why is Chess.com giving so easy puzzles?

And now I got to 3000 but feeling not proud at all, not like when I got to 2800 half a year ago and even told friends at work about it!

Anyone have solutions? I came back from a break and the puzzles are all 1400-1600. I appreciate the refresher but I am ready to be forced to calculate long lines again.. bring back my 2700s and random 3100s that would either be impossible or easy.

In a way this new system reflects what can be done with normal playing rating, you can play vs much lower rated players with the same risk/reward of ELO.

But the problem is that it did not use to be like this for puzzles, it's just something that annoyingly got changed.

That's certainly not the intention.

Hi Martin_Stahl,

I am not calling your integrity into question but I would disagree with you. The site’s take over of Chessable has also resulted in massive price increases for courses. I thought the site was about making chess more accessible to everyone. What they did on Chessable has had the opposite. Not to hijack this thread but my last remaining gripe is the Fair Play process. When you report someone it just falls into a dark void. You never get any feedback, where in the process your report is……Lastly, as a billion dollar company I would think they could put some more money into computing power to scale out cheat detection.

Now all that said…..I do like playing here but it has improvements to make.

Happy Saturday!

Thanks for the recommendation.

It's a little crummy having to re-do the WHOLE puzzle if you get one step wrong, though. That takes some getting used to.

There are fair criticisms that can be made.

Can't say much about Chessable costs, as I never purchased anything, but their setup is extremely different and the bulk of course pricing goes to the course creators. Hosting, traffic, and development costs don't generally go down, so it wouldn't surprise me that overall prices increased to keep things running and maintain author percentages

But where do you get that Chess.com is a billion dollar company? Everything I've seen publicly posted puts gross revenues well below that level (by a lot). Scaling out and making it possible to analyze around 20 million games every day would likely not be feasible financially.

I read it in Financial Times or something like that a year ago if memory serves (the valuation). Now was their reporting accurate I have no idea but I would be inclined to think it is close.

I just did a quick Google search and could not find the article.

Last public information I've seen, earlier this year was yearly gross revenues of around 150 million.

Agree with others, if I'm rated over 3400, I should not be getting puzzles in the 1500-1700 range.

Being a privately held company we will never know with certainty. Also generally a companies value is four to five times its gross income from what I understand.

The valuation can be a multiple, but that's a very rough estimate and doesn't take into account a large number of factors. Even if the site had a 5x multiple evaluation, it's still not a billion dollar company and it doesn't mean there's sufficient net revenue increase spending massively. 🤔

That is the problem with it being privately held. We will never know what it is worth which is fine it is privately help ie: none of my business. Though, with the cost of cycles in the cloud being pretty reasonable I don’t think it is unreasonable for the them invest more to better police the cheating issue on the site.

A company that valued their customers experience would first finish the update, test it internally, and then release the complete update together with an anouncement, providing reasoning and explanations. This would lead to a smooth transition and little unconvinience to the customers. Sure, there are often still minor quirks initially, but nothing on the scale like we are currently witnessing.

Now, what chesscom is currently doing is quite the opposite. Apparently, parts of the update are still missing and also are the customers testing the partial update right now. Sure, internal testing is somewhat expensive. So from my point of view, chesscom is just saving on those expenses.

It doesn't. I'm sorry but the difficulty setting "Standard" gives me 1100 puzzles and "Extra Hard" gives me +5 -22 average. no point of doing puzzles, lost all of its fun.

same?!?!?!?!

It also makes it a lot less fun to compare with friends. "You're 3400? Oh so am I. Wait what level puzzles are you selecting? Oh I'm doing the extra hard ones". etc. Makes the rating meaningless.