"This is DEFINITELY intentional by the site"
Google "Hanlon's Razor".
Why is the elo on chess.com so bad?
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Sep 17, 2022
0
#64
Brilliantly explained!! I wish more people understood simple math! This broken rating system was purposely designed this way which is why this site will never be my primary playing site and I'm surely never going to pay a dime to play here. Thanks!
So, after reading through all the old posts, I will say that it definitely feels like a real slog to grind games out to push your elo up.
I would say that my elo tends to swing around 50-ish points or so.
Like, my elo will hang around a 950 for a while or a 1050 but can dip as low as 900 or 1000 depending on the time control.
i definitely agree that it does feel bad that having a good day (something on the order of 10 wins and 3 or 4 losses) will generally only net you around 20 to 50 points depending on how long it has been and the time control and all that.
I would like it If I could have three numbers prominently displayed to help my ego.
1. Peak elo in the time control so you can see when you perform better than your previous best.
2. Average total elo (basically the current number)
3. performance today. Like the elo you get when you start just showing how good the system thinks you preformed today/this session
Like, it would be nice to see feedback on me playing poorly when I don't get sleep and how much the dip is since that way I can try to correct for that aspect.
and I think having the peak elo would help mak losing the average elo feel less bad, for me at least, since I can point to the more static number and say, "I can play at that level when I am at my best". plus it gives a clear goal to work toward.
maybe this is a bad idea, but it would be nice to help with adding long-term, and short-term feedback to the system and would help motivate me. Bonus points if you can toggle the extra numbers on and off.
The rating system is pissing me off though. I'm not a grandmaster, so I will maybe win like three to five games in a row. But what makes me mad is that in those five games, I will maybe gain 35 points collectively. Then I will lose one game and my score drops down by like 50 points and the other guy goes up by 82 even though previously, when all the games before, they lost like only 14 points or something. I try my best with these games on rapid and it kicks me down into oblivion after I lose one game, and all of the sudden I had barely scraped my way back up to 813 and now after two losses I am back down to 644. They need to improve how the points are determined because that is what makes me lose interest in the website. I can actually play chess, I have been playing with my father since I was somewhere around the age of 4 or 5, but this game straight goes "nope, score says you suck, lets put you with all the beginners." (also why do most of the beginners resign after two moves or so?). Anyway, I am rambling on. tldr; They need to fix their scoring system, it don't work.
JamesonTeeling wrote:
The rating system is pissing me off though. I'm not a grandmaster, so I will maybe win like three to five games in a row. But what makes me mad is that in those five games, I will maybe gain 35 points collectively. Then I will lose one game and my score drops down by like 50 points and the other guy goes up by 82 even though previously, when all the games before, they lost like only 14 points or something. I try my best with these games on rapid and it kicks me down into oblivion after I lose one game, and all of the sudden I had barely scraped my way back up to 813 and now after two losses I am back down to 644. They need to improve how the points are determined because that is what makes me lose interest in the website. I can actually play chess, I have been playing with my father since I was somewhere around the age of 4 or 5, but this game straight goes "nope, score says you suck, lets put you with all the beginners." (also why do most of the beginners resign after two moves or so?). Anyway, I am rambling on. tldr; They need to fix their scoring system, it don't work.
Unless your account is new/inactive for several years this will never happen
Jan 1, 2024
0
#69
JamesonTeeling wrote:
They need to fix their scoring system, it don't work.
Alternatively, you might learn how the rating system works.
The amount of points gained or lost in a game depends on several factors:
1) Who wins, loses or draws. Obviously.
2) Which player is higher rated, and by how much. You gain very little by beating a player that you are EXPECTED to beat. You gain a lot more points by beating a higher-rated player, and you lose a lot more points if a lower-rated player beats you.
3) How many games each player has played recently at this particular time-control (Blitz, Rapid, Daily, etc). If you haven't played many Rapid games lately, then your Rapid rating has not had a chance to properly track any changes in your playing strength, so the rating system allows a bigger rating swing for each loss, draw or win. If you've been playing a lot of Rapid lately, then your rating changes will be small because the system assumes that your rating should be fairly accurate and up-to-date.
Link me to the games, and I can probably explain why the numbers worked the way they did.
Gotta say, I find the premise of the OP wrong.
I played for a couple months on another site. Came back here, my rating climbed rapidly. Why? Because the system has a built-in way to correct for long gaps, by increasing the volatility of your rating if you go idle.
It is there solely to avoid mismatch pairings, which is does more often than not.
Jun 29, 2024
0
#72
Ca_boom wrote:
Its honestly a really bad system because it is encouraging people to spam new accounts. When you first make an account and win a random game you get +200 elo so you jump to 1400 with one game or if you lose one game you jump down to 1000/1050. This is DEFINITELY intentional by the site so that people make new accounts constantly and thus the site seem to have a lot of traffic because after 10-20 games you only get 6-7 elo PER GAME. That's incredibly low because lets say i have an old account at chess.com where my elo is 600 (when in reality my real elo is 1300 now). In order to get to my REAL elo i have to win more than 100++ games.... and imagine if those games are 30 mints RAPID. This is RIDICULOUSLY slow. Problem number 2 is that with so many new accounts on chess.com you cannot possibly know how strong your opponent is at the range of 1100 to 1400 elo or the range were the new accounts are being put in general. You can face a PRO who just started or made a new account, a cheater who made a fresh account to cheat or a complete beginner. It makes the elo 1100-1400 and any other were new accounts are put an illusion. Why cant we just get more points when we are on a win streak? Why do we get 200+ points when we have a fresh account but when we dont we get 6-7?
This elo system is super unbalanced and needs fixing. Please just improve it because unless you are not a pro and you play against pros at high elo (were you basically play with the same people all the time because they are very few up there) this number means nothing.
And even if you are not convinced about my argument i have one more. I asked 5 friends with a real elo at chess who also play chess.com. 2 of them had way higher elo at chess.com than their real elo and 3 of them had lower with the second person having way lower (250+ elo difference) . This also proves that chess.com elo is unbalanced.
Let's say you are a 1600 rated player, and have just started a chess.com account. The options for starting elo are 1200 or 1800. (all hypothetical, I don't remember the exact numbers.) Rather than make you play hundreds of easy games against low players to get your actual rating, chess.com will give you a lot of elo per win to get to it quickly. Ofc after the first few games, once you've reached your desired elo, you'll be getting very few points for games.
"Why cant we just get more points when we are on a win streak?" Because chess doesn't work that way. ELO is a way of determining your skill. Your skill is based on wins, losses, and draws. How many of those you had at once is not a matter of skill.
Jun 29, 2024
0
#73
KetoOn1963 wrote:
Say you have an OTB rating of 1800. You play in an OTB tournament, and finish with a rating of 1784. You did not suddenly forget 16 rating points of chess knowledge. That 1784 represents your performance in that tournament.
About 600 years ago i played in Las Vegas at the National Open. I was a 1600 player at the time. I played up in the Under 2000 section. I finished with a rating of 1794. I did not suddenly develop 100+ rating points of chess knowledge. It is an estimate of how i did in that tournament.
"That 1784 represents your performance in that tournament." Not necessarily. The loss of ELO has nothing to do with how well you played, only how much you lost. Basically, you lose the same amount of ELO for a game if you played like a 100, vs if you played like a 1000.
Jun 29, 2024
0
#74
Ca_boom wrote:
blueemu wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glicko_rating_system
The big rating swings when you first join are intentional, yes. It is to enable your rating to "home in" on its proper value as quickly as possible.
Consider this case:
A new player has no idea what his proper rating should be. All he knows is that he regularly beats the other kids at his school. When he joins, he picks a strong initial rating (1800).
In fact, he is only 1000 strength. He doesn't know this, because he has never faced real competition before.
If he was using a simple rating system (say, plus 8 points for a win, minus 8 points for a loss) it would take 100 lost games before his rating sank from 1800 to its natural value of 1000. At that point, he would be matched against other 1000-strength players, and would win about as many games as he lost.
But with the Glicko-2 rating system, he will drop to 1000 within six or eight games, and from then on will face competition of his own skill level.
Yes, but thats only if the only other option is for him to lose 6-7 elo per game and not more. What if everyone starts at a base elo lets say 1200 or 1000 or even BETTER you start with no elo and you get your placement elo after 10 games that you will play depending on how much you win or lost and by who and then you get or lose 25+- points every game instead of 6-7. When you are having a winning streak you will get more points and when you are in a losing streak you will get less and less until you start winning again. That way your elo will have the ability to accelerate with your skill lvl. I feel this would be a much more balanced environment.
"What if everyone starts at a base elo lets say 1200 or 1000 or even BETTER you start with no elo and you get your placement elo after 10 games that you will play depending on how much you win or lost and by who and then you get or lose 25+- points every game instead of 6-7. When you are having a winning streak you will get more points and when you are in a losing streak you will get less and less until you start winning again."
OKKK...let's start dissecting this. First of all, starting with a set ELO which is the same for everybody is a horrid idea. Imagine if a 600 and a 2600 start at the same ELO. Smart pairing, right? And who would want to slog through 50+ games just to get to their actual skill level?
"get or lose 25+- points every game instead of 6-7." Yeah...so ELO represents your skill, right? So you got the same amount of skill from winning against a 600 vs winning against a 2600, to use my previous examples?
"When you are having a winning streak you will get more points and when you are in a losing streak you will get less and less until you start winning again."
Winning streaks...your ELO represents how much you win/lose/draw. In what order those happened doesn't make you more skilled in any way.
GambitShift wrote:
Yea, I don't understand how I lose to people lower rated and then get paired with people higher rated. Then all of a sudden I beat someone who is my highest opponent for the day. It doesn't make sense.
Even when you play the bots, they change their level. A few games will go down with blunders, then all of a sudden no blunders. It's like they are programmed to play the 3rd best move in one game and then the 1st for a while in the next.
That is in my opinion the worst part about chess.com. I'm always losing to people that have 120-150 ELO, yet I win against the 200-300 ELO people easily. If chess.com wanted to change the system, they could make it so alt accounts would get put in the same level as the main account. They also might be able to make it so every game gives, and loses the same amount as every other game. no matter the ELO
yup, ratings are a joke on chess.com
presjpolk wrote:
Gotta say, I find the premise of the OP wrong.
I played for a couple months on another site. Came back here, my rating climbed rapidly. Why? Because the system has a built-in way to correct for long gaps, by increasing the volatility of your rating if you go idle.
Umm??? Does anyone understand this?
#75 the reason you are 100 is because you blunder all the time and play horrible games... No offense... Not because you are a GM who is suffering low rating from an oppressive site
#79 Yes I agree
They're all excuses, my fellow members. Play earnestly, play a limited amount of games a day, and your rating will reach just where it should.
I was 1400 rapid just the other day, now I'm 1500+. You know why? I'm ready to move up.
Isn't climbing up easy, though? I climbed from 800 to 1300+ quite fast. In my case I keep being matched up with people in 1200+ mmr when I was in the 1000s.