Low Rapid / High Daily elo 🤨

I somewhat fit the bill of what you are talking about: I am 1800 Daily rating right now, but my Rapid isn't even 1300.

Here's the short and sweet of why this is common:

1. A much higher daily rating (compared to Rapid and Blitz) is just easier if you regularly check your games and make sure you don't flag. From personal experience, lots of somewhat lower rated players sign up for tournaments and then time out (either because they aren't serious about it - or they weren't super familiar with how correspondence worked and just let the games run out). This is free Daily rating. This lack of seriousness results in an inflated rating in the Daily game rating pool.
2. Game databases. It is legal in Chess.com Daily games to consult game databases. There are some extremely powerful and extensive resources to help navigate the opening and middlegame. I have a personal theory: if a player is at least 1000 rapid rating and learns how to navigate through a large game database, then that player would have an opening/middlegame advantage in every single game against other Daily players rated <1700.

Age is also a factor.

I'm approaching 70, and while I don't play fast time controls I am sure that if I did my rapid or blitz rating would be hundreds of points lower than my daily rating.

Some people are better at different time controls. For sample, the faster the time control the better opening traps work. The longer time control the more you need to be able play a more complete game, opening, middle, and end game.

It is, before I timeouted around 40 games on another site, I was 1700-1850 in Daily chess over there. Even now after so many timeouts, my rating is sitting at low 1500s.

On Rapid chess and faster? I struggle to reach 900 elo in those here, which makes for an 800 point difference.

Reporting them is incredibly stupid. If someone is better at slower, Classical-like time controls, it does not necessarily indicate they are cheating.

Additionally, many players suffer from the opposite problem. They are good at fast time controls but they suck at slower time controls, for example this guy I played on this site, in Daily:

https://www.chess.com/member/maedhros64

I went 1.5/2 in Daily against this guy. Was not even close (for him, lol). He would struggle in Classical time controls, especially in >2h games

I guess this isn't too old to reply to? Although 1500 daily and 500 rapid (your example) would be quite something (unless they only played one rapid game, lost, and gave it up).

But as a ~1500 rapid, I'm expecting to be over ~1700 daily when my rating there settles down. First, daily ratings simply are over 200 points higher on chess.com average (you can look for yourself, it's really closer to 300). Second, I generally play about 2 games at a time, while I have opponents with 20 games, so there is no way they are really paying attention. Third, how long to you spend per move? If I spend fifteen minutes, that's a short amount of time. Fourth, the database is allowed, and you can use other ones too, as long as you don't turn on an engine--which I feel like many people don't bother much.

Bottom line, your daily rating "should be" higher than your rapid, by quite a bit, just given the population mean is over 900 (for daily) vs under 600 (for rapid). And then it's just a matter of how hard you are trying.

I know this is kinda irrelevant but i found a gm with 600 daily rating

I play quite a lot daily games and my Daily rating (around 1560) is still below my rapid rating (around 1640). I started from 400 level so it took some time to grind the games. However, I would say that I nearly never run into someone whose daily rating exceeds their best non-daily rating. Often the daily ratings are significantly lower than their best non-daily ratings. I have played people who are lets say around 1800 - 2000 rapid or blitz and their daily ratings have been 1200 - 1500. The reason I suppose is that they just haven't played a lot of daily games.

It is interesting if you are paired often with people with much higher daily rating than their non-daily rating since it is exactly opposite to my findings and we play around same level at daily.

People who only play blitz time controls have not developed any kind of medium / long term planning or positional play. Which explains why they could be 1800 at blitz but considerably lower when it comes to a time control where one or two move combinations will only get you so far.

Daily games are played under rules for correspondence chess. This means that one can use books, published analyses, and databases. One just cannot use a move-generating engine. This means that even a beginner can play a “book” opening and reach a solid muddle-game position. I suspect that, even though beginners will then make mistakes when left to their own devices, they are likely to win many games because their opponent has forfeited or hangs material.

I only started doing daily games yesterday, but so far my experience is that when I have a basically unlimited amount of time to think about my moves, the results are much prettier than how I play on a time limit. The fact that you have to confirm moves (meaning I can tentatively "play" a bad move, then take it back without consequences when I realize it's a blunder) also helps.

But then again, I haven't quite gotten to *my* skill level yet. We'll see if that continues when I do get there.

It's true that this is allowed, but not true that many do it. Whenever I suspect this is happening, which is close to never at all, I use the Blocking function.

You can do this with Rapid games too, Just get a 'move confirmation' extension, perfectly legal... I actually did ask: anything that doesn't suggest moves or help you decide a move, is fine. It's available for any chromium based browser. I like it just to avoid mouse slips. Chrome or Edge for example, also for Firefox.

move confirmation for chess.com

I'm sorry to tell you that this is how Daily is SUPPOSED to be played. It is intended to be the Internet equivalent of Postal Chess, which does indeed allow (and expect) its players to use the appropriate reference materials.

You have been punishing people for playing the game the way it was INTENDED to be played.

Don't feel sorry. I never thought anything else. I'm only telling you that's not the way it's usually played, legal or not, not at my level.