Why is Online play SO UNFAIR?!

For a few minutes, I'm on a winning streak and JUST got to 800 points and am intrigued to get to 850! But then, SO SO SUDDENLY, someone SO GOOD comes along and COMPLETELY CRUSHES ME. CHESS.COM CAN SEE I LOST THAT ONE, so did they give me an easier opponent? NO, THEY DID NOT. I WON 3, BUT LOST ABOUT 10 IN A ROW!!!!! HOW IS THAT FAIR?!?!?!

This is very normal. Ratings don't equal strength. You can be an 800, and get 800-870 rated opponents, but your opponents can be underrated or overrated. If this upsets you, you can always set your opponents' minimum and maximum ratings. To do this, go to the play section choose the time control you want to play, and click "Custom". There you will see "Rating Range", edit it. You'll get opponents in the rating range you set.

Fair? Chess is as fair as it gets. You start out with equal pieces and who goes first is random. You are matched against someone with similar rating and you both follow the same rules of the game. What more do you want?

Having character is accepting tough times and tough situations, enduring, persisting, and not complaining. Try that....it will pay off in other aspects of your life as well.

You're welcome.

Are you saying chess.com should throw an easy opponent your way whenever you lose?

Well, even if they do that, remember, just the way you want to win, you opponent also wants to win and if you don't play well, you will lose and lose again.

One time I had a new account, and I'd won 20 or 30 games in a row and my rating was 2000... and the next game they gave me a 1700 player who had lost his last 8 games and I crushed him in 10 moves or something lol.

Sometimes the pairings are weird, but 99% of the time they're good.

Try puzzles. After you fail one that you should have gotten right, the site will feed you an easier one just to mock you.

I do puzzles and I've long suspected that I'm being mocked. I make a good move and "BZZZZZZZZZZZZTTTTTTT. There was a better movie! You lose 14 points." Then I get one right and it's "Great job. You get 5 points."

I've never tried chess.com puzzles... ok I take that back, I tried some about 10 years ago.

I'd just finished working through Emms Ultimate Chess Puzzle Book:
https://amazon.com/Ultimate-Chess-Puzzle-Book-ebook/dp/B007M2GHL0

And I found online puzzles really disappointing. Puzzles in books were more sophisticated, for example the first or last move would be a quiet move that put the opponent in zugzwang. Some puzzles you had to figure out whether the best you could do was draw and go for the perpetual. Some puzzles the author would give you 6 moves, and then say "both players missed a tactic somewhere, find it."

Online it was just brute force "it's ALWAYS a check or capture." I assume that's how some really bad players have super high puzzle ratings... when the moves are always extremely forcing all you have to do is guess which check or capture is right.

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On the positive side, it trains a certain subset of tactics, which is being totally committed to calculating the most forcing lines... which is useful in real games (as long as that's not your only skill).

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I am billy from the Sicilian Defense opening

copy and paste me so that I can explore chess.com

The matchmaking system should be fair, and there isn't a pity system.

This is not true. There are a lot of more complex puzzles in the system.

Chess.com has plenty of puzzles with quiet moves. I do agree, though, that books are better.

I’m working though Sergey Ivashchenko, The Manual of Chess Combinations; Victor Henkin, 1000 Checkmate Combinations, and some endgame books. I tend to bounce from book to book without ever finishing one, but I do expect to finish these.

But the past few months I’ve done over 3000 puzzles here, too.

I assume that's true because there's been 10 years to improve

Still, they're lower quality than carefully hand picked puzzles, and there's an issue with super inflated ratings.

I will say that I enjoy puzzle rush specifically because it's only (or at least mostly) the most basic-baby-brute-force solutions... the habit of being blind to everything but the most forcing line is very useful as long as you can turn it on and off in your head (so to speak).

There have been puzzles similar to what you mentioned from your book in the site's database since I've been a member. It's just that many of those types of puzzles are going to be at higher rating levels. The easiest ones, the more forcing ones, are most common at lower rating levels.

I know what you mean about not completing books!

I've started to work though Yusupov's build-boost-evolution series again. We've both mentioned it to each other in the past, but the positions in his book are superb quality... a position + solution that makes me smile was worth working through even if I learned absolutely nothing... with a mindset like that I think I have a good chance to finish a book or two this time

I don't know what to say man. At that time I was giving 3 hours a day to working through the Emms book. I'd grown accustom to a certain kind of puzzle + solution. When I came online I was disappointed.

This is a 10 years old opinion that's also subjective and about an old version of the site. Everyone should take it plenty of salt grains, but that's how I felt.

I would bet that there are very few players who could not find a good challenge in the chess.com puzzles. So what if there are books with even better puzzles? Books are great, but on line puzzles have lots of advantages too.....stats, feedback, convenience......

The worst thing about book puzzles is if you want an answer for why a certain move is bad, and you can't figure it out, you have to manually set it up on some software... but when you do puzzles online you can (FINALLY) click a single button and check with an engine.

I say "finally" because it took websites eons to implement it. There were plenty of places to do puzzles online, some that even had chess engines, but none that let you check the puzzle with one click... I guess they were worried about cheaters or something.

Oh, now that you've jogged my memory, I remember the main source of my frustration...

When doing puzzles in a book, most of my time was spent working to find improvements for my opponent. If I could defeat every defensive try, then I was confident my solution was correct.

Online, especially at low ratings, sometimes the defense in the solution was extremely easy to defeat... the chess.com computer that mined the puzzle would choose the mate in 8 defense, even if that meant giving up 8 pieces to stop an incredibly obvious mate pattern... but there'd be some super difficult mate in 5, that would make the puzzle rated 800 points higher, never shown.

It was really frustrating to calculate some really nice variations over 5-10 minutes, only to find out the solution was the most obvious boring crap I'd seen during the first 60 seconds.

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Additionally, sometimes I'd rule out a really tricky line and go for something safer... remember I was used to some puzzles requiring going for a draw... only to find that lots of people rated 500 points below me got the puzzle correct by guessing a scary looking check or capture... they had no solution for the difficult lines I'd calculated.

To put it another way, in order to get harder puzzles, you were required to guess scary looking checks or captures without understanding why they worked, and many times, not even the solution would require you to justify your moves.