if I say it explicitly. But google "import chess game lichess" and you'll find a site with where you can "request a computer analysis" , and a white box where you can copy+paste PGNs. It basically tells you how bad your mistakes were in your games.

JGRenaud

Mar 8, 2017

0

#5

Cherub_Enjel wrote:

Unfortunately, chess.com will mod out my comment if I say it explicitly. But google "import chess game lichess" and you'll find a site with where you can "request a computer analysis" , and a white box where you can copy+paste PGNs. It basically tells you how bad your mistakes were in your games.

Ah bummer! I think you mean to say what your advice is would be automatically jumbled up. That's unfortunate. I'll go with what you've given me though, and I genuinely appreciate your high level insight. Hope I can make my way closer to you. I've been playing chess for 3 months now, and my goal by the end of the year is a large stretch, but it's 1500 OTB USCF. I know that that's very very unlikely but I'm spending 3 hours a day on Chess so hopefully that's enough. Closer to 6-8 hours on weekends.

Cherub_Enjel

Mar 8, 2017

0

#6

Yep - they will jumble up any advertisements to different sites, but I think you'll be able to find it by the google search. Average centipawn loss is also a baseline measure for checking engine use - the whole idea of centipawn loss is how different in quality your moves were, on average, from the engine's best moves.

Best of luck!

MrMojok

Mar 8, 2017

0

#7

It's another interesting way to look at a game, and probably much more interesting if you figure it for a bunch of games, as chess.com has done for GMs past and present recently.

But I wouldn't get too caught up in it. In an OTB tournament game I played last weekend, my opponent (who lost) had a CAPS of about 96%.

Cherub_Enjel

Mar 8, 2017

0

#8

2Q1C wrote:

The CAPS system is a joke. One of the reasons why I chose platinum over a diamond membership. Instead of gimmicks chess.com should take the example of other sites and allow training in analysis like replaying the move you got wrong. It's almost embarrassing that these rival sites offer these benefits for free.

I personally like gold membership the best, since you get most of the important benefits of chess.com (no ads, unlimited tournaments, opening explorer, master games library, etc.) just for being premium. I also don't typically do more than 25 tactics a day, although I'd like more lessons/day.