Solve the lag problem, chess.com

yes sometimes on my iPad I also get lag

Don't call it lag, there is a name for it: Platform Balancing Algorithm.

I have a rock solid internet connection and this lag has been a problem for years. So much so that I’m seriously thinking of switching to lichess. We’re at a point now where chess.com is too unreliable to be considered the best platform. And nothing is being done to fix it.

I actually saw my time going down yesterday while waiting for my opponent to move.... this is a joke

its funny that the support page says Page Not Found

so ,any solution anyone?

chess.com could stop making this a posh pay to win.

for starters

and this is so old so no need for commenting here a lot any more.

yes ,games could be cancelled if any of the challengers lagged for an amount of time that can do anything to save it

That speed is only to/from your (local) Internet service provider/DNS server. After that, who knows. From there it can take any number of hops to get to chess.com servers. Chess.com ‘replies’ in the same manner, taking however many hops it needs to send data back to you. Ideally the number of hops is minimized, finding the most direct (and thus fastest) route but not necessarily. It is also dynamic, i.e taking one route at one moment, a different route the next. In addition servers almost always split data packets up, each taking different routes and reassembling the data at the target server. Then there are data errors to contend with, needing to resend data packets that have checksum errors.

Finally there is simple physics to contend with; the speed of light. The distance between Peru and Japan is 15500 km. Even if you had a direct connect between Peru & Japan, no ‘overhead’, no varying # of hops in between it would still take approx 51ms to send or receive a single data packet. Thats a built in ‘lag’ of 102ms (send + receive) right there

There are a couple common network diagnostic tools to measure how/why ‘lag’ is what it is; ping and traceroute. Ping tells you how long it takes to reach an IP/destination (ping chess.com). Traceroute displays possible routes (hops) and the transit time of data packets along the way (traceroute chess.com). Note the two examples are for illustration purposes only. I seriously doubt the game servers have the same IP as the chess.com web server

yeah I just lost two games today like that. I have just started but this is a first having that issue. Frustrating since it was both games I was doing well in lol

Whenever I play puzzle rush, I notice that my opponents are always able to start playing while I myself am still waiting for the countdown to finish. In some cases, they will even get two puzzles in whille I am still waiting around, which can make the difference between winning and losing, because not only is my opponent getting extra time, it also pressures me into making stupid moves I otherwise wouldn't have made.

I can relate to other players who are experiencing random lag issues in theirlive games, as this has made the difference between me claiming a victory, or ending on a draw/loss on numerous occasions. Outside of bullet chess, there have only been a few instances where I can say that I genuinely failed to claim a win without being in a losing position through my own doing, including a game I played yesterday, that resulted in a loss on even material. 

However, this is not the game I am writing about.

The general description of the second game had multiple issues that really messed me over:

1) At one point during the game (move 35) I was clicking on my knight, and even though I was tempted to drop him on a square, I saw the bishop, so I was trying to move him back. Often enough, the game makes me click on a piece more than once to get a move -- especially in the final seconds -- and yet the game registered me as making the move, despite never taking my finger off the mouse! Effectively, I gave up my lead.

2) Fortunately, my positional advantage was superior enough that I was able to kill all of my opponent's material pieces with two pawns and promote both of them to queens. (I offered to trade one of the queens for a rook, though he ultimately traded with my rook later in the game.)

3) When I killed all of his pieces on move 63, I still had 22 seconds left on the clock versus 7.7 seconds for him (I had 26 seconds previously, but the game apparently took four seconds to register my move, despite moving my piece instantly).

In at least two of my opponent's final moves, it took him 0.1 seconds to move, and yet I was typically losing 2-3 seconds for every move I played. Even in his final move, his clock dropped from a mere 0.6 seconds to 0.4 seconds. 

Suddenly, my comfortable lead in material AND time became meaningless. When I was two moves away from a forced checkmate, the game declared my time to be expired, and because I was moderately higher-rated, I ended up losing an elo point.

(I would add a link for the game, but for some reason I am not able to paste. Needless to say, it should not be that hard to find, since I do not get that many drawn games.)

Needless to say, I was so disgusted with the game's outcome that it most likely impacted my gameplay in the next two games that I played, including one where I placed a minor piece on a square and allowed it to be captured for free after being ahead in material throughout the entire game.

Yes, I know that this is a long post, but this is something that has been on my mind for five years already, and needless to say, this was the last straw.

Unlike some other drawn/lost timeout games, my opponent had no other pieces, so it is not as though he was checking me and throwing me off balance. I already knew what needed to be done, and still the game was deducting multiple seconds per move.

In other games I have played, the following things have happened:

1) I was one move away from winning through a forced checkmate with at least 3-4 seconds left on the clock, and despite watching my opponent's timer drop to ZERO, the game showed his move, and suddenly my clock was done to ONE second! I quickly responded by trying to move into the checkmate, and the game failed to register me clicking at the required piece the first time. By the time it registered my move, it had already timed me out, causing me to lose what was otherwise a clear victory.

2) Last year -- or maybe it was the year before -- I played with an opponent who was down to just three seconds (give or take) on the clock while I had a bishop and knight advantage, and his closest pawn was multiple moves away from promotion. At this point, I figured -- based on how the clock treats me -- that this game was a done deal, so I began exchanging his pawns for minor pieces as a way to distract him. Not only was he able to kill all those pieces while barely losing a fraction of a second, he was then able to promote not one, but TWO queens, and then chase me around the board while simultaneously capturing my pawns. Even while his clock dropped to a fraction of a second, the game would continuously upgrade his remaining time back to 1-2 seconds. If I had known that the clock would get all stupid with me I obviously wouldn't have bothered sacrificing my knight and bishop.

In other cases, I only won during these lag games because my opponent made a blunder on the very last move, and I was able to catch it quickly enough to secure a win. 

Seriously, chess is not a graphic-intensive game, so there is no reason I should need an ultra fast internet connection. If I can watch HD videos without any connection issues, I should be able to play a game and not lose because of the website's broken clock system.

Used to play bullet games everyday, now it is unplayable bc of lag problem, I premove and lose five seconds when the other opponent moves. My internet connection is great on all other sites, this is on chess.com's end. Please fix, I pay a membership to play games on this site

Hi, due to lag my modest ratings have dropped in bullet and blitz to very low levels. Losing on bullet by up to thirty seconds. Many seconds elapsing per move, you don't really know how the games stand. Have largely moved over to lichess where the problem is far less pronounced. This all has happened in the last three or four weeks. The occasional glitch is ok but this seems to have become a prrmanent problem. Pity

WELL THEN SEND THE MESSAGE TO CHESS.COM ALREADY