What are the odds of randomly playing the same person twice?

? 4 odds out of what

4 odds out of evens?

I no math

uh ook

I mean, I'm being a little silly of course...

I feel like if you're smart enough to ask the question, then you should be smart enough to estimate the answer... IDK.

Chess.com tells you the number of people in live chess, and their stats lets you calculate the overall proportion of players in your rating range. You'd apply that proportion to the number of players online for a rough estimate.

Although if you want to be more accurate, you'd assume higher odds since most potential pairings are already in a game or idle.

And of course chess.com may not allow it (or be biased against it). Top players often rematch so as to avoid waiting for a pairing, which makes more sense if chess.com tries to avoid (or doesn't allow) rematches.

they allow it

its happened before many times

I remember playing you twice earlier today, but it wasn't even surprising because it happens very often to me that i see the same person twice if i am doing a fairly long bullet run.

Ok, well back of the napikan calculation...

OP plays blitz and is rated 1200.

According to this:
https://www.chess.com/leaderboard/live

there are about 1 million 1100 to 1300 players out of 23 million total.

So 1 in 23 applied to the currently 180,000 players online gives about 8000 potential opponents.

According to lichess at the moment there are about 40K players playing 18K games, meaning about 10% of people are idle (i.e. 90% of people are in a game).

So let's drop the estimate down from 8000 to about 1000.

So roughly 1 in 1000 for the OP in blitz right now.

nice

so much for not a math person

To be sure we'd probably want to do the same calculation for someone like me... because the same method might produce something silly like 1 in 10... which would mean (roughly) every 10 games I have a 50/50 chance of repeating my most recent opponent at least once... which from experience is definitely not true.

It has happened to me before :0

It happens. Especially if you play at regular times each day, you catch people doing the same. I only had it once when I was under 1000 or so, but it happens more lately

Careful, he'll accuse you of being a bot/AI/a plant sent here to trick him. Untreated psychosis

It happened on 10 Aug 2023 to me, I played dieortis2 ON THE SAME DAY!

Very common

It's probably not random selection then, I guess....

I have 600 bullet, regular 1 minute bullet, and one game after I played a guy, I got him again. I lost to him that time, after I had beaten him so I asked him for a rematch and then beat him to prove I'm not fraud and that Gojo Satoru is not a fraud.